Three questions. Applied rigorously. To reveal who a system is actually serving — and who is absorbing the cost of its failures.
Who pays the price?
What's in the way?
Who had a say?
Developed by Briana Ford through Dignity by Design, the Margins Audit is a freely available public tool. It works in boardrooms and community centers, nonprofit strategy sessions and city planning processes. It's designed to be accessible without being simple.
Access the Free ToolkitMost systems aren't designed to harm people. They're designed by people who couldn't see them. The Margins Audit fixes the lens.
The Margins Audit is a diagnostic tool — a structured practice for examining the structural blind spots that shape who benefits from a system and who absorbs its costs. It emerged from years of observing how well-intentioned decisions consistently produced unequal outcomes, not because of malice, but because of who was absent from the design process.
The framework is deceptively simple. Three questions, applied publicly and consistently, do something powerful: they move the conversation from intention to impact. From "what did we mean to do?" to "what is actually happening, and to whom?"
The Margins Audit is proprietary IP developed by Briana Ford and Dignity by Design. It is freely available as a public tool through the toolkit — because frameworks for equity should not sit behind paywalls.
"Accountability is a precondition for collaboration — not an obstacle to it."
The questions are not checkboxes. They are an orientation. A commitment, renewed every time a decision is made, to ask: who is this for, and who is paying for it — in ways that never show up in a budget?
Every system produces winners and losers — but the losers are rarely named out loud. This question is about tracing harm to its source: when this policy is enacted, this program ends, this decision is made, who absorbs the cost? Not theoretically. Specifically.
Cost can be financial, temporal, physical, emotional, or civic. It can look like a longer commute, a missed appointment, a missed deadline, a missed opportunity. The question asks: follow the harm. Name who's holding it.
This is the structural question. After you've named who's paying the price, you ask: what is keeping them from accessing what they need? This surfaces barriers that are built into the design of a system — not individual failures, not personal deficits, but structural blockages that systematically prevent participation.
Barriers can be physical, technological, linguistic, cultural, procedural, financial, or temporal. They can be policies, forms, hours of operation, transportation gaps, or the assumption that everyone has a printer.
Participation is not the same as representation. This question examines who was present in the decision-making process — and who was absent, excluded, or present in a token capacity. It asks about power as much as presence.
The most common failure mode in civic and organizational design is not malice. It's the unconscious reproduction of the same small room. When the people most affected by a decision are not the people making it, harm follows — not necessarily with intention, but with consistency.
The Margins Audit is applied as a facilitated process, a structured workshop, or an embedded practice within an organization's decision-making cycle.
Start with a specific policy, program, process, or decision — not a values statement, not a strategic goal. The Margins Audit works best when applied to something concrete and bounded. "Our intake process" or "the proposed zoning change" or "how we allocate community grant funding."
Work through each question systematically. The goal is not to reach consensus quickly — it's to surface disagreement productively. The answers to these questions are often where an organization discovers what it actually believes versus what it says it believes.
Articulate the structural blind spots that emerged. Who was absent from your decision-making process? What barriers exist that weren't visible before? Who has been absorbing costs that don't show up in any report? Name it out loud, in the room, together.
The Margins Audit is a diagnostic — it reveals what's there. What you do with that information is the design work. In facilitated engagements, this phase often becomes the co-design process: bringing in the people the audit identified as absent, and centering their voice in whatever comes next.
It was designed to work anywhere decisions are made. It has been applied by:
Strategic planning, program design, grant-making decisions, and community engagement processes that need a structural equity lens built in from the start.
City agencies, planning departments, and public bodies navigating decisions about infrastructure, policy, and public resources — where the stakes are community-level.
Facilitators, designers, strategists, and organizers who want a consistent equity lens they can apply across contexts — and that holds up in a room with power in it.
Everything you need to apply the Margins Audit in your organization, community, or practice — free, accessible, and designed for practitioners who are ready to do the real work.
Access the Toolkit →