Equity with intentionality
Lauren Shweder Biel
Co-Founder and Executive Director
DC Greens
Key Takeaways
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Using E-D-I language intentionally is a reflection of principles and values and can also help drive decision making down the line; however, it is important to make it clear that language is aspirational and show how this work is being done.
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Operationalizing racial equity requires disrupting both internal and external practices; it is critical for organizations with privilege to do this work and reflect its importance to funders.
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Institutionalizing pathways for staff to continually and safely raise concerns around racial equity creates dialogues that advance organizations and their work.
Overview
With a current staff of 18 employees from diverse backgrounds, DC Greens is a nonprofit organization that uses levers of food education, food access, and food policy to advance food justice in Washington, DC. However, this is not how the organization began. “For the first six years we were operating, we weren’t having conversations about race and the implications of structural racism in our work,” says Lauren Shweder Biel, DC Greens Co-Founder and Executive Director.
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When Biel and Sarah Holway founded DC Greens to expand food access in 2009, they faced the dilemma of many start-up non-profits: they needed staff to raise money to pay staff to do mission-oriented work. DC Greens hired unpaid interns to help generate this power inexpensively, but, as Biel relates, “We fell into one of the classic equity foibles of many organizations at that stage.”
For the sake of efficiency, DC Greens hired from this pool of proven intern talent when it had sufficient funding. However, as those who can work unpaid often have savings or family support cushion, early hires came from a relatively privileged group and therefore, as Biel notes, “We ended up reproducing the systems we should be working against.”
This awareness is a result of the work DC Greens has done over the last three years to become conscious of the implications of being white-led while working in communities of color, honest about challenges in its work, and deliberate in operationalizing racial equity across the organization.
As DC Greens initially began to expand and grow, the founders wanted to be more intentional in hiring and brought a first person of color into the organization in 2014. However, Biel says, “As an organization, we still weren’t having deeper conversations about racial equity yet. Our hiring was a kind of tokenism that we didn’t recognize at the time.” The organization continued to hire in an intentional way but had not set up any other internal processes to operationalize racial equity, which began to take a toll on staff.
By 2016, it had become clear there were tensions and communication problems within the organization. “At that point, we hit pause,” says Biel. Leadership brought in a racial equity facilitator who spent two weeks with the organization, first to level set understanding around structural racism, and then to facilitate strategic planning with a racial equity framework. The strategic planning process led to an organizational shift from food access to food justice, with a collective definition built by DC Greens staff.
This work and collective definition began the ongoing process of operationalizing racial equity across the organization. Biel says that being intentional with language is not only a reflection of DC Greens’ principles and values, but actually helps drive organizational decision making. “While food access was a way to talk about the ‘what’ of the work,” Biel says, “food justice is about the ‘how' of the work.
It forces us to name the structural racism that has gotten us to where we are, and then work against it in an explicit way.” For DC Greens, this meant collaborating with community leaders and people most impacted by food insecurity on planning and program design. By investing in community input into their process, DC Greens has evolved to be an organization that helps build channels for community members to shape policies that impact their lives and thinks at every step about how to transfer power, resources, and influence to those living in the experiences the organizations is trying to address. “The DC Greens definition of ‘justice’ has ended up being a north star for how we make decisions about all our work,” says Biel.
“More and more, organizations are adopting language around equity in their mission statements”
This intentional language influences and reflects other aspects of DC Greens’ work as well. Community ‘inreach’ – rather than ‘outreach’ – focuses the organization on collaborating and hiring within communities. Eliminating the word ‘empowerment’ continues to push DC Greens to focus on channels for people’s power to be expressed. However, Biel cautions that organizations should not shift language without doing the critical organizational work. “More and more, organizations are adopting language around equity in their mission statements,” she says. “We all have to be very careful that that is not an appropriation of a set of concepts.” DC Greens staff have voiced that many organizations’ equity statements do not match their internal or external practices. “If there isn’t opportunity to own that these equity statements are aspirational and show clear mechanisms by which the organization is owning its equity work,” Biel warns, “it has the potential to create damage.”
