Who Has a Seat at Your Table?
November 20, 2025 | By David M. Wagner
With the holiday season just around the corner, I’d like to ask you: Who has a seat at your table?
No, not the table hosting your holiday feast…
Who has a say in the decisions that guide your organization?
More to the point: is there a seat at that table for everyone who is impacted by the work you do?
Your organization can best serve the needs of your stakeholders – the people who benefit from your work (directly and indirectly), your staff and volunteers, your community, even your funders – if they all have appropriate opportunities to provide input in decisions that affect them.
Getting the right people at the table requires knowing who needs to be there, actively inviting their involvement, and making it easy for them to say “yes” to participating.
Make the Table Bigger
It’s been said: “If there aren’t enough seats at the table, make the table bigger.”
How do you know whom to provide seats for? Here are some illuminating questions:
Who will be affected by the decisions you’re making?
Who will be upset afterward if they weren’t consulted?
Who do you want to be a part of your work?
Once you have a sense of the community who will be impacted, take a look at the panel of decisionmakers you have in place.
How well does that panel represent that community? Consider demographic factors like identities, lived experience, and roles in the community.
Recruit Actively and Thoughtfully
Now that you have an idea of who else needs a seat at the table, make an intentional effort to invite participation.
Beware of tokenism – no one wants to be “the [insert demographic trait here] representative.”
Look for opportunities to involve stakeholders who can (partly) represent multiple groups and invite enough participants so that no group is represented by only one person.
Further, it’s appropriate to be explicit about your goals to bring broad representation to the table.
However, be sure to approach stakeholders based on the traits you think would make them valuable to decision-making processes (“we think highly of you as a leader”) and not based on their inherent attributes (“you’d check these boxes for us”).
Build Bridges to Participation
Finally, design a “table” that makes it easy for your stakeholders to be meaningfully involved.
Not everyone can afford the time or travel expense or fundraising expectations to sit on your board, so consider:
How could you make board participation more accessible? Evaluate meeting times, locations, frequency, and other barriers to participation.
What alternatives to board participation – non-voting membership on a committee or task force, advisory board membership, ad hoc consultation, focus group or survey participation, etc. – would be appropriate?
How might teaming, training, mentorship, financial compensation, or other supports encourage participation?
Be mindful of power dynamics – some participants come to the table with more privilege than others. Consider structural, procedural, and cultural levers that can create balance and equity among participants.
I would love to know what other barriers to participation you’ve encountered when trying to make inclusive decisions, and what you’ve seen work (or not) to overcome those barriers! And if you need help designing a more inclusive process or organization, let’s connect.