Governance recruitment
To build accountability to our community, SHIFT’s decision-making committees all engage a diversity of perspectives from across the university and communities we work with.
What it means to be part of SHIFT’s decision-making structures
SHIFT’s governance structure is designed to create accountability to our community and to enable our mission, vision and values to be stewarded by a diversity of perspectives.
We see the potential for participatory decision-making structures to contribute to systemic social change. By giving people meaningful opportunities to share power and contribute to decision-making, we are building an engaged and dynamic SHIFT community.
Steering Committee
About the Steering Committee
The SHIFT Steering Committee (SC) is a core component of SHIFT’s governance model and is responsible for ensuring that our activities, objectives and future directions are aligned with our mission and values.
Engaging in questions of high-level strategy concerning SHIFT’s evolution over time, deliberation among members is enriched by shared commitments to deep listening and generative dialogue. The Steering Committee’s decisions are informed by regular input from SHIFT staff and community members, facilitated through communication with our program hubs.
Program hubs
What is a hub?
Program hubs are the primary decision-making site for major program-level decisions at SHIFT. They support staff in developing program-level strategy, providing additional perspective to major operational decisions, and actively bridging the day-to-day work of the staff team with the multi-year horizon of the Steering Committee.
Both of SHIFT’s two current hubs — the Funding Hub and the Governance Hub — bring together a diversity of voices from across the SHIFT community and broader ecosystem to inform the strategic programming decisions related to their area of focus. Hubs are composed of four to six members of the SHIFT community, including a Steering Committee member and a staff member. Ideally, hub members will represent a mixture of people who have expertise in the topic area and people who are likely to be impacted by the hub’s decisions.
By engaging at the level of strategic programming decisions, hubs play a critical role of ensuring that the broader organizational orientations are turned into action and impact in ways that are aligned with SHIFT’s mission, vision and values.
Selection juries
SHIFT’s selection juries play an essential role in bridging SHIFT’s participatory governance efforts with the distribution of financial resources. Through their work and the diversity of perspectives they bring to the table, jury members ensure community ownership of SHIFT’s funding decisions.
An independent selection jury composed of three to five members is assembled for each of our funding programs. Jury members are provided with training and assessment tools to review all eligible applications through their funding stream. Using a structured and facilitated consent-based decision-making process, jury members are invited to discuss and deliberate on which projects are most closely aligned with SHIFT’s selection criteria. Together they decide which projects will enter the community and receive funding and support from SHIFT.
