Generate institutional knowledge about how the organization is working to uphold community safety, including service offerings, and areas for improvement, to inform strategic planning.
Explore the mission alignment of governance practices and procedures to foster sustainable institutional development.
Create structure for the organization to discuss assumptions about best practices and capacity to facilitate policy improvements.
Foster communication and transparency around governance to build trust and improve relationships between the organization and its community.
Provide insights into resources provided to those upholding community safety process to ensure adequate training and support is available.
Running an organizational self-assessment involves dedicating time and resources within your organization. Identify resources (time, labor, etc.) that can be devoted to this process.
Consider acknowledging the extra work and knowledge that acting as a facilitator requires with compensation and dedicated work time.
Account for extra work that may be required of participants, and provide dedicated work time.
Acknowledge the work that participants may incur by providing food or other resources to incentivize participation, such as a reduction of other duties.
Identify facilitator(s) - see description in Facilitator Guide
Identify who to involve (see below)
Tailor the self-assessment and documents (survey, reflection discussion questions, etc.)
Distribute surveys
Organize a reflection discussion meeting with participant stakeholders
Create a report and plan next steps (see below)
To represent the diversity of the organization, consider the following:
Identify members of your team with core organizational knowledge.
Consider making a call for participation among all staff, at all levels.
Seek participation from organizers of any existing incident reporting procedures or safe space committees.
Seek buy-in from key decision-makers, including leadership, board members, and others tasked with evaluating the organization’s sustainability and mission-alignment.
Invite anyone with understanding of institutional procedures, their application and adoption.
This guide has been published with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0), such that organizations can tailor it to their particular context.
Overview
Creating a report to summarize the discussions and ideas generated from this self-assessment process will provide a way to guide organizational changes to foster better mission-alignment of policies and procedures.
Following the reflection meeting discussion, the facilitator can lead the process of creating a report. An additional team member can alternatively create the report with the engagement of the facilitator.
What goes in a report?
We recommend the report include:
Gaps in mission-alignment of current policies and procedures identified in survey and reflection stages
Suggestions provided by participants in the reflection meeting
Considerations related to democratic decision-making about governance policies
Follow-ups discussed in the reflection meeting
How leadership/membership will use the report to enact next steps
The report should not include summaries of survey data unless consent was explicitly provided.
Audience / Communication / Accessibility
Consider the audience for your report. Who will it be distributed to and how will it be made available?
Discuss the different forms of transparency and accessibility to make such a document available
Communicate to participants and broader organization about accountability and communication processes decided upon to implement changes based on identified areas for improvement