Recent Engagements

Management Consulting / Equity Training

Establishing Group Norms for a Community Racial Justice Coalition

In 2019, I was engaged to facilitate a subcommittee for a city’s Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) coalition that was focused on combating racism and discrimination goals across the city, as defined by the CHIP. This group is newly formed, but had iterated from a previous formation that included many of the same members and leadership, but was held within the community rather than housed within the city government. In the transition process, membership atrophied, leadership shifted, and multiple narratives of the group’s transition emerged. Some thought the initial group was voluntarily disbanded, while others thought it was overtaken. Some believed leadership were ousted, while others felt the change process naturally led to some choosing to step away. The truth is not one or the other, but rather exists in between these two narratives, where the realities of power dynamics, broken relationships, mistrust, and histories of oppression take root. 

These realities continued to take root in the re-formation of the subcommittee, and it became apparent to the group’s members that a slow and intentional relationship building process was going to be necessary to do the work the group is charged with; to work to end racism and discrimination in the city. It is impossible to do this externally without an internal transformation as well. Over the course of the next year, I will be offering facilitation and consulting services to the subcommittee to help them codify group systems, put language to their group’s values and vision, and explore elements of the group’s culture that will both help and hurt their progress toward their goals. As an external facilitator, I bring no history of relationships, no vested interest in a particular outcome of the group’s work, and no emotional connection to the organizations and individuals that make up the group’s membership. I bring only a commitment to integrity of process. To date, the group has worked to establish a shared vision and a list of ways of being (or community values) that they bring to their relationships with one another. In our last meeting, one participant reflected in a round of plus/delta feedback, “We accomplished a lot. And I felt we did it together”. By the end of 2020, the goal for this group is to be self-facilitated with a cadre of trained and trusted group member facilitators who rotate as leaders of process for each meeting. Instead of having roots in mistrust and broken relationship, this group will have roots in alignment, attunement, and shared vision.

Working Toward Gender-Inclusivity at an Arts Organization

A local organization has recently engaged in a transformative process to increase the organization’s responsiveness to white supremacy culture and structural racism, both internally in it’s workplace culture and externally in it’s partnerships and programming. The organization hired myself and my colleague, Jax Gil, to facilitate a one-day training on gender inclusivity as a part of their effort toward increasing safe and nurturing workplace environments for transgender and non-binary employees. 

To begin, Jax and I worked to understand the current organizational climate for trans and gender non-conforming (GNC) individuals, the current spread of staff knowledge on the topic of gender identity, and desired outcomes for the training. During the training itself, we offered a unique set of group activities and discussions that aimed to build relationships, increase knowledge about gender identity, and explore the organization’s workplace culture. By connecting the work of gender inclusivity to the work of ending white supremacy, participants were able to connect the topic to their larger efforts toward addressing structural racism. Through a collaborative activity that looked to identify where the organization was acting in alignment toward a shared vision and where it was out of attunement, we found that there is first a need for structural changes at the org to allow for more shared power and decision-making. Shifting these aspects of workplace culture will push the group toward a more nurturing organization, allowing the brilliance of the team to transform the organization towards closer alignment with its values, particularly toward greater gender inclusivity. This organization is ripe for shifts toward trans-affirming practices, such as making a habit of sharing gender pronouns among the team and with external partners.

Shifting from a Culture of Blame to a Culture of Accountability at a Social Justice Non-Profit

In May of 2019, I was privileged to have been hired by my friend and colleague, Lawrence Barriner, to assist him in documenting a one-day retreat for a social justice non-profit in New York City. This organization had gone through rapid growth in the past few years and was struggling with a reactive organizational culture that discouraged experimentation, instilled fear, and caused for blame to be held between colleagues. As is common in many non-profit social justice organizations, charismatic and creative leaders are held up as the identity of the organization. In the case of this organization, the founder and executive director built this non-profit in her image and invited people to share in her vision. As the organization grew, so too did the diversity of perspective and individual purpose. Now, the organization finds itself struggling to reconcile the impassioned vision for justice with what feels like egocentric and unilateral leadership. 

Lawrence held the group through a series of hard conversations about what it means to shift from a culture of blame to a culture of accountability, which included establishing community agreements and routine opportunities to give multi-directional feedback.  Using a fun, visual activity that asked the team to consider their organization as an organism, they constructed a picture of their workplace ecosystem that included biological assets, hindrances, allies, and predators in the environment (a metaphorical SWOT analysis). Through the course of the day, we saw incredible strength and resilience among this team. There is a lot of work left to do for this organization, including our recommendation of executive coaching for the E.D., restructuring their hiring process, and engaging in regular organizational retreats.  It remains to be seen if these structural shifts in how power is held in this organization will take place, but the conversation was a critical starting point for this work.