Communicating around racial equity work can be a challenge for the organization, however. “It can be hard to tell our story cleanly,” Biel says. “In some ways, there’s mismatch between the desire to have a snappy communication and the nuance that’s necessary to understand what equity really means.” She underscores that the social good sector is at the very early stages of what it looks like to operationalize equity, and this work means disrupting common practices, like the metrics set and multiple financial statements required by funders. DC Greens is experiencing the effects of its disruption in its fundraising efforts. “We have had supporters say that they aren’t always clear on what we do and that they want to hear from someone whose life has been impacted,” she says. “But that doesn’t always feel respectful.” Leadership and staff want to explain DC Greens’ work without featuring program beneficiaries as props for fundraising – and ensure that those speaking to a largely white, affluent audience are telling stories of power. Ultimately, staff has decided that speakers should be people of color in professional positions, such as service providers or nonprofit partners, as well as community members who have gone through DC Greens advocacy program and want to tell the story of what they have accomplished on behalf of their community. “It’s essential for all of us to rethink how we’ve done things if we are going to center equity,” Biel says.
Biel is quick to note, however, that these are recent learnings for her and DC Greens leadership and that the process of operationalizing racial equity will always be ongoing. “Initially, I felt naively like ‘we did the work, we’re done!’” she says. “I now realize that this work is never done.” As new staff join DC Greens who were not a part of initial conversations around racial equity, DC Greens has invested in ongoing staff facilitation to reflect on and question elements of organizational practice, and safely voice concerns. “We’re trying to create strong internal pathways so people feel like they can raise issues when they have them,” Biel adds. “We need to keep examining our organizational practices to ensure they live up to what we claim to be.”
Part of this examination has been processing what it means to be a white-led organization in this space. Biel notes that just being able to do the work of operationalizing racial equity in her organization points to privilege, as many small community-led nonprofits may only be able to raise funds by answering calls for tight program deliverables, and do not have unrestricted funds to build this kind of internal process and strategic planning into their work. “Organizations like ours – that are in these privileged positions – are the ones that have to do this work,” she says, as well as reflect this issue back to family foundations who provide funding.
Biel emphasizes that she is learning constantly, and that rather than having it all figured out, DC Greens is in a continual process of “internal tilling and external disrupting.” This process is a lot of work, and she is aware that organizations like hers need leaders of color that intuitively know how to approach this work. But this too is part of the dialogue, which Biel embraces. “In some ways I hope what people see in us is an organization that is grappling, and the grappling itself is meaningful,” she says. “You don’t ever arrive with this work; it is a process of getting some things right, doing other things less right and figuring it out together.”
Q&A: LAUREN SHWEDER BIEL
Ask Questions, Get Answers.
What DEI problem did you identify in your communications practices, why is it a problem, and how did you identify it?
One of the key problems that runs across the nonprofit sector is that there is a repeated trope of trotting out people’s stories in an effort to show impact and raise funds for programs – something that can often cross the line into exploitative power dynamics. In the work that we do, the majority of our constituents are people of color, and the majority of our donors are white. This means that there is a particular risk of reinforcing harmful stereotypes through communications, relying on the “white savior” framework that continues to perpetuate structural racism. As an organization, we try to work against this current in a range of ways.
How did you come up with a strategy to address it?
We recognized that it’s necessary to strategize at both the organizational level and within communications specifically to improve our racial equity analysis. Communications won’t embody principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion if the organization itself isn’t framed around DEI. As an organization, we invest in racial equity training for all our staff to help disrupt inherited language and tropes and work to root programs in a historical context. We also prioritized having our Communications Manager become familiar with our programs and our partners in order to have the necessary context to draft communications that fully represent the programs while aligning with DEI principles.
What obstacles did you face in approaching the issue?
Storytelling is a very key part of fundraising, to be able to demonstrate the value and impact of programs. Rethinking our communications strategy required pushing back against deeply ingrained ideas about how to raise money. We continually work to navigate how to embed storytelling into our work while making sure it doesn’t veer into exploitation by putting people’s trauma on display or playing into the narrative that our organization is the savior. In addition to having to push back against the traditional forms of communications, there is the difficulty of determining what is exploitative and what isn’t in situations where it’s not clear cut. That analysis requires experience and practice and is an ongoing process.
A recent example came from our annual event: We have long resisted the classic gala moment when program participants talk about the impact of the work on their lives. Many of our donors had asked us to include something along these lines, emphasizing that without the “heartstrings” moment, we were not going to be as effective at raising critical funds. After much internal debate, we decided to include a range of partners (a teacher, a Medicaid provider, a city councilmember, and one of our community advocates). We were mindful to have POC professionals in the mix alongside program participants, in order to disrupt any implicit biases or assumptions about race and social class. We also selected a program participant, Pumpkin, who had worked to get an advocacy win in the previous year - helping to secure over 30,000 signatures in support of healthy school breakfast legislation. Her story was not only about how we had connected her with tools for advocacy. It was about how she had expressed her power and how she had helped the city.
It was important to the team that Pumpkin was able to feel prepared and at ease speaking in front of 350 wealthy donors. In the weeks leading up to the event, we worked with Pumpkin to help her craft her speech. Knowing that she lacked a printer, we printed the speech out for her and ensured that the font size and type were visually accessible. Our internal discussions about whether to include program participant speeches, what sort of stories we wanted to highlight, and how to best support Pumpkin opened up very real, sometimes raw conversations internally. One of our top learnings is that difficult situations benefit from having multiple perspectives, and the process of discussing opens up learning for everyone and has the potential to build more trust on a team.
What specific things did you do to shift your communications process?
First, the application for our Communications Manager role required a statement on structural racism and communications so that we could identify candidates that already had a strong racial equity lens prior to a first interview, also making it clear to prospective candidates that fluency in racial equity would be core to the organization and the role.
We have identified the need for a shared organizational language to ensure consistency across our programs/grant submissions/appeals/etc. While we are careful about what words and phrases we use in communications now, we’re in the process of developing a formal guide for the organization (e.g., staying away from the terms “empowering” or “direct service” and focusing more on “building channels for power to be expressed,” and “direct partnership with the people most impacted by the problem”).
Ultimately, we focus on building authentic relationships with both our program participants and reporters. Authentic stories. This allows us to only include program participants in stories where we have had initial conversations with media outlets and feel comfortable with the narrative they’re writing.
If program participants are featured in communications, we make sure that they have ownership over any of the materials and can approve or reject the way they’re represented. We also make sure they’re compensated for time they contribute for media interviews. When we use pictures, we ensure that we have consent from subjects, and that the individuals are demonstrating agency within the images.
We have also become more mindful of how our institutional dollars can be deployed to support small businesses, working to identify POC graphic designers who can provide a look and feel to our materials that speaks more directly to our program partners, while shifting our graphic design contracting towards small businesses that we had previously overlooked.
What did you learn from this?
A communications strategy that embeds DEI principles needs to solicit input from a diverse group of individuals. As a food justice organization, we try to center the people most impacted by food insecurity in our organizational strategy. As such, we look to them as thought partners around communications. We try to solicit as many perspectives as we can in our communications.
There is no easy solution to embed DEI in comms. We learned to look at other organizations who were models at including DEI in comms and we made sure to communicate with our Board around the value of transforming our communications to include DEI. We recognize that this process will require us to consistently evaluate our progress and develop new strategies as needed moving forward.
Where do you want to go from here?
We would like to start setting the standard for DEI communications. We’re hoping to be able to preemptively strategize around how to embed DEI in each communication so that we can anticipate what stories and events will be most relevant for the audience of our communications channels. We want to make sure that we are being inclusive of all potential audiences including partner organizations, program participants, volunteers, and donors. We hope to also continue to make the communications process more transparent and collaborative across the organization as part of the ongoing effort to integrate communications with programs rather than as the siloed function it traditionally is.
What advice can you give other communications teams?
Embedding DEI principles into communications is an ongoing process. This role requires constant reeducation around antiracism, and it takes work to learn the history of the area you work in or the people you work with. Try to educate yourself on the policies and events that created the environment that you operate in, so that you can include that context in any communications. Also, work closely with program leads to get an understanding of their work. Communications is often treated as a siloed function, but it should be familiar with programs and build direct relationships with participants in order to properly represent the work and any individuals who are featured in communications.
