In 2024, we launched our Participatory Investing in Health initiative, exploring field narratives, implementation tools, and stakeholder engagement to ensure that community leaders with lived expertise have power over the financial resources that shape health and healing in their communities. What might it look like, for example, for a healthcare institution’s small business support fund to include BIPOC small business owners and community activists as part of the fund’s development, sourcing, diligence, and ultimate awarding of investments?
Following dozens of conversations with healthcare institution leaders as well as community leaders to explore appetite for participatory investing within the health sector, we launched our Reimagining Equity series. Speakers explored models for moving from institution-oriented decision-making towards community decision-making, and put forward reflection prompts to attendees for consideration within their own institutions.
One of the barriers to adoption of participatory investing, identified by healthcare and community leaders alike, is a lack of tools to 1) introduce the concept of participatory investing inside of organizational contexts where that type of democratic decision-making is not common; 2) align internal stakeholders around a vision for participatory investing; 3) identifying tangible starting points to begin testing participatory investing as a concept; 4) clear operational tools to begin implementing participatory processes.
Based on this feedback, we spent the first half of 2025 focused on developing and testing a comprehensive set of tools that now comprise our Participatory Investing Toolkit. Recently, we convened members of Shift’s network of thought leaders in two convenings on the East and West Coast, in order to delve into the overarching framework for the toolkit as well as test in real-time a few of the tools.
One tool, focused on building cooperation between diverse stakeholders in a local ecosystem, presents a facilitated roleplaying scenario in which participants each play a particular role in a shared resourcing process (i.e. a health system, healthcare technology company, large nonprofit, grassroots organization must come together to distribute $500K in funds related to a social determinants of health initiative). The exercise is designed to provide a low-stakes environment for individuals to test out shared decision-making as well as note any tensions or barriers that arise in distributing the funds. Our group enjoyed test-driving the tool, engaging with the tool’s reflection questions afterwards, and providing feedback to shape the toolkit for public engagement.
We look forward to launching the Participatory Investing Toolkit in early 2026, and encourage you to look through the tools and consider how they might be relevant to your own work establishing partnerships between healthcare and community institutions.