By Cyndi Suarez, President of Big Soul
The Seed of a Powerful Idea
This year Equity In The Center celebrates its fifth anniversary. In a short time it has become a leading organization for racial equity work, coining the term Race Equity Culture™, which is now used as the standard for driving racial equity in organizations. How did a five-year-old organization identify culture as the site for race equity and create a framework for how to build it?
It began with the seed of an idea that was cultivated in 2015 at Annie E Casey Foundation’s Learning Pipelines Lab, designed to develop “a particular type of leadership,” leadership that reflects the demographics of our country. The lab, which was led by Ashley Stewart, convened leading organizations in the US focused on leadership development for people of color, including Americorps, ProInspire, Public Allies, and Management Leadership for Tomorrow. It met over a period of nine months, culminating in a white paper that proposed an initiative to research the question, “Why is the top of the social sector so white?”
In 2016, Kerrien Suarez was hired as a consultant to explore the viability of this research project. It was determined that it was viable, and, with a startup grant from the Casey Foundation, Suarez was hired in 2017 by ProInspire as Director of Equity In The Center to oversee the exploration.
From the very beginning, this has been a collective and collaborative endeavor comprised of philanthropy, nonprofits, and racial equity consultants. Suarez began by designing a series of dialogue sessions with Ericka Hines, founder of Black Women Thriving and EIC’s Managing Director. Together, they assimilated findings and came to the first conclusion.
Suarez recalls, “The core shift between October 2016 and March of 2017 was away from talking about the lack of diversity at the highest level of the social sector and towards talking about structural racism, because the lack of diversity was a symptom, not the root cause. That was the most pivotal shift that I think changed everything.”
This insight moved the focus from developing individual leaders to transforming organizations. Suarez continues, “We then proposed a framework for organizational transformation to mitigate the extent to which organizations replicate patterns of structural racism inside of themselves, to drive that lack of diversity at the top. So how can we undo racism, so to speak, within organizations?”
Developing Collective Knowledge
EIC set out to understand what actually happens in racial equity processes and how it can be improved. Throughout 2017, it held a series of Dialogue & Design Sessions, conducted in-depth interviews, led feedback discussions, and participated in informal conversations about what would eventually become the Race Equity Cycle™, “which shows the various stages an organization goes through to create a Race Equity Culture that centers race equity inside and outside of the organization.”
The Dialogue & Design Sessions are notable. Not only did the framework develop across the three, in-person, two-day sessions, but a disparate, developing field grew into a values-aligned community of racial equity leaders. Suarez recalls, “In every session the framework looked different.”
The first session in March 2017 was hosted by the Meyer Foundation in Washington, DC. The initial draft of the race equity process was a straight line that started at diversity, proceeded to inclusion, and culminated in equity.
Hines, a race equity consultant, was co-leader of the first session. She says, “I remember being in that meeting and saying, ‘I don’t see a through line between what organization A says they want to do and what organization B says they want to do and what organization C wants to do.’”
The first big insight from that meeting was that change is not linear. The second insight was that most people don’t have a clear definition of those three terms—diversity, equity, inclusion—within their organization, even when they had been working on DEI for years.
Suarez shares,
Almost no one had shared definitions within their organization. So we dropped those terms, one, because they are associated with transactional diversity work. But most of all because people didn’t actually know what they meant. That transactional focus doesn’t yield the internal organizational transformation that is going to close the racial leadership gap and mitigate the underlying racism that’s within institutions. So that was a big aha for us upfront.
By the second session in Detroit, in October 2017, sponsored by Kresge Foundation, the race equity process line had become a circle.
Amanda Andere, CEO of Funders Together to End Homelessness and EIC board member, recalls,
At every convening I went to, EIC was having conversations that we weren’t having at the time. They were explicitly talking about structural racism, but within the context of the nonprofit sector. So not just in the work that we do. They were not letting us off the hook around that to just focus on these outside systems, and not think that the nonprofit industrial complex is separate from that.
Like many participants, Andere, who runs a philanthropy network, is a nonprofit leader who was trying to implement a race equity change culture in her organization. She continues,
We were on our own equity journey at the time and looking for ways to tap into resources. Equity In The Center really spoke to what we were thinking about because it was more than diversity and inclusion. It was really getting at policy and practice. It was also appealing to me because it was research based. In philanthropy, even if they know a thing is a thing, evidence always helps. I really felt like they had something special that was not being offered in the nonprofit sector.
Carly Hare, CEO of Headwaters Foundation and EIC board member, remembers,
2018-ish is when it was emerging. There was some skepticism around, what is this thing? And what is independently already happening in the field or not? The conversation was about what EIC could strategically hold, but also the work they don’t do. Where can EIC serve the work? The conversations did not have a filter of this is what works for philanthropy, or this is what works for nonprofits. But of this is what works.
At the Detroit convening a collective mapping exercise began to help participants make sense of the field.
Sean Thomas-Breitfeld—program officer on Ford’s Civic Engagement and Government team, former Co-Executive Director of the Building Movement Project, and EIC board member—shares, “I ended up spending an hour afterwards with Kay (Suarez) and Carly and a few other people just trying to do sensemaking, to try to see, what are the through lines? That was, I think, the moment where I really felt both invested in the project, but also in the people, because it was so much of a collective project.”
By the second session much of the thinking that would eventually lead to the Race Equity Cycle™ has been done, and it included an intensive literature review conducted by Hines. The session focused on capacity builders that would be utilizing the framework. What were they seeing? Working groups began to emerge from these convenings.
By the time the third and final session was held in Baltimore, Thomas-Breitfeld says,
We were having a sense of who the model resonated with, based on who showed up at that much bigger conference. At that point, people from Planned Parenthood were in the room. I think that it was speaking to this sense that was really felt in the sector in the second half of the 2010s around how organizations have not figured out racial equity and inclusion yet, and really need to be making moves in that direction. It felt like a space where people were wrestling with complicated issues, and sometimes being really willing to disagree with each other too. It was network building.
Holly Delany Cole, advisor for The LeadersTrust and EIC board member, sums it up well when she says,
The collective process—I thought that that was the way it should happen. How about you get the folks in the room who have been doing this and living it and thinking about it? And how about you listen to them? That’s just a practice that I think is a powerful one. That’s not how expertise is developed normally, by actually listening to the field.
Managing Conflict
It wasn’t all positive, however. Philanthropy fosters a highly competitive approach to social change, and structural change efforts challenge the role of philanthropy itself. So, it’s not surprising that there were rumblings about the newly funded “it girl” project. Dr Raquel Gutierrez—founder and CEO of Blue Agave Partners, an EIC advisor, and a member of EIC’s team of seasoned racial equity practitioners—captures the feeling when she shares,
I’m curious about the role class plays in that. I just have to say there are a lot of fucking good ideas out there, and the majority of them, 99.9% of them are not going to be at Annie E Casey getting funded. So having that access is part of this story, and I don’t think it’s one that we should shy away from sharing as part of the story. And it doesn’t need to be negative. It just is part of the reality. You don’t have access, you’re not getting the funds.
So, from the beginning, EIC had to become adept at managing conflict.
The role that EIC would play in an already underfunded field was top of mind for many, including EIC. Further, the collective nature of the inquiry brought up issues of ownership and led to a commitment by EIC from the beginning to not become a competing provider of racial equity services. Many participants point to EIC’s relationship-based approach as a key attractor. Relationship-based approaches build trust and trust is key to collective change efforts.
Maggie Potapchuk, lead of MP Associates Consulting and EIC board member, adds,
I think racial equity organizations and folks that are working on racial equity, we come in with a set of values and those don’t always get operationalized. Equity In The Center was trying to flag those times when they were not being operationalized and have us get more aligned going forward. So whether it was tension with another organization, or just something going on internally within the organization.
Further, being a leading racial equity organization did not insulate EIC from the issues other nonprofits were having supporting the new influx of Black leaders, particularly women.
Andrew Plumley—senior consultant at Global Health Visions, the second employee hired by EIC as Senior Program Manager (later becoming Managing Director)—speaks to this,
I’m ride or die for Kay. She’s been an incredible leader for me. I respect the way in which she puts her values first and cares for people, but also I think she does the right thing, and she’s a badass. She had an expert way of saying the hard thing, saying it directly, but saying it with the utmost care. That was a weekly occurrence.
Suarez and Plumley’s willingness to have difficult conversations allowed them to become skilled and fearless in addressing conflict in the work. Further, EIC benefitted from having a network of practitioners it could rely on and call in to facilitate difficult conversations. But, perhaps most importantly, it had a board of racial equity practitioners who understood the racial and gender aspects of the conflict—both internally and externally—and was committed to Suarez’s leadership. (More on that in a later article in this series.)
The Report
EIC’s seminal “Awake, to Woke, to Work: Building a Race Equity Culture” report was released in 2018, after over a year of sharing, feedback, and vetting. The framework offered a new set of phases for race equity change processes, to replace diversity, equity, and inclusion: Awake, Woke, and Work.
Gutierrez says, “Awake to Woke to Work was so exciting for me, mainly because it gave people a structure and language that was potentially operational, but it also created a platform for me to be able to ask questions with funders, my peers, and nonprofits.”
Hare describes the framework this way,
There are these decisions at these levels in an organization. And there are these indicators or levers which you can manipulate to change those at your positionality within the organization. So it’s just high level. The Awake moment is that moment when you’ve gone from not knowing this work needs to be done and something awakens you to the need to have a racial equity approach. Woke was for people for whom the work is already happening, they can name the things. Then the work is, then how are you going to change it? What do you have the authority to impact and change, and what could you actually move your agency on. That framing hadn’t really lived in the same way anywhere, and really was inspiring.
Plumley says,
We were going to conferences, sharing the resource, doing open enrollment workshops, doing smaller sessions for individual organizations, and supporting them on their own journeys. That’s when I really got to understand. I think we probably worked with over 400 organizations in getting this material to them and getting those resources, helping with coaching.
The advisory group grew to over 150, working groups formed, projects began to take shape, and toolkits began to be developed to respond to implementation questions. The work was mostly being done by Suarez, Plumley, and a team of consultants, which included Ericka Hines. They were also interviewing practitioners to help make recommendations to the field.
Delany Cole says,
Naming things is really important. It opens doors. In the sci-fi series Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin, Ged’s superpower—and the thing that everyone powerful could do—was to say the true name of things. The Equity In The Center framework was getting closer to the true name. It organized things in a way that was accessible. It organized these ideas, these concepts, this encouragement, this exhortation to be in ways that I could recognize it and hang on to it.
Delany Cole concludes, “What EIC had done, not just with me, but with other people, is established projects that supported the ability of nonprofit leaders to adopt and adapt the work and it included resourcing them in all these various ways that made sense to me.”
The Launch
At the end of 2019, Luminaire Group conducted an impact assessment of EIC’s work. During that process, EIC’s advisors voted for it to leave ProInspire and become an independent organization. Suarez shared,
I think that evolution is tied to how Andrew, Ericka, and my analysis changed from March of 2017 to say fall of 2018, because the process to leave started a year before we actually exited. The analysis deepened because we were learning, and that changed us as leaders. It also changed the way we interacted with ProInspire.
ProInspire had a mission. It had a strategy. It had a brand in the market and an established body of work. Its focus on leadership development, specifically leadership development for people of color, was different from Equity In The Center’s focus on building a race equity culture. Suarez says,
We felt we needed to separate so that we could focus on culture and not have this tension between our work relative to ProInspire’s scope. You can’t have two strategies inside of an organization. One dominates, understandably, and that was ProInspire’s because it was at ProInspire. We felt that our work was itself a body that could stand alone.
In 2020, EIC spun out of ProInspire to become an independent 501(c)(3) organization. Since then, ProInspire’s focus has shifted toward equity. However, while the collective sensemaking process that took the work to a higher and deeper level was appreciated by practitioners, from the very beginning the question was, and still remains, what role will EIC play in this developing ecosystem?
Cyndi Suarez is president of Big Soul, a creative knowledge firm. She is the author of The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics, in which she outlines a new theory and practice of liberatory power. She is a former president and editor-in chief at Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ). Suarez has over 30 years of experience in the nonprofit sector and has worked as a strategy and innovation consultant with a focus on networks and platforms for social movements. She is currently writing a book that offers a new framework for social change. Learn more at cyndisuarez.com.
