REACH Cohort Members: Vega Mala Consulting & Richael Faithful
Client Partners: DC Greens & Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ)

DC Greens works towards health equity in our nation’s capital through multiple channels, the most renowned of which is the Produce RX program “in which doctors can prescribe fruits and vegetables to patients on Medicaid,” says Fatimah Ahmad, its Operations Director. The organization also works on several policy initiatives, including improving healthy food access in places like correctional facilities and public schools, and operates a one-acre green and wellness space with a farm that provides fruits and vegetables to local communities in Southeast Washington, D.C. The organization was founded in 2009 when one of its two white founders realized that there wasn’t a farmer’s market in her neighborhood, but that original strategy expanded when the organization recognized that their work was not colorblind and “race plays a huge part in people’s access to food.”

Ahmad continues, “In 2018, we realized that we could not do the work of improving health outcomes without understanding more deeply what the impact of systemic racism and oppression had on all of us.” In 2022, DC Greens hired its first Black woman executive director. Ahmad says that this transition was preceded by a lot of honest conversations about race. (Since the interview for this case study, Ahmad has been appointed the Interim Executive Director at the organization.)

Credit: Vaga Mala Consulting

“The organization early on would say we’re a food justice organization,” explains Ahmad. “I don’t think there was a clear understanding of what that meant to people. A lot of the first year [2018] with our facilitators was about having discussions about who we are, and what it means when we say this thing out into the world. Where is it we think we can have the most impact? Who do we want to move into being? That led us to this refinement of us being a health equity organization. We refined our values so that they are more closely aligned with our mission and that they were actually things that are very attainable. We developed an organizational philosophy that we didn’t have before. For instance, we value collaboration over competition. We don’t gatekeep information. If we come into a space with a similar organization, the first thing we need to be asking ourselves is, is there a way we can collaborate with them?”

She continues, “We decided from there that we needed some external support to provide guidance on basically analyzing what those pieces actually looked like as an organization.”

The organization first brought on Richael Faithful to facilitate a staff retreat, and afterward, the BIPOC staff caucus continued the conversation with them. Faithful then invited another consultant to facilitate a separate caucus for white staff. Soon after, DC Greens added a third consultant to support organizational design work and individual coaching. One conversation led to other pieces of the puzzle. Ahmad says, “We realized there was an element that was missing, and that was a social justice approach to human resources that could help us operationalize the wonderful learnings we were having from our caucus work and individual coaching.” For this, Faithful introduced DC Greens to their longtime collaborator, Mala Nagarajan at Vega Mala Consulting, to work with the Operations working group that Ahmad was a part of. Faithful and Nagarajan’s collaborative practice on equitable compensation has only deepened, with support from the REACH Fund, since their partnership with DC Greens.

Ahmad says, “We ended up engaging the four consultants all at the same time, to support us in hitting what we were hoping to be a stabilizing, transformative alignment project for our organization.” On reflecting on the intricate process, Ahmad breathes out a “Wow,” before she continues. “It was complex, and it was not neat. Transformation oftentimes is not a linear process. It doesn’t have a clean beginning, middle, and end. The number one thing is abandoning perfection, or abandoning this idea of arriving somewhere. We had to believe we were engaging in something where, on the other side of it, we were going to be in a place that was more aligned with our values and that supported us in achieving our mission.”

There were times, Ahmad acknowledges, “when things were really, really hard. Sometimes it looked like we might be doing more damage than we were doing good. Our organization has had a comfort with change that I think is uncommon. Because of the way our founders navigated the organization, we had a tolerance and a muscle for flexibility.” That “and the commitment to do what we said we were going to do is what made us push forward to the other side of hard,” says Ahmad. To her, this inner work to align the values of those working at DC Greens, set them up effectively for their subsequent work in decolonizing traditional HR practices, including staff compensation.

For Nagarajan, equitable compensation structures have broader movement implications. She says, “We’re really talking about how we bring interpersonal and community small ‘r’ reparations ¹ into compensation and in a way that advances our movements. We show people a potential way, like Chris Moore-Backman wrote, to ‘give back in proportion to their privilege.’ We are trying to reflect and embody ‘small is a reflection of the large,’ as adrienne maree brown wrote in Emergent Strategy.”

