Empowerment

How government agencies can use empowerment:

Engagement

• Using human centered design practices to guide program development, implementation and assessment
• Engaging participants/customers directly in the development, implementation and evaluation of the work, compensating for their time
• Leveraging trusted communicators to convey messaging or collect feedback
  
• Conducting focus groups or worker voice surveys to better understand local needs
• Creating employee resource groups within a business or organization or worker boards within local government structures to inform the work
• Reporting back to those who shared their insights on progress in implementing feedback
• Acknowledging potential power imbalances between workforce agency and grantees

Capacity Building

• Funding or conducting training for community representatives to serve as evaluators
• Exploring sabbatical programs to enable staff to refresh and renew their thinking
• Creating nonprofit apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeship programs to enable BIPOC talent to enter the field without being forced to trade economic mobility for job experience
• Supporting worker organizing activities

Continuous Learning

• Joining associations to support worker organizing, worker power or related activities
• Learning more about employee ownership models and how your organization can implement or support them

Funding

• Providing incentives (financial or process) for co-design of evaluation measures as those carrying out the work know the space best
• Embedding necessary funds for training/capacity building of populations in budget/grant proposal to support human centered design and related processes
• Funding employee ownership model feasibility studies

👋 Learn How to Implement the Empowerment Lever