DEIA

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion,
and Accessibility

Meaningful collaboration only flourishes when equity and inclusion are at the foundation. Our work is guided by practices that challenge systemic inequities, elevate marginalized voices, and create technology that supports community-driven solutions.

Equity Practices

Our consulting team operationalizes racial and intersectional equity through a hybrid nonprofit structure that prioritizes serving marginalized communities via subsidized services and community-controlled data commons. This ensures underrepresented groups lead their own narrative processes.

Our diverse team partners with community-led organizations spanning broad cultural, racial, socioeconomic, and geographical contexts. These partnerships ensure accountability, authentic representation, and leadership by those most impacted. Our approach centers community control, capacity building, and systemic change — directly aligning with commitments to follow community leadership while addressing structural inequities.

Catalist recognizes that equity is not a one-time achievement but an ongoing practice. We are committed to continuous reflection, learning, and adaptation. We welcome accountability from the communities we serve and actively seek collaboration that challenges us to grow and better embody our values.

Diverse hands cradling the earth
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Community-led by design
Relationship-First Technology

We believe technology should strengthen human relationships, not replace them. Every feature we design aims to cultivate trust, collaboration, and reciprocity across communities and networks. Catalist ensures diversity of perspective and knowledge is included by embedding sovereignty, consent, and cultural protocols directly into design — honoring different knowledge systems and qualitative ways of knowing alongside quantitative data. Our tools enable communities to decide how their wisdom is represented, shared, and protected.

At Catalist, we center relationships in our work, listening deeply to the needs of our collaborators and partners before building. We build with, not for, partners — ensuring co-design, feedback loops, and ongoing collaboration shape development at every step. By putting relationships first, our process resists extractive models and instead builds a platform that amplifies care, respect, and long-term partnership.

Trustworthy Privacy, Across Scales

We've developed open-source methodologies with our partner OMNI-Mapping that preserve granular privacy permissions while maintaining data provenance across scales. This allows individual community stories to power system-level insights without losing contextual richness or authentic voice.

But communities also need ways to share knowledge across networks without sacrificing trust. Privacy must be flexible enough to honor cultural protocols, personal agency, and collective agreements while still allowing the right information to flow to the right people at the right time.

That's why our approach goes beyond "open vs. closed": supporting layered permissions and embedding safeguards that protect sensitive information while keeping trusted pathways open. The value created through shared knowledge flows back to the communities that generate it — ensuring contributions strengthen local capacity and leadership rather than simply informing funders, researchers, or institutions.

Data Sovereignty and Agency

Communities must have full control over their knowledge and contributions.

Technology should never extract, misuse, or lock away data. Our platform is built to protect sovereignty by ensuring information remains in the hands of those who create and steward it. Every feature is designed to preserve agency, so people and organizations know their knowledge is safe, respected, and within their control.

You own your data.

Any information you contribute to Catalist belongs to you, not us. Individuals and organizations can easily export their data at any time into the format or database of their choice — whether Airtable, Google Sheets, CSV, or another system. We are continuously improving these tools to ensure exports are simple, transparent, and accessible.

Others own their data.

Catalist minimizes the amount of data it holds directly by pointing to original sources whenever possible. Instead of duplicating or enclosing knowledge, we use external links to ensure communities retain control at the source. This design principle reduces centralization and honors the stewardship of those who have generated and curated knowledge.

Claiming and maintaining ownership.

Information curated into Catalist — whether about a person, project, group, or organization — can always be claimed by its rightful owner. Owners gain full authority to edit content, manage privacy and access settings, and co-steward data with collaborators. Requests to claim ownership are approved by both the original curator and an admin, ensuring integrity and trust in the process. By decentralizing data stewardship, Catalist shifts power away from central admins and keeps it aligned with the people most connected to the knowledge itself.

In practice, sovereignty is not an abstract principle but a daily reality in how data is handled. Communities set their own boundaries, define their privacy, and retain the ability to decide how, when, and where their knowledge is shared. Catalist is more than a knowledge platform — it is an infrastructure for protecting agency and ensuring that data remains a living, community-guided asset.

Commitment to Accessibility

Usable by everyone, everywhere.

Accessibility is central to our design philosophy. We strive to ensure our platform, tools, and resources are usable by people of all abilities, across devices and geographies. We continuously review and adapt to emerging accessibility standards, and we prioritize feedback from users to make Catalist more inclusive.

Accessibility is a design constraint, not an afterthought.

From color contrast to keyboard navigation, from mobile responsiveness to language clarity — we build with the full range of human experience in mind. If you encounter a barrier, we want to hear from you.

Questions about our DEIA commitments?

We're accountable to the communities we serve. If you want to understand how these principles shape our work in practice — or if you have feedback on how we can do better — we'd welcome the conversation.

Book a conversation Back to About Catalist →