In the equitable compensation case study, RE practitioners Mala Nagarajan and Richael Faithful begin their work with any client partner with a political re-education about the wealth gap in the U.S. and its root causes. Faithful says capitalism’s conditioning on us is so deep that we often replicate it uncritically. They say, “Even in racial justice movement, we cling to narratives, like meritocracy, that make it challenging to talk about pay equity.” By highlighting how the reward system in most nonprofits “mimics the inequities in our market system,” this political re-education, says Nagarajan, destabilizes its inevitability. She says, “The way I talk about my work is that we’re reverse engineering compensation so we can more easily see the privileges it builds on and be more intentional about how we rebuild a system that is less harmful, less extractive, more values-aligned, and more reparative.”

Similarly, many organizations begin their racial equity journey by reclaiming the erased history and ancestral practices of BIPOC communities in order to create a shared understanding of the persistence of systemic racism in communities today. They often engage staff in political study, using resources like the 1619 Project, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimerer, and Healing Justice Lineages by Cara Page and Erica Woodland.

In a collaborative essay, Aja Couchois Duncan and Elissa Sloan Perry at Change Elemental explain why getting on the same page on political analysis is important. They write, “Collective sense-making requires some shared understanding of the current and historical structures, strategies, and belief systems that benefit some people at the expense of others. This is a juncture in the journey where indepth, whole-system conversations are crucial to restore the very real stories of settler colonialism, enslavement, genocide, wage theft, and extractive capitalism that have largely been disappeared from and or greatly distorted in our education systems. Building on these understandings, teams can also develop a shared understanding of how the continuing impacts of these legacies and other ongoing systems of oppression and inequity interact to perpetuate the manifestations of inequity in our lives and organizations. This discordant recognition is fundamental to the path…What matters is that teams are moving towards a shared understanding that interrupting current, intersectional racial inequities isn’t possible without having a depth of knowledge about historical inequities and the practices and systems that support their perpetuation.” ¹

Cynthia Silva Parker at Interaction Institute for Social Change shares a story of transformation of a client organization that went through this politicization process: “Their team members said, ‘We would never have come to the conclusion that we have to get in the game of actually dealing with structural barriers if it hadn’t been for this process. There are 4 million young people who are not employed. They’re our target audience. We obviously aren’t going to serve 4 million people and we need to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make sure there aren’t another 4 million people coming right behind them in the same situation.’ That was a big insight for an organization that was already at the top of its game, feeling very proud, and rightfully so, about the work they were doing, and then realizing, ‘Oh, there’s a whole other thing now we don’t know that much about. We have to find some new partners.’ They’re not running pickets or doing organizing work, but they’ve gotten in the movement in a bigger way than they would’ve otherwise.”