Nagarajan has been experimenting with several equitable approaches to compensation that do not replicate market approaches. According to her, now these market approaches: (1) widen the wealth gap, and (2) reward people who are doing similar work differently, through gendered and racialized compensation factors and benefit practices.

Common compensation factors like seniority, geography, years of relevant experience, and education level are more likely to disadvantage workers who have not had structural support or privileges. Common-place percentage-based benefits, like a percentage-based cost of living adjustment or a percentage-based retirement match, favor higher-income workers in building a disproportionate amount of wealth over time. Lower-income workers are disadvantaged by these approaches and hold the bulk of the burden inequitably.

For example, Nagarajan believes that everyone in the organization should receive the same base pay, with additional compensation to specific “areas of responsibilities” (AOR). The equitable approach also limits the ability (on both sides) to negotiate a salary, a practice that feels counter-intuitive to a capitalistic culture where employer and employee have opposing objectives.

Nagarajan often tells her clients, “Look, we’re doing something on the edge of innovation. It is not something that we have a yellow brick road for, but if we don’t try something different, we will continue to advance racist policies.” Many, including DC Greens, are willing to experiment with Nagarajan. And the four-part seminar series that she has instituted on equitable compensation is always at capacity. The demand illustrates for her that people are so dissatisfied with the status quo that is the market approach to compensation, that they are willing to explore something new, even if it is uncomfortable.

Ahmad says that unlearning that status quo takes “multiple levels of touchpoints to layer the information.” She explains, “We are developing something where the goal is not for you to try to get the most money for your salary. The goal is for you to get the amount that corresponds to the responsibility you’re holding, no more or no less. And so, the invisible part of people having feelings around pay, that they need to advocate and fight for something—this system doesn’t work that way. The system is, we are looking at this all together. And so you don’t have to advocate and fight for anything.” For new staff, this is reinforced throughout the hiring process from the job announcement to the onboarding. The responsibility cannot fall only on Ahmad as the Operations Director. She says, “It takes a group of people to hold this and to continue to hold this, And it gets easier over time.”

For existing staff, it took many conversations. In this work, Nagarajan always starts with political education around the root causes behind the widening wealth gap in the U.S. Nagarajan recognizes that the equitable compensation change process needs to speak beyond the cognitive side because “there’s money trauma that needs to be addressed.”

For Faithful, equitable compensation strikes at the crux of their racial equity approach, which is about alignment of racial justice values, incorporation of power analysis, and being trauma-informed and healing-centered. They say, “We really get to the intersections of people’s trauma around money and work, understanding the power relationships about the choices and the limitations people have around how they’re valued, how that value translates into material compensation, and how that relates to their labor. And for people who want to be intentional about what that means, not only individually, but at a collective level.” They add, “Eighty percent of our work is actually just trying to do that deep listening and feeling of what is happening.”

To do this, Faithful starts with different circles of dialogues to understand “how people feel inside the system,” particularly their sense of value and their relationship with power in the organization. “We start with what people feel is fair, and then we go to the level of organization, the choices the organization made around compensation. We get people’s feedback about their experiences, feelings, and thoughts within existing systems,” says Faithful. “Typically by then, there is an opportunity to draw out racialized components of the systems. Gender and disability come up a lot, too. It allows us to have a more intersectional discussion.” Faithful aims for these listening sessions to “leverage the voices of people who especially feel like there is a lack of transparency.”
In collaborating with Faithful, Mark Liu at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ) observes that Faithful possesses “a level of being present, validating, hearing what people were saying, being able to listen and capture the main lessons. There were also some activities at the very beginning, since we’re talking about pay equity, about people’s relationship to money. And people were able to share about that. And so I think they [Faithful] just set the stage to empower folks around conversations about money, but also acknowledging the baggage that we may be bringing, normalizing that and taking away some of the shame that people may carry.”

Based on their work with organizations like DC Greens and GGJ, Faithful is standardizing a discussion guide, part of the compensation equity toolkit that they and Nagarajan are developing with support from the REACH Fund.

