At a time when even corporations are spouting rhetoric about diversity, equity and inclusion without an antiracist lens, the social change sector needs a deeper transformation. Nonprofit organizations are driven by their social mission. When an organization’s internal culture replicates racist practices—such as pay inequity, undemocratic governance, and elitist exclusion—it creates a misalignment in values that makes it impossible to effect the kind of social change it claims to want in the community it serves. Some organizations, especially ones that are traditionally white-led, began their racial equity journey with an “implosion” caused by this misalignment. Catalyzing change outside requires self-examination and inner transformation.
Fatimah Ahmad at DC Greens, a nonprofit organization in Washington D.C. that advances health equity by building a just and resilient food system, says, “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.” As a result, DC Greens enlisted the help of RE practitioners to engage staff in courageous conversations about how racism plays out in the power dynamics in the organization. Ahmad says, “For example, one of the responsibilities we now list in our job description is that people examine their power and privilege as a regular part of working in our organization because without a very basic equity analysis, people are not going to be able to do the work that they are here to do.”
Capitalistic pressures, like funding structures that encourage competition and prize conformity, often reproduce how organizations compensate and treat their workers. Later sections elaborate on different ways of changing this organizational culture, but it has to start with self-examination and inner transformation. The DC Greens example is just one of many where nonprofit leaders and managers interrogate how they personally benefit from current systems of inequities as a precondition to making the cultural change necessary to bring about racial justice.
Sometimes we think about racial justice work as the fight on the street. What’s the policy fight, what’s the advocacy fight? How are we shifting the conditions for people? All of that is part and parcel of racial justice work. And I also think that organizational transformation is part of racial justice work, and that’s not always a story that gets highlighted.
Liz Derias-Tyehimba, CompassPoint
But it is not only nonprofit organizations and their leaders that need to do this important inner work to unlearn white supremacy and racial capitalistic conditioning. RE practitioners also recognize that they need to be the change they want to manifest in their client partners. They have to, as one RE practitioner says, “walk the talk,” too. Heidi Lopez at REACH cohort member Latinx Racial Equity Project (LREP) explains, “We need to make sure that we’re doing the work internally. We were absolutely out of alignment in almost every aspect of the organization: who led, who was represented or not, how people were treating each other, how people were honest or not about the identities that we held, and the ways we were enacting white supremacy with, among, and between each other, including anti-Blackness and Native erasure that we talk about in our workshops.” This self-examination makes the difference between “bringing community along from a more authentic place and causing harm.” According to Lopez, the inner work is integral to the work LREP does with its client partners. “Doing our own work internally is part of how we assess other organizations because you can only take people so far as you’ve gone. If I haven’t done my own reflection, my own analysis, then I don’t know what questions I may need to ask, or I may be too scared to ask.” Or, as Mala Nagarajan at Vega Mala Consulting asks, “If we cannot demonstrate the change we seek to make, who are we to ask the rest of the world to change?”
Group hands with puzzle for solution, teamwork and workflow goals, achievement and success in closeup. Team building game, project development and people for problem solving, synergy or collaboration
The REACH Fund offers RE practitioners in its cohort, like LREP, the time, resources, and the spaciousness necessary to leverage their learning from working with client partners in order to hone their own approaches and practices in these tumultuous times and align their organizational culture and practices more authentically.
As Liz Derias at CompassPoint demonstrates in the case study below, “Racial justice is hard work. Sometimes we think about racial justice work as the fight on the street. What’s the policy fight, what’s the advocacy fight? How are we shifting the conditions for people? All of that is part and parcel of racial justice work. And I also think that organizational transformation is part of racial justice work, and that’s not always a story that gets highlighted. So for us at CompassPoint, we really have been trying to practice racial justice from the inside out. It’s forced us to take a look at how we develop systems that actually embed our values.”