Anti-oppressive co-design meeting practices: land acknowledgements, shared roles, breakout discussions, multiple input modes¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The team adopted an explicitly anti-oppressive and anti-colonial approach to advisory group meetings, listing practices such as "taking turns doing a personal land acknowledgement", checking in as a group, sharing roles to flatten hierarchy, ensuring time for smaller breakout discussion to promote space for all voices, encouraging multiple modes of input/feedback, and actively welcoming a diversity of critical views. The broader process centered people with lived experience via group facilitation techniques, shared decision making, and accountability practices.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Early engagement of community members in shaping innovation agendas, structured collaboration, and iterative feedback loops

Constraints¶

• The authors acknowledge the advisory group composition and facilitation process may have introduced biases, and certain voices facing compounded systemic barriers may not have been fully represented

Target Learners¶

• co-design facilitators
• research teams
• healthcare organizations

Target Learning Goals¶

• redistributing power in co-design processes by centering people with lived experience of systemic inequity

Affordances¶

• Hec Health Equity Framework

Related Strategies¶

• Establish Group Norms
• Team Contracts
• In co-design meetings, position community members as experts and create space for challenging ideas, including adapting survey questions to community feedback.
• Structure R&D teams for student critical mass, processing time, and collaboration to dispel intimidation
• Center educators in research by shifting power dynamics, including diverse educators, and structuring feedback loops

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Mehelay S, Comeau B, Chandra S, Fancott C, Gordon D, Loftgard K, Louzado C, Nixon SA, Shahid S, Tilson K, Wilson C, Shaw J. (2026). Shifting power: co-developing a framework for equity in healthcare. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-14964-7