Quick Actions
- Seek participants from underrepresented groups including people from rural areas and those that are younger, older, newcomer, and racialized.
- Broaden recruitment criteria beyond traditional technical expertise to value lived experiences of disability, community knowledge, and accessibility advocacy.
- Emphasize that lived experience is valuable in its own right and that technical expertise is not required to participate.
- Engage participants through community organizations, community leaders, and advocacy groups.
- Don’t limit recruitment to the same people or groups who already participate in standards development work. Relying on existing committees, industry contacts, or repeat contributors, misses out on new perspectives and contributes to consultation fatigue.
Long-term Actions
- Be proactive - build long-term relationships with communities historically excluded from standards development work.
- Focus on recruiting people who are underrepresented in your field including D/deaf and D/disabled people. One strategy is to regularly ask “Who else are we missing?”
More Information
- Finding Participants: Community-Led Co-design Kit discusses finding people through community groups and local leaders, not just existing contacts.
- WHO framework for meaningful engagement supports the principle that lived experience is valuable in its own right and should be treated as expertise, not as a substitute for technical credentials.
- Establishing a Lived Experience Advisory Panel supports the use of structured recruitment that intentionally brings in people with relevant lived experience, rather than organizational insiders.
Examples
- Australia – Standards Australia collaborates with community groups to identify participants, uses accessible recruitment materials including plain English, Auslan and multilingual, and offers digital tools with assistive features. Honorariums are provided to support participation from equity-denied groups.
- South Africa – South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) engages youth and people in rural areas through its “Youth in Standards” initiative. By partnering with schools and universities, and encouraging community nominations, they bring in fresh, diverse voices particularly young D/disabled people from under-served backgrounds.
- New Zealand – Standards New Zealand (SNZ) integrates Māori principles and works with Indigenous and D/disability communities to co-design recruitment processes. They engage elders and community leaders to identify participants and focus on relationship-building rather than short-term outreach, resulting in sustained Indigenous and D/disabled representation.