The work with DC Greens that started in 2018 got Nagarajan and Faithful thinking about a more reparative approach to pay equity, and they also understood that they needed to live this radical value themselves before demanding it for their clients. So Nagarajan and Faithful, along with the other two consultants at DC Greens, practiced what they preached by devising an arrangement that considered their various needs. They considered factors like historical discrimination, net worth, the number of people their income supported, emotional labor, monthly expenses, and distributed and anticipated inheritance, to arrive at variable rates for each of the four consultants. ² The final arrangement, Nagarajan says, made a huge difference in alleviating one consultant’s financial stress, while allowing other consultants to live their values. This experiment was a natural outgrowth of Nagarajan’s formulation of the Reparative Distributive Factor (RDF) ³
, the roots of which began years before when Nagarajan pondered how business finance concepts like present and future value could be repurposed, for example, to estimate how long affirmative action would need to be in place to restore equity and guarantee equal opportunity by identifying the present value of historical discrimination and land theft.

Often, in workshop or conference presentations, Faithful and Nagarajan ask participants to anonymously share their salary, their household income, and their personal wealth. And if the group is large enough, they will also ask about their racial identity, so they can do a quick cross-tabulation by race. Nagarajan says, “It’s always jaw-dropping for folks to see who they are in the room with and where they are in the [wealth] curve. I think once people see how people’s material conditions growing up have affected where they are in their current station, things really shift. People have an epiphany. One person when we did this said, ‘I was in the lowest group and I thought our household making 60K was like a huge step up. And all these folks are making 120K.’ He was describing this disconnect: we go into a workplace and we think we’re all equal.”

Society’s inhibition to discuss personal wealth can make it uncomfortable for organizations and individuals to be transparent about people’s salaries. (Some people even think disclosing salaries is illegal; it is not). This obfuscation also hides disparities. In contrast, the transparency about money can be liberating. From working with her clients, Nagarajan observes that, as staff collectively decide on the value of different AOR, invisible labor begins to surface, and many people feel seen in the organization. In another instance, the client organization’s leadership was so upset to find out from these conversations that some staff “were struggling month to month to make ends meet that the organization increased the bottom range by $10,000,” even before their team implemented a new compensation structure.

That is not to say the alternative approach did not meet any resistance. Many people have invested a lot of their resources in academic degrees and professional credentials, factors that drive traditional compensation approaches. Faithful recalls an older Black man in a client organization who “struggled with the reality of making a lot of life decisions around certain degrees,” despite systemic barriers that he had faced to achieve them. Faithful says, “He felt he had paid his dues. He was playing by the rules. He was having some difficulty with the idea that the rules are changing, and resentment that it didn’t give him the advantage he was supposed to have.” Part of the reconciliation, they say, is a “reframe” or “breakdown of the market binary”: a reparative consideration is additive (win-win), or lifting up more people, without bringing others down (zero-sum).

When Nagarajan and Faithful applied this approach to their work with GGJ, according to Mark Liu, Finance and HR Manager, people “appreciated being part of the process to imagine and actually create something new and different.” Under Faithful’s skillful facilitation, the staff agreed to prioritize people’s needs as part of GGJ’s total compensation program. From these conversations, Liu became clearer about staff wanting the organization “to take care of staff with more needs, not necessarily those who the market says we should pay more.” He started to think more creatively about supporting staff who are single parents, for example.

Faithful acknowledges with limited resources and legal constraints, an organization —and individuals within it—need to make some trade-offs for this redistribution. Faithful finds it encouraging that some people in privileged positions have volunteered for pay reductions, contradicting a conventional narrative of economic and professional self-interest. When asked what compelled these people to make these decisions, both Nagarajan and Faithful believe that their pay reduction gives their commitment to racial and economic justice a sense of integrity in an “embodied” way. Faithful says, “The thing that I see is common among people who are prepared to redistribute in that way is first they usually have a pretty significant amount of political education. So they have really interrogated that on a systemic level and then brought that down to the personal level, in the ways they have benefited from historical and current racism. I think the other thing that these people have in common is often that there’s also been enough personal development where they can value themselves in other ways, like feeling like they are more in line with their community or spiritual values.”

