It’s a familiar pattern: a program is designed, built and nearly finished, and only then is it shown to the people it’s meant to serve — usually for a final round of feedback, often too late to change much. Participation, treated this way, becomes a formality rather than a design input.
Experience is a form of expertise
Administrative data can show what happened. Professional expertise can explain a process. But people who navigate a system directly — a service, a building, a form, a policy — often see things that neither data nor professional training reveals: where a process quietly excludes people, where a “reasonable” requirement isn’t reasonable at all, where a policy reads well but plays out badly.
Treating that knowledge as a lesser form of evidence, brought in only to validate decisions already made, wastes exactly the insight that would have improved the decision in the first place.
What meaningful participation actually looks like
Not every form of involvement is equal. Being surveyed after a decision is different from shaping the decision. Being invited to one meeting is different from being part of ongoing design. At the Centre, we try to build participation in earlier and more substantively — through curriculum development, advisory input, facilitation, and review of materials before they’re finalized, not just after.
Meaningful participation should influence what is built, not just how it’s explained afterward.
This has a practical cost, and we think it’s worth it
Involving people earlier takes more time than finalizing a plan and asking for reactions. It can mean redesigning something that was already mostly built. It’s slower. Where feasible, people contributing substantive lived-experience expertise should also be compensated for that work — which has a real budget line, not just a good intention.
We think that cost is worth paying, because the alternative — a program that looks inclusive on paper but wasn’t shaped by the people it serves — tends to cost more later, in the form of programs that don’t actually work for the people they were built for.
Related
See how this principle runs through the Vantercor Centre’s work →