From Community Voice to Community Power: Rethinking engagement, co-design, and who gets to shape public systems.

Over the last decade, public agencies and organizations have gotten much better at asking people what they think. They hold listening sessions, convene advisory councils, conduct surveys, facilitate focus groups, and invite people with lived experience to comment on proposed policies and programs.

All of these can be valuable, but they are not necessarily co-design.

After years of working alongside states, communities, service providers, families, and cross-sector partners to redesign public systems, one of the most important distinctions leaders can make is between inviting input and giving people meaningful influence over what gets built. The real difference is power and trust.

Engagement asks — co-design changes.

Traditional stakeholder engagement often follows a familiar sequence. An institution identifies the problem, its leaders establish the parameters, staff or consultants develop possible solutions, community members are invited to react, they share real, personal stories about their experiences, their feedback is summarized, and decision-makers determine what to incorporate. That’s input, and input alone is where many well-intentioned engagement processes break down.

In some instances, this flow is entirely appropriate, as not every decision requires a participatory design process. The problem comes when we describe this process as co-design.

Co-design requires much more. It means bringing people into the work early enough to influence how the problem is understood and help decide what solutions are needed, not simply react to someone else’s proposed solution. It means treating lived experience as expertise alongside policy, research, and technical expertise. And most critically, it means establishing mechanisms through which community participation can actually alter a decision.

The distinction between the two isn’t the volume of engagement, but where power sits in the process.

Before seeking participation, ask yourself: What can participants change?

I once supported a large public-system transformation process where an advisory body had been established to bring community and practitioner perspectives into the work. All of the members were passionate, brought a wealth of experience and insights, and were deeply committed to the initiative. Most importantly, the institution genuinely wanted their participation and viewed the advisory as an essential component of its systems transformation efforts.

But an important question kept resurfacing: What exactly was the group being asked to influence?

Without a clear answer, advisory bodies can slowly become information-receiving bodies. Meetings become filled with presentations and updates, and “advising” quickly turns into members responding to decisions already in motion. While support staff collected thoughtful observations, they struggled to explain where those observations go next.

The problem here isn’t necessarily bad intent; it’s poor governance design.

One of the most useful things leaders can do before establishing an advisory group, engagement process, or co-design effort is to define the decision architecture:

• What decisions have already been made?
• What remains open?
• What is this group being asked to recommend, shape, or decide?
• Who makes the final decision?
• What happens when institutional leaders choose a different direction?
• How will participants know what happened to their recommendations?

These questions may sound procedural, but they are actually questions about power. Leading with transparency about the limits of participation is far more respectful than inviting people into a process that appears more influential than it really is.

Co-design also changes whose knowledge counts.

Public systems tend to privilege certain kinds of expertise (e.g., administrative data, legal requirements, fiscal analysis, research evidence, professional credentials). While all of these things matter, systems look very different based on the point of view of the person trying to navigate them.

A policy can make perfect administrative sense and still create an enormous burden for families. A program can be available while remaining functionally inaccessible. A referral process can look seamless in a workflow diagram while leaving families calling multiple offices to figure out what happens next.

In several state projects I have supported, some of the most consequential insights emerged when technical experts and people experiencing the system examined the same problem together. The goal was not to replace technical expertise with lived experience, but to recognize that either one on its own was insufficient. Good co-design creates a structure in which different forms of knowledge can interrogate one another.

An invitation is not enough: representation matters.

Another common mistake is assuming that an open invitation creates an equitable engagement process. It doesn’t.

The people most likely to attend a two-hour meeting, respond to a public survey, join a standing committee, or participate repeatedly in a planning process are not necessarily representative of the people most affected by the system.

In most instances, people facing the greatest barriers or experiencing the most harm in a system may also have the least discretionary time, transportation, child care, technological access, institutional trust, or flexibility to participate. That means equitable design requires more than asking, Who is at the table?

We also have to ask: Who is missing, and what about our process makes it difficult for them to participate?

In one statewide engagement effort, early participation data revealed that families and providers most affected by the proposed changes were significantly underrepresented. Rather than treating the participants who had already shown up as sufficient, the engagement strategy changed. Outreach became more targeted, focusing on those farthest from opportunity; engagement moved closer to communities; and additional ways of participating were created to ease participants’ burden.