Building out a shared folder for our neighborhood coalition, and I’m hunting for practical, low-cost tools that support resident co-researchers — consent scripts, stipend calculators, and facilitation guides people use. If you’ve got a template or toolkit you trust (e.g., for Photovoice or rapid community mapping), I’m happy to trade; I can share our $30/hour compensation model and a Spanish/English meeting norms one-pager.
I use CTB’s free consent scripts and Photovoice facilitation: https://ctb.ku.edu; $30/hour works — don’t forget childcare/transit.
And quick tip: Field Papers (https://fieldpapers.org) has been great for rapid mapping — residents sketch on printed atlases, snap a photo, and we have geocoded layers the same day; just print high-contrast so scans align. For stipends, an Airtable with a “hours × rate” field and separate childcare/transit tags (co-signing @juliafrank98) keeps approvals as low-friction as a sticky note.
Quick example: I’ve had good luck with KoboToolbox for low-tech co-research — simple consent checklists and a stipend log on one form that works offline, like a clipboard with superpowers. Pair it with Liberating Structures for facilitation ideas: https://www.liberatingstructures.com. $30/hour has landed well for us, but I add a line for prep/review time and flag 1099 thresholds to avoid tax surprises.
I’ve had good luck setting up a simple stipend workflow in Google Forms + Sheets: residents enter start/stop times on their phone, the sheet auto-calculates pay at “$30/hour” and emails a receipt PDF we drop in the shared folder. Small caveat: we set a 1‑hour minimum and add a “verbal consent” checkbox with a timestamp so nobody’s stuck signing paperwork mid-activity.
I lean on the Community Tool Box’s plain-language consent as a base and keep a separate photo-release for Photovoice; here’s the consent page I point co-researchers to: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/ethical-conduct/informed-consent/overview/main. For stipends, a tiny corner calculator adds transit time and rounds to 15 minutes so your hourly rate stays consistent — small caveat: keep the pay log totally separate from consent to avoid mixing identifiers, that bites later.