The Equity Delivery team is excited to provide our project teams with an evolving suite of tools and resources to support equity delivery across the project lifecycle. In the coming months, we will be working with leadership and across USDS to identify ways to embed equity in all that we do from the moment a project becomes reality to the handoff. Equity at USDS means uplifting the value and meaningfulness of our work by centering the humanity of the people we serve. We don’t simply ask "What work do I need to do?" Or "How can I evaluate the work?" Equity asks us to consider "What is the underlying thought process, vision, and sense of care driving our work? How are we caring for people against the backdrop of the larger system in which our work takes place?"
In asking questions like these, we develop a deep respect for the people in communities who work on these problems everyday, people we serve whose lives expand beyond the products and services we are building, and we realize our potential to completely transform people’s lived experiences.
*This content will be updated as tools are added.
This 30-minute team exercise helps you prepare to conduct other equity/impact exercises in this toolkit, by helping you refine your guiding problem statement. The tool enourages you to adjust your problem statement so that it focuses on the impact on members of the public, and removes assumptions about the solution or unconfirmed assumptions about what people on the ground feel, think, want, or find most important or problematic.
Template (in Mural)
This 60-minute team exercise helps you and your team achieve a richer sense of self, of team, and of the people involved in your project. It prompts teams to reflect on their lived experiences and highlights gaps and opportunities between the team’s experience and the communities being served.
You can use this tool to:
- Reflect on how aspects of our individual and collective identities inform our leadership
- Reflect on where there may be gaps with the people we serve (USDSers & American public)
- Learn more about our team members as people (to enable further support and collaboration)
End-to-End Guide (in Slack Canvas)
Template (in Mural)
Use this 60-minute team exercise to help you and your team articulate what fairness looks like in the outcomes your program or service creates for the public. To Be Fair helps you assess to what extent the impact of your project is distributed equitably, and chart out a plan for equitable impact that can be measured.
The objectives for this exercise are to:
• Define what a fair distribution of outputs and outcomes looks like for the people impacted by your program or service
• Make team commitments that will help ensure the impact you create is equitable
• Provide a basis for concrete success metrics that assess the extent to which your project's impact on the public is equitable
The powerpoint below is a valuable pre-read before conducting the Fairness exercise. Here is a recording of that presentation.
Approaches to Assessing Equity in Outcomes.pptx (PowerPoint Presentation)
Template - Canvas (in Mural)
Template - Graph (in Mural)
Use this tool to ensure the problem your team is solving is as high-impact as possible within the constraints that this problem space poses for your team. This tool challenges teams to consider different levers of change and do a risk-benefit analysis among them, focusing on the reach and burden they tend to carry for the American public.
You can use this tool to:
- Assess the expected reach and public burden that solutions to your team’s problem statement might carry relative to alternative framings of that problem
- Think through your constraints to understand which problem spaces are most feasible for your team to address
- Determine a North Star to ground future project delivery
Template (in Mural)
Based on "A Framework for Public Health Action: The Health Impact Pyramid", by Thomas R. Frieden.
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Participation Spectrum is a planning and evaluative tool to help you and your team assess how stakeholders participated and the integrity of that participation. This tools is adapted from the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation, an internationally recognized framework government entities use to structure public participation engagements--and from Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan's seminal research on administrative burden. When used with agency teams, this tool introduces foundational elements of equitable CX measurement and design so those teams can build a system for meaningful, continuous feedback and partnership with all individuals they serve.
You can use this tool to:
- Provide a lightweight rubric for planning how to build relationships and empower your stakeholders.
- Provide a shared language for the various kinds of stakeholder engagement and empowerment you can implement in your project.
- Understand metrics for measuring participation in the project and design engagement strategies accordingly.
- Assess the overall process for how stakeholders were included in your project and at what phase.
- Determine the overall integrity of how stakeholders were invited to engage.
- Think critically about the unintentional burden on stakeholders' participation in your project and how to relieve this burden in the future.
End-to- End Guide (in Slack Canvas)
Template (in Mural)
Based on the International Association for Public Participation's Spectrum of Public Participation and Donald Moynihan, Pamela Herd, and Hope Harvey's seminal research on administrative burden.
Adobe Illustrator Files 36 x 24
PDF 36 x 24
We need your helping hands! Drop us (Celeste Espinoza, Jeremy Zitomer, Alex Bornkessel, Natasha Jamal) a DM and we’ll connect you.
Environmental scan of tools and resources You can contribute resources for adaptation and inclusion in the toolkit, by adding a resource or tool to our environmental scan document. We can also connect you with other USDSers who are contributing on specific topics. We’re flexible. Let’s build this together!
Plain language, Accessibility, and Branding Equity Delivery has a vision that our tools and resources will not just drive equity but be equitable by design. We need USDSers help to fill in the gaps with accessibility recommendations, plain language reviews, and other design tasks. You can find those needs in Issues if you have a cycle or two to give.