The traditional human resources approach values equal pay for equal work (in theory), which is antithetical to the reparative approach that considers historical discrimination and current needs. As a former civil rights lawyer, Faithful appreciates the traditional principle of protecting marginalized people who are often discriminated against in the workplace. A reparative approach could be (falsely) faulted for “reverse racism”; in fact, any “remedial” policy that aims to correct the continuing effects of the history of racism in the U.S. has become suspect in the political climate after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in college admissions in June 2023. But Nagarajan and Faithful believe there can be “creative workarounds.”

One of those solutions is to reframe knowledge production. In addition to academic and professional credentials, lived experience, especially with the issues and communities addressed by a nonprofit organization, should be equally valued and invested. At GGJ, Liu thinks that sometimes people’s assets are reflected in their lived experience in communities of high needs. He explains, “Did you grow up in a place without secure food access? Did you have to translate for your family? Do you know someone in prison? There are all kinds of issues that people face that help people in their work. We’ve weighted that piece heavily in our system.”

“It’s about experience more than identities,” says Faithful. “It gets trickier when you get into identities.”

Another “workaround” is expanding compensation to consider more than just salaries. For instance, at GGJ, Liu is exploring how to use wellness funding to support single parents, including support for dependent care or fuller health insurance coverage for children. At the end of the day, Faithful believes that even when an organization cannot pay someone as much as they think they deserve, there are different ways for that organization to acknowledge that person’s worth and contributions.

Faithful also believes the work that they and Nagarajan are doing in changing organizational culture (and not just instituting policies) is key to this transformation. They explain, “There are a whole bunch of laws that [human resources] have to comply with. Anything prescriptive that’s this radical will run into legal interference. But culturally, if we’re doing lots of facilitation and people have a change of heart, or if they are given a broad set of choices of what they want to do and we get more people to select the choices that are more radical, then that’s the genuine workaround.”

Conversations about equitable compensation often shed light on unspoken inequities in the organization beyond salary structure. Both Ahmad at DC Greens and Liu at GGJ observe that the work around equitable compensation was part of a larger “courageous conversation” both organizations were engaging in to uplift and heal from past hurt. The byproduct is more than just a pay structure that is aligned with their organizational values. Both Ahmad and Liu also think it contributed to a more open and democratic culture in their respective organization, as well as more trust, cohesion, clarity, and sense of belonging among staff.

According to Ahmad, an early insight from working on the compensation structure was that DC Green’s organizational chart did not have enough “clarity about roles, responsibilities, and reporting structure.” Ahmad says, “Through that lack of clarity, people with various identities across the organization did not have the same access to power. We had two white founders. So oftentimes some of the white staff felt more comfortable accessing the founders advocating for themselves and potentially getting opportunities to do things that some of the BIPOC staff did not have the same comfort level around doing.”

As illustrated in a later section about “inclusive governance,” working on the organizational chart opened up a new conversation about decision-making in the organization. This intricacy explains why it takes multiple RE practitioners, with different expertise and skill sets, for deep transformations. “What started out as an HR initiative now looks like a change management initiative,” summarizes Ahamd. These parallel conversations and processes illustrate how intricately linked organizational structure and practices are if leaders are serious about weaving equity throughout their organization.

Liu reflects, “What’s been really key for GGJ is to be able to get better and better at conflict. We live in a racist society. We’re not perfect. There’s going to be stuff that happens. It was more about how we’re going to restore, repair, and be accountable, without throwing anyone away or banishing or punishing people. And how do we help everyone grow and be better together? Particularly in my HR role, how do I keep applying these principles to policies and practices? I feel like it’s paying off and we have to keep working on it.”

Ultimately, to Nagarajan and Faithful, racial equity in organizational development is culture work. In their webinar series around equitable compensation, they are training other consultants and internal organizational change agents in this work. Collectively, they hope, enough organizations will transform and reach a tipping point in the nonprofit sector. The work with individual organizations is only the beginning. Citing Sociologist Damon Centola, Nagarajan and Faithful write, “When 25% of us who have been privileged voluntarily redistribute because it’s the right thing to do, the scale of justice and social pressure will turn people to do the right thing (not because of the law).” Beyond the work with individual organizations, their vision as RE practitioners is that “social justice organizations be the source of a private reparations movement to make workplaces fairer and more effectively make market corrections.” ²