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We’ve been talking and thinking a lot about change recently, both within the team at CCI and with our clients. DEI is, to us, inherently about change, not for the sake of change, but in order to shift towards equity and inclusion.
Change work, however, by necessity involves grief work, which by necessity involves acceptance work.
Read MorePeople often think that DEI work is about race - at its most demonized, the misconception is that it’s about making white people believe they and the US are inherently racist. At its best it is often thought to be about how to hire more Black and other people of color so that the staff is more reflective of the communities they serve.
It is absolutely not the former, and the latter is only a very small part.
I’m not even sure I knew it when I started out, but what I’ve come to find is that, for me at least, DEI work is about healing - healing from the trauma and harm of systems of oppression.
Read MoreThere’s a moment in our work, whether it’s during a particular meeting or whether it’s over the course of a more extended period of time, where the containers that we work to build create space for hard truths to be spoken or revealed.
Things that have been swept under the rug for niceness, people pleasing, fear of conflict, denial and avoidance become visible.
It’s progress, but often it’s so painful, an opening of Pandora’s box, that it doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like things got worse.
Read MoreI’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much there is that goes unspoken. It comes up a lot in our DEI work with client organizations. When things go unspoken, we rely on socialization for a common understanding. We also rely on a homogenous or dominant culture where everyone is socialized into the same norms. If you don’t understand or follow the unspoken norms, you’re excluded. A lot of the work of assimilation, that is, of fitting into a dominant culture, is figuring out the unspoken norms.
And when norms are unspoken, it is much easier for them to become invisible, unchallenged, and unchanging.
Read MoreLeaders are often “visionaries” and “change makers” by definition. They have a vision for something that is different than currently exists, and they have the drive to make that vision a reality.
Not every leader is suited to driving change towards equity and inclusion however.
Read MoreI have found it incredibly helpful to think of the four levels of oppression as the four levels of everything.
In particular, I’ve found it helpful to think of these levels as the four levels where we can have an impact and create change.
This doesn’t mean we should all necessarily be trying to work all four levels at once, although I do think we should try and consider all four levels at once.
However, one of the things that can be useful to figure out is where we personally are best suited to make the most impact.
Read MoreChange is a funny thing. I find that people, myself included, often get stuck in either being resistant to change because it's happening too fast and is out of our control or not in the direction we wanted, or being frustrated and feeling like we're banging our heads into walls and screaming into the wind because change isn't happening fast enough. Sometimes it feels like change isn't happening at all, or it's one step forward and three steps back.
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