Reproductive Justice Training for DPH-Funded Sexuality Educators

In December of 2018, Chrislene DeJean and I collaborated to design and facilitate a two-day training for sexuality educators funded by the MA Department of Public Health’s Office of Sexual Health and Youth Development. This training, focused on reproductive and racial justice for mainstream reproductive health programs, offered a space for participants to learn, to connect with one another, and to vision solutions for more equitable and impactful programming. Using group discussion, activities, personal reflection, and brainstorms, participants explored the impact of white supremacy on reproductive health outcomes in the U.S. and how white supremacy culture manifests in their organizational systems. In discussion of the racist history of reproductive health initiatives in America, many participants learned something new, while others were reminded of their ancestry, their own family’s history and experiences. This training aimed to reinforce the work of health educators, counselors and facilitators is to understand the legacy they bring to their classrooms, our counseling rooms, or our positions of leadership. To do that, we must use our heads to understand. And we must use our hearts to feel what these legacies mean. In a final activity focused on designing solutions, participants worked together in groups to creatively depict the vision they have for reproductive justice at their organization. Through picture, song, poem, and role-play, we allowed ourselves to dream up alternatives to the oppressive systems we work within today. Participants left the training with a renewed sense of commitment to reproductive justice work, and some new framing and tools to operationalize these values.

An abbreviated slide deck from this training can be found here.

Navigating Mistrust as a Program Leader

From 2013-2018, I was in the role of Program Manager in a grant-funded sexual health and youth development program. In this role, I oversaw a staff of 18 community health educators who offered sexual health services in clinic, school, and community environments. As a white-led and historically predominantly white program, we resolved in 2015 to begin an intentional process of integrating racial justice values into our mission and vision. Beyond the current trendiness of “diversity” work, we knew we had to deepen our analysis in order to do reproductive health work that was justice-driven and centered on liberation. And in doing so, we made some really productive adjustments to our practice. By convening a representative “racial justice working group”, we used racial equity assessment tools to evaluate and adjust structural elements of the program such as our hiring practices, our personnel policies, and our supervision structure.

Interpersonally, however, there was more that needed to be done. Whilst most staff agreed on the structural changes needed, there was a long history of hurt and resentment among members of the team directed at each other and also at management for the particular ways that power was held in hierarchy.  As a manager myself, I found it challenging to facilitate team-building work to a group that didn’t trust my leadership. It was a good lesson in the importance of an outside facilitator when times get tough. I learned that white folks in leadership roles who are trying to do racial justice work deal with a very specific paradox; how do we use the power of our leadership positions to move forward the work of racial justice while simultaneously relinquishing the centralized power that traditional hierarchies afford us? While I was often asked to “fix” whatever was wrong with our program, I also understood that my unilateral fixing would just be a perpetuation of the whiteness in leadership. As I grappled with this question, I also understood that given our current hierarchical structure, I couldn’t deny my power. It was my responsibility to set the process for how we’d move through this conflict collectively, for the health and safety of our workplace. By setting some ground rules for communication in group spaces and taking the time to meet one on one with each member of the team to hear their concerns, I gained a relatively complete picture of the issues at hand. We committed the funds to hire an outside facilitator to move through some trust-building exercises with our group that ultimately led to a shift away from interpersonal conflict toward renewed commitment to structural change.

Redistributing Power Among a Self-Organized Group of City Employees and Community Members

In 2017, a self-organized group of four women, comprised of both city employees and community leaders, asked me to facilitate the establishment of group norms and expectations. They had been tasked with acting as advisors to the city’s Mayor on the topic of race relations. After a series of murders of black men at the hands of police across the country, it became clear to the Mayor of this city that he needed help in knowing how to address these events in his community. This multiracial group of women were tapped to be those advisors. 

I began our work together by exploring what community agreements this group wanted to adhere to. In doing so, it became clear that there was a history of harm felt by the only Black woman among the group. She had concerns that her contribution was merely token in nature. As a religious leader in the community, her time in the group was unpaid, whereas the others were present as sanctioned by their employers. This dynamic didn’t afford her the same flexibility and freedom to be present. The group claimed to be committed to her leadership, and yet they weren’t creating the conditions for it. Additionally, she felt there was a history of these women favoring the leadership of another woman in the group because of her proximity to the Mayor in her role at City Hall. All of these dynamics contributed to a sense of unease among the group that had to be broken through. 

I facilitated several tough conversations that lead to un-surfacing this dynamic. As part of my strategy, I felt it necessary to work with the group to understand these challenges as structural, rather than personal. The women learned to hear and understand each other’s words in the context of intent (what they meant) vs. impact (how it landed). This built empathy and patience, as it was imperative that they not allow shame, defensiveness, or fragility to dominate the conversation. By keeping the analysis structural, the group ultimately got to a place where they decided to disband and thus my engagement with them ended. They restructured as a community group, not a City-sponsored group, that had explicit leadership held by community members of color. This group self-organized successfully and became a leading voice in the community on race and equity, from which the Mayor often hears policy recommendations.