Power Shifts: Participatory Design in Financing

This session explores how both philanthropic financing and impact investing can be more inclusive. Participants will explore the principal tenants of participatory design as it relates to financing, will interact with key examples, and will outline how they might start to include participatory design in their own models.  The objective of participatory design in this context is to include the voice and potentially vote of ESOs, SGBs, their workers, consumers, and their communities in some part of the financing decision-making continuum. The key takeaway of the session is that financing actors can introduce relatively simple changes to their processes that make financing more inclusive and collaborative, while starting to shift the nexus of power to the entities creating / doing the impact.