Fast Company, the world’s leading progressive business media brand with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, leadership, world changing ideas, and design, highlighted Equity in the Center’s recently released publication, Awake to Woke to Work: Building a Race Equity Culture, this week on its website. Ben Paynter, who covers social impact and the future of philanthropy, drew on the publication and an interview with Kerrien Suarez (Director, Equity in the Center) to explain the need for social sector organizations to do race equity work internally before they can advance it externally. In the article, How Nonprofits Can Address Their Own Biases To Build Better Diversity, Paynter offers a vivid description of the progression organizations follow as they move from Awake to Woke to Work and how the Race Equity Cycle works to help them advance.
Awake to Woke to Work: Building a Race Equity Culture, represents months of research by Equity in the Center and illustrates in detail how organizations can move through the Race Equity Cycle by activating specific organizational levers. The publication 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.
Equity in the Center works to shift mindsets, practices, and systems within the social sector to increase race equity. An initiative of ProInspire, Equity in the Center believes in a future where nonprofit and philanthropic organizations define, implement, and advance race equity internally while advocating and centering it in their work externally. Click here to learn more and to get connected with this work.
You can read an excerpt of the article below, or read it in its entirety on Fast Company’s website.
How Nonprofits Can Address Their Own Biases To Build Better Diversity
Before you address racial inequity in the world, you need to first address it within your own organization.
The issues that many philanthropic groups are fighting are results of systemic, institutionalized racism, from unfair housing practices to inequitable education. Which begs the question: What are philanthropic groups doing to make sure they’ve eliminated similar (albeit perhaps unintentional) inequalities and bias within their own organizations?
Even once you’ve acknowledged it’s a problem, figuring out how to fix it it is another, perhaps even more complicated issue. While people of color make up 40% of nonprofit employees, they account for only 10% of CEOs and board chairs, and just 16% of all board members. Those numbers have stayed steady in recent years, despite that fact that people of color typically express more interest than their white counterparts in achieving executive level roles in the sector.
Equity in the Center, an initiative from the nonprofit social sector talent development group ProInspire, finally said: enough.
Click here to read the remainder of the article.
