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Turning member voice into a statewide policy platform

The California Asset Building Coalition needed a legislative agenda its members actually recognized as theirs. I designed the research that produced one: surveys, town halls, and a visual language built so that people could answer in their own terms rather than in the sector’s.

Statewide
coalition platform built from member input
126+
staff surveyed in the national CDFI study
80%+
participation rate on that survey
3
organizations, one participatory method
Principal client California Asset Building Coalition, a statewide coalition
My role Advisor and public policy strategist
Dates 2021 to 2023
Scope Community-centered research, participatory survey design, policy alignment, internal equity assessment

🧭 Where this sits. Research and policy, upstream of everything else. Before capital moves, someone decides what counts as a priority and who got asked. Designing that asking well is the difference between a platform members will campaign for and one they will politely ignore.

🧩 Context and challenge

Equity is not a feeling. It is a framework, or it is nothing.

A coalition platform written in a conference room reads as consensus and produces none. Members recognize their own words, and they can tell when the agenda was drafted first and consulted on afterward.

The problem was practical: how do you gather input from members across a state, in several languages, at different levels of policy fluency, and turn it into legislative priorities and funding asks that still resemble what people said?

🛠 What I did at CABC

🗳
Designed a member-informed platform

Led the design of the policy platform itself, using digital surveys to capture what members meant by housing justice, anti-racism, and lived-experience leadership rather than assuming.

🎨
Built a visual language for values

Co-created an iconography so abstract commitments could be recognized, sorted, and argued about by people who were not policy professionals.

🗣
Ran town halls and narrative polling

Facilitated community input with language accessibility built in from the start, so participation did not depend on fluency in English or in policy.

🏛
Translated input into asks

Developed the framework that carried member input through to legislative priorities and statewide funding requests without laundering it into sector language on the way.

🔁 The same method, turned inward

Participatory research works on an organization’s own staff as well as it works on a membership. I ran it twice more.

Open Door
Social impact co-living startup

Designed and ran a company-wide racial and gender equity assessment, pairing demographic survey data with open-ended reflection and live Menti polling.

Advised leadership on bringing recruitment, internal culture, and resident engagement into line with the inclusion and safety the brand promised.

Surfaced the gaps between stated identity and operational behavior, and gave them steps to close each one.

Low Income Investment Fund
National CDFI

Interpreted an organization-wide racial equity and employee experience survey covering 126+ staff across departments, with participation above 80%.

Disaggregated by race, tenure, and role to locate where recruitment, retention, and capacity building were actually breaking.

Delivered recommendations on advancement pathways, pay perception gaps, and the long work of building psychological safety inside teams.

⚙️ Tools and methods

Qualtrics, Jotform, Google FormsCustom survey logic, multilingual access, equity benchmarking
MentiReal-time pulse checks and live workshop engagement
Power BIFindings turned into dashboards, infographics, and icon sets
Airtable and NotionResearch management and pattern tracking
Facilitated listening spacesCross-functional feedback loops and decision alignment

📈 Outcomes

Member-informed platform adoptedFunding strategy and legislative priorities set with equity framing members had written themselves
Icon-based visual language shippedHigher engagement across community partners who had previously opted out of policy processes
80%+ participation at the CDFI126+ staff, and a response rate high enough that the findings could not be dismissed as a vocal minority
Assessment delivered at Open DoorConcrete recommendations for recruitment practice and team culture, not a report that sat
Data-to-decision bridge, three timesFindings fed directly into internal equity practice and external advocacy at every site

Someone always decides what counts as a priority. The question is who got asked.

Participatory research moves teams past vague commitment toward strategies communities recognize as their own. Whether the output is a legislative platform or an HR pathway, the method is the same: ask well, disaggregate honestly, and make the findings legible enough that they are hard to ignore. That is what turns inclusion from an intention into infrastructure.