We write weekly on the issues that are top of mind for us as we do the work of driving equity, shifting culture and co-creating inclusion with our clients. To receive these posts via email, join our free weekly email series, Self-coaching for DEI advocates and leaders.
Summer is my favorite season, even in NYC where it can (and increasingly so it seems) be blazingly and uncomfortably hot and humid.
Ok, I don’t love that part.
But the spirit of summer holds so much appeal to me.
Summer for me is a time for self-reflection, curiosity and integration.
It’s also a time for dreaming.
Read MoreJust a few weeks ago, we welcomed Lori Press to our team as our new Administrative Coordinator. This is an exciting evolution for the CCI team as it’s a new role, and will free me and the rest of the team up to do more of the strategic level work that will help keep us on a path towards increased impact for our clients as well as for us.
It has been important to us however that we bring someone onto the team who isn’t just here to support us, but that is someone we can support in their career and professional development as well as with a supportive work environment in general, something that was clear was not the norm for many of the candidates for this position.
Read MoreAs you may have heard us speak about before, every year CCI takes the month of August as a pause from external client meetings, facilitation and coaching for our own strategic planning, professional development and self-care.
This year my intention is to not have to do any work at all for my two week vacation at the end of August.
Read MoreWhen Co-Creating Inclusion first started, as is often typical for small businesses in the early days, I started my salary out low and built a team of independent contractors.
After the first year, we had the ability to bring on our first employee (other than myself) and the year after that, we did our first pay equity audit, benchmarked our salaries to the market, and were even able to provide some back pay to cover some of the difference between what we had been paying ourselves and market rates.
Creating an equitable and transparent pay structure has been a priority for us ever since. After all, it’s not really DEI work if we participate in the extraction of our own labor in a way that exacerbates systemic inequities and does not support our needs.
Read MoreOne of the communication strategies we talk about in our DEI workshops with organizational clients is what we like to call the “tell me more” strategy - in other words, leaning into curiosity in order to de-escalate a situation and foster an environment and culture where difficult conversations across difference can take place.
While it is not always the right strategy, particularly if hearing more from someone is likely to only cause more harm (you actually have to genuinely be ready to hear more) it can even be a strategy for responding to aggressions, micro or otherwise.
Read MoreWe’ve talked before about what can happen when trauma and power intersect and the things you can do in the moment to prevent yourself from causing harm by reacting in trauma when you align with power.
This is one of the reasons why self-reflection is critical in DEI work.
However, it’s critical for various reasons no matter how we align with contextual power and privilege.
Read MoreLast week Malaika, Danae and I were in Seattle to meet with a client and to do our first in-person facilitation with an org client since late February 2020.
I am loathe to say that in person is categorically better - our team was built as a remote team since before the pandemic and we have not found it to be a barrier to building trust and collaboration, although I recognize that is easier when you have a small team that has always worked remotely.
And yet… there is something very powerful about the embodied experience of being together in physical space. Conversation flows a little easier. There is no fumbling for the mute button. You can ready full body language. There is a shared physical experience, even if it’s just being in the same space.
Read MoreI am excited to announce that Co-Creating Inclusion is expanding and we are recruiting for an Administrative Coordinator (remote) to help support our amazing team in the impactful DEI consulting work we do for our clients.
Do you know someone who is detail-oriented, thrives on structure and optimization, and who loves to improve internal systems, structures, and processes?
Please pass along the job posting and share widely among your networks - we would love to get your referrals and recommendations!
View the job posting here or on LinkedIn.
Read MoreAs a former architect, some of the most engaging and enriching educational experiences I ever had were in my design studio classes in architecture school. “Project-based learning” is a concept people are more familiar with now - in fact, my kids have been in schools with project-based learning since kindergarten - but for me it was a revelation that my actual academic courses could be more interesting than extra-curriculars.
Read MoreAs DEI consultants at CCI, we are very clear that we are not