Equity in the Center
Equity in the Center works to shift mindsets, practices, and systems within the social sector to increase racial equity. We envision a future where nonprofit and philanthropic organizations define, implement and advance race equity internally while advocating and centering it in their work externally.
New Website: Woke@Work
Equity in the Center's home for our Woke at Work series is dedicated to highlighting tools and resources that support nonprofit and philanthropic leaders in building what we call a Race Equity Culture (one that focuses on creating equity inside and outside of the organization). The site is an extension of the Awake to Woke to Work: Building a Race Equity Culture research we published earlier this year, and is designed to feature multi-media content, including our Buzzfeed style listicles that can help folks both cope with white supremacy culture inside of organizations and work to actively mitigate it. Check out our first two listicles below!
Organizations have a feverish obsession with getting diverse talent in the door. In the past year, Guidestar and NonProfit Quarterly published pieces underscoring the importance of recruiting leaders of color to the non-profit sector, but little has been said about retaining leaders of color, and even less about why so many leaders of color leave. It turns out there’s a secret to losing diverse talent. It takes daily effort, but with consistency, incorporating these seven components within your organization will send leaders of color packing (depending on what you do or don’t).
Leaders find the process of hiring a race equity consultant to be fraught with challenges. So many organizations make critical missteps in the process that Fakequity wrote a blog about how not to screw it up. The increasing number of training and capacity building options available, the complexity of assessing organizational readiness, the question of when and with whom to begin the work: Individually and collectively, these issues can lead to months (sometimes years) of delays. This leads to a type of “analysis paralysis” that practitioners recognize as a means of tactically avoiding beginning the work itself.
Awake to Woke to Work: Building a Race Equity Culture Publication
This publication is the culmination of the Equity in the Center’s research, which illustrates in detail how organizations can move through the Race Equity Cycle by activating specific organizational levers. Awake to Woke to Work: Building a Race Equity Culture provides insights, tactics, and practices social sector organizations can and have used to measurably shift organizational culture, operationalize equity, and move from a dominant organizational culture to a Race Equity Culture.
About
Established in 2015, Equity in the Center has a built a coalition of individuals and organizations within the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors who champion race equity work. Find out more about our mission, goals, and core team.
