Beyond tokenism
Power, lived experience and the Participation Ladder.
Two and a half hours on moving beyond tokenism: the movement's own critique of involvement, three applied cases, what we mean by community, and choosing the right rung of participation honestly.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 2 hours 30 minutes
- Where
- Communities and systems
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Engagement and involvement leads, managers and board members across public service and voluntary organisations
Overview
Communities can tell quickly whether engagement gives them real influence. Built from Voices that shape the work, this course starts with the critique that service users, survivors and disabled people have made of involvement, naming everyday tokenism and applying Peter Beresford's consumerist and democratic models alongside the 4Pi National Involvement Standards. A capstone then reads the Poverty Truth Commission, Social Security Scotland's Experience Panels and Recovery Colleges. It explores community through MacQueen's definition, Wenger's communities of practice, Putnam's social capital and Chaskin's capacity framework, and closes with Arnstein's ladder, the IAP2 spectrum and the Sheffield street trees dispute.
Aims
The purpose is to help leaders spot tokenism in their own practice, see the many communities they serve rather than only the obvious ones, and match every engagement honestly to the influence genuinely on offer, so that people trust that taking part will change something.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Distinguish Beresford's consumerist and democratic models, and assess whether your involvement serves the organisation or changes it.
- Compare how three applied cases shifted power, and use the lived experience pyramid to plan one concrete change.
- Apply the four lenses on community and Arnstein's ladder to name who your work is missing and who actually decides.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Identify common patterns of tokenism and locate them on Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation.
- Apply the five questions of context, power, conditions, change and transfer to any case of lived experience involvement.
- Apply the four lenses of geographic, interest, identity and practice communities to a real place, naming the communities your work is likely to miss.
- Describe Arnstein's eight rungs and three tiers and identify which rung a piece of engagement is actually operating on.
- Distinguish Beresford's consumerist and democratic models of involvement and assess whether your involvement serves the organisation or changes it.
- Compare how the Poverty Truth Commission, the Experience Panels and Recovery Colleges shifted power, and identify the limits of each.
- Distinguish bonding, bridging and linking social capital and explain why many engagement failures are linking capital failures.
- Compare the promises made at each level of the IAP2 spectrum and check delivered participation against what was promised.
Built from 2 parts.
2 hours 30 minutes of learning.
- 01Beyond the token gestureTokenism, power and lived experience in practiceBitesize · Lived Experience2 modules
- 02Rungs of real influenceCommunity and the Participation LadderBitesize · Working with Communities and Partnerships2 modules