This article is the third in a series on Equity In The Center. Its purpose is to capture knowledge for the nonprofit sector. The articles in this series explore:
- The creation of EIC
- EIC’s biggest learnings thus far
- EIC’s biggest contribution to the field to date
- The next biggest contribution EIC can make to the field
- What is next for racial equity work
The Power of a Framework
By Cyndi Suarez of Big Soul
When one asks Equity In The Center leaders, partners, and clients what the organization’s biggest contribution to the field of racial equity to date is, at the top of that list is its Awake to Woke to Work framework. A conceptual framework is a roadmap for understanding a topic. However, it seems that Equity In The Center’s framework does a lot more than that. It changed behavior in the field.
What the Framework Made Possible
For one, the framework made it easier for people to talk about racial justice. It mitigated the fear, shame, and punishment that is often associated with the work.
Mikayla Smith (pseudonym for an interviewee who has asked to remain anonymous), an organizational development leader at a mid-sized, national nonprofit, says,
I remember when I first started doing that work and trying to talk to other peer nonprofits. People really didn’t want to share what they were doing internally around diversity, equity, inclusion. It was risky to center race equity and talk about white privilege. There were not a lot of organizations that really wanted to talk about how to fully embed a practice of race equity, not just a belief but a practice of what it actually looks like to codify our values in a way that’s unique and tailored to our mission and who we serve. Equity In The Center was one of the first organizations in this generation that really centered that conversation amongst people who are leading the work in their organizations and practitioners. Very few people at the time were bold enough to do this. It allowed us to be able to talk about it with credibility, without being targeted.
Specifically, according to Smith the framework supported clarity, language, and innovation. She explains,
One, the framework was born out of people who are actually already doing the work. There is something about the process of developing it, the process of convening people who are just doing it, that helped create clarity about what the work is. Two, the framework gives language to organizations and people that were trying to do the work on their own. The reaction was, ‘Oh, wow! You can locate where your organization is in this! The framework names exactly what we’re experiencing.’ Three, it provides an avenue for people to innovate on practices that really allow them to make impact in the different aspects of the framework. The publication of the framework gave the work more validity. That was huge.
The framework also built a culture around racial equity as a skill to be developed.
Jeffrey Bradach, co-founder and former managing partner of The Bridgespan Group, shares his experience:
I was on a panel at the Equity In The Center gathering in Baltimore. Kay was interviewing me. It was the first time I spoke externally about committing to racial equity work. I talked very vaguely and uncomfortably about being a white leader grappling with it. The leader of CompassPoint at the time was also on the panel. My main memory is that he was way more sophisticated about how to even talk about this than I was. I thought, ‘Oh, man! I’m so out of my league.’ But the context was open enough for me to be willing to talk about the particularities of being a white leader trying to do this work in a way that bridged the ambitious intention with levers and handholds you can start moving on. It allowed clarity about whether you’re moving forward or not. I felt supported and challenged. It was comfortable enough in the right way for learning and developmental growth. It made it possible to have conversations in a slightly different way: we’re on this journey and there’s a developmental path.
In addition to contributing to building an open, yet rigorous, skill-oriented culture for racial equity, the framework built understanding about the developmental phases, at an organizational level.
Smith says,
When I think about the ‘Awake’ phase, there were a lot of people at the time that were just trying to get senior leaders to acknowledge that cultural awareness, diversity, equity was a thing. Equity is different from equality, just the basics. Then how to understand—given our work and our mission, and who we ultimately serve—what we should value around diversity. Have we articulated that? Do people know that? It was helpful for organizations to understand that’s the very beginning of the work. It’s not the full work. But there’s alignment within a team or within an organization around it. It’s not just within the community of historically marginalized, or people of color in that organization.
Further, the framework articulated levers in each phase, as well as the cyclical, back and forth process of moving through the phases.
Smith recalls,
You take two steps forward, and you get four steps back. In the organization that I was in at the time, the framework was a helpful tool to go back to and reassess, where have we taken steps back? That means it really wasn’t embedded. It was certain leaders carrying these parts, and once they transitioned, gains were lost. So the framework was the most helpful in that continuous assessment of where we’ve made progress and where we’ve not.
Bradach agrees. He shares, “You can’t work on just one thing and think you’re going to make progress on this. That was my interpretation of Bridgespan’s first 15 years doing racial equity work. We thought that if we brought in diverse people from diverse backgrounds, we would be done—check!”
He continues,
Then, in year 10 we started doing analysis on retention rates and discovered people of color had lower retention rates. So we were in this leaky bucket that we kept celebrating. ‘Oh, isn’t it great, a Black partner!’ But they left after 18 months. What’s that about? It wasn’t until we truly grasped that there were cultural factors at Bridgespan, broader team dynamics that were not inclusive, and frankly a lack of skill at integrating equity into our actual work that prevented us from gaining ground. So we came to believe that we had to move all these things at once. It’s not that everything moved at the same rate, but focusing just on one thing was not going to work.
The circle chart was the thing I remember most. I recall reading it and finding it super helpful, because it was very concrete. The practicality and tangibility of it is super helpful to calibrate where you are and where the points of leverage in the system are. So, this notion that there are multiple levers—boards of directors, teams, management process, recruiting processes—helped anchor us.
Rael Nelson James, partner and Head of Equity at Bridgespan, says the framework reinforced Bridgespan’s racial equity strategy. She shares, “It gave heft to it because there are a lot of things that mirror what we were already doing. It helped people say, ‘Okay, what we’re doing at Bridgespan is more universal than we thought.’ That gave my team and me even more credibility to be leading this work internally.”
Nelson James adds that, though Bridgespan does not offer DEI services to its clients, the framework helped its client-facing staff. She says,
This is a group of people whose bread and butter is being deeply familiar with the nonprofit sector. I would say that DEI was probably a blind spot for some colleagues in terms of how they might advise clients to move forward on this. It was a question that would stymie a lot of folks. Just being able to read the framework and internalize something that was so clearly laid out, I think, enabled consulting staff to be able to have conversations with their own teams internally and as well with their clients. They were able to introduce the idea if they noticed a disparity in data, or did a focus group about something else and equity came up. They are able to bring it up with the CEO and say, ‘One resource you might want to explore is Equity In The Center.’ Now they are able to say five important sentences about what’s contained in the framework and how it could be useful to that CEO. So it is really additive to the toolkit that all of our consultants bring with them to client engagements.
Thus, the framework supported the development of a skills-based culture for racial equity; created clarity on phases, levers, and the circular process of development; allowed reassessment along the way; and served as a connector between the advanced practitioners and those seeking help.
Can it be even better?
Building on the Framework
After more than five years applying the Awake to Woke to Work framework, advanced users have ideas for the kind of support that they need at this point. At the top of the list is a desire for practical examples of how organizations are implementing the work at the different phases of the cycle, particularly how they are making progress.
Users suggest offering anonymity for the featured organizations and instead adding descriptors of the type of industry, size, and so on. These could be, as one user put it, “Bite sized, less than five minutes if it’s a video, and by topic. For example, Embedding racial equity in your performance management system. Very specific examples: here’s the challenge, here’s what we did, here’s the output.”
These types of case studies are common in the private sector. It’s time for the nonprofit sector to have these.
Users also want updated assessments. EIC currently has assessments for how well an organization is doing in each phase. What has it learned thus far about how the work develops? Bradach says,
There’s a subset of organizations that over the last 10 years have traveled a long distance on dimensions of diversity, equity, inclusion. I would put Bridgespan as one of them. We’re in a vastly different place. Over half our team is BIPOC. The culture is much better than it was, although we still have some of these divides. The content of our work integrates equity questions into everything we do.
Now, we still have a bunch of dimensions that we need to get better on. So how do you maintain the momentum, focus, attention needed to keep making progress, just practically, without having it be the singular thing you are focused on? What is the point of arrival? Is there a steady state? I would say you regress if you don’t keep the pressure on.
Third, users suggest EIC change the language. As EIC is aware, the term “woke” has been turned on its head in backlash language. One user confides,
I think that’s a polarizing term, and it has been for some time for people who are more right leaning or more centrist. I think people want to do DEI work in the sense that they like the idea of an organization being welcoming to all of its employees. I would stop short of saying people want to do equity work in an activist way, which is, we should transform our organization so that people from all backgrounds can thrive. There are a lot of caveats, including ‘as long as it fits with business interests,’ or, ‘not if it interrupts business.’ It’s pretty much a nonstarter in mainstream organizations in this moment.
You have to be pretty far to the left, or a small organization, to use the word ‘woke’ in this moment. You can see that any word that is used to describe the advancement of Black people becomes weaponized and a dirty word. People are just too afraid right now to do anything that’s going to get them attention that they don’t want from the administration.
This user also notes that the backlash has served as an opening for people who appeared to be allies but were secretly in disagreement: “The interesting thing is that the administration’s pushback has actually elucidated a lot of the cracks that already existed in the sector where people were going along with this in part because it’s America’s racial reckoning, and it’s what everyone is doing. But they had some deep criticisms they weren’t voicing.”
Underlying this change in language is the idea that the next phase of the work needs to expand support for racial equity. This user says,
I don’t think it’s altruism anymore. Altruism was a big part of what motivated people—even going back to William Lloyd Garrison, he writes an anti-slavery newsletter because he feels it in his heart. I don’t think that’s the motivation anymore. I think there needs to be something else.
Who are the unlikely suspects that EIC can engage with? How can people who are centrists, but who believe in some of the same basic principles, be part of the work? Those who also want to see the Black wealth gap close, for example. There are lots of people who work in financial services who will say, ‘I think it’s important for our economy to close the Black white economic gap. But I’m not down with all that woke-ism.’ So similar goal, but for whatever reason, they don’t see themselves on the same route that some of us who are progressives see. But if we share that goal, how can we talk about a shared pathway there? Another is ending childhood hunger. There are a lot of people who are unlikely comrades in that endeavor. However, the how is so differently pursued and named that it gets in the way of what could be effective collaborations. So how do we figure out unlikely partnerships?
What’s that universal language? What are the new alliances that need to come out of this really dark era in order for us to get back to actually doing the work? What will that coalition need to look like? What will galvanize it? I think those are the questions for the next four to 10 years that all of us in the space are gonna have to ask ourselves.
Bradach notes one organization that has begun to shift its language,
I’m on the Board of Policy Link and have experienced its evolution to embrace the concept of ‘All,’ without letting go of the particularities of the barriers and the challenges facing different identities and populations. It’s not like they’re sugar coating. Instead they say, ‘We’ve always been about the All. So let’s just say we are about the All. But all people aren’t given an opportunity to flourish. So we’re focused on this.’ It does open the aperture, in their case, more than 85 million people in America who live below 200 percent of the poverty line. Fifty-five percent of people at that level are people of color and 45 percent of them—nearly 40 million people—are white. So, Michael [CEO of Policy Link] will say, ‘We care about those white folks, too.’ I think that clarity—completely aligned with the mission—increases the odds of success, which people are seeing now. This is actually bringing some people in that would otherwise be hesitant to engage.
Another option is to create different languages for different audiences. One user observes,
People who are fighting for racial justice in the US and people who are running DEI for companies and organizations, there’s some overlap in the middle, but those are actually quite distinct pursuits. One is how do we redesign systems to fit more people better, the other is how can we make the status quo look betterfor the marginalized people in the workplace.
So, Awake to Woke to Work is a powerful framework, that perhaps can be even more powerful if it adds practical examples, uses assessments to build knowledge and practice, and fine tunes the language to increase mainstream support for racial equity.
As EIC looks forward to its next phase, the feedback it has received on the Awake to Woke to Work framework is telling—what began as convenings and resulted in implementable steps now has the field asking for more. Specifically, a way forward in these times, and more actionable tools to help us get there.
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.
