PI TOOL 7 – Centering Compassion – Shift Health Accelerator

CENTERING COMPASSION

Toolkit: PI7-CC

Participatory Investing toolkit

Centering Compassion

Within Participatory Investing

Overview

Engaging in participatory work requires acknowledging what has come before. This work is not possible without taking into account the existing harms that both financial and healthcare structures have caused to a broad base of communities. At the same time, healthcare actors often face a broad variety of internal and external pressures that impact their engagement with communities.

To explore this tension, we brought our advisors together to explore how compassion can be embedded within the bridging work of participatory governance. In this toolkit, compassion is understood as an active practice of recognizing harm, redistributing power, and changing conditions that reproduce inequity. Compassion gives us the frame for holding our shared humanity within the context of investment processes, while offering opportunities for reflection and action to build long-term and equitable partnerships. Ultimately, compassion-centered investing centers repair, relationships, and restoration of trust as standalone outcomes and indicators of long-term impact.

The following Insights Emerged:

Relationship-building is crucial to this work

Building participatory processes is deeply relational — regardless of the initiative, framework, or theory that sits behind it. Compassion requires individual reflection and grappling — across all stakeholders — about existing trauma, assumptions, miscommunication, and shared aspirations. It also requires the development of relationship and collective space where these doubts and hopes can be communicated, without fear of repercussion.

Building and maintaining trust is an ongoing process

As referenced above, establishing trust requires risk-taking for all parties involved. The parties involved will need to evaluate whether their “signals match their cues” — ie if their stated intent is matching with their actual actions. In instances where trust has been broken — particularly when communities have been denied access or voice, there is a particular need to determine how to rebuild trust and establish accountability.

Processes are changeable

“This is the way it’s always been” is a universal challenge to overcome. For capital holders, there are worries about financial stewardship and reticent leadership. For community stakeholders there is skepticism about the capacity for change within systems that were fundamentally designed to extract.

Compassion in participatory investing must be power-aware

Healthcare and financial institutions hold disproportionate control over capital, timelines, definitions of risk, and legitimacy. Community leaders often carry the consequences of past harms while being asked to show trust, patience, and credibility. A compassion lens asks: Who is being asked to stretch, and who is being protected? Whose comfort defines the pace of change? Whose losses are considered acceptable?

Building power can take many forms

Strengthening community governance and participatory processes leads to more robust and healthier communities as well as civic infrastructure. Often, institutions may view community power-building as ancillary or oppositional, when in fact these structures allow for more compassionate, transparent processes that allow all stakeholders to meet their common goals.

Compassion as a practice in participatory investing

Our advisors not only helped define compassion for healthcare-community partnerships but articulated specific actions to embed compassion in capital decision-making. In participatory investing, compassion shows up when:

Decisions

account for historical harm, not just current proposals

Processes adapt to community needs and visions

rather than asking people to adapt to status quo and/or institutional processes

Time, risk, and uncertainty

are shared more equitably

Repair is treated as a valid outcome,

not as a ‘nice to have,’ disconnected from impact

Explicit agreements are established

regarding what will not be penalized, dismissed, or deferred, especially when discomfort or critique surfaces

Exercise

Reflection Prompts

For Journaling or Group Share

1. What individual and institutional histories are you bringing to this project/partnership?

2. What external forces shape your work?

External forces might include: policy, economic, cultural forces

3. What internal forces shape your work?

Internal forces might include: strategic priorities, norms, budget constraints

4. How do you build relationships in your work?

5. What is an example of a process where you had to navigate broken trust or mistrust?

6. What assumptions and values do you bring around partnerships between healthcare institutions and community leaders?

7. Given power asymmetries, what forms of flexibility, humility, or redistribution are required for compassion to be real rather than rhetorical?

8. In moments where money, governance, or accountability are being discussed, does a decision reduce harm caused by past exclusion, or does it reproduce it? What would repair look like?

9. If we apply compassion practices to investing, how will we know, six months or 5 years from now, that trust repair occurred? What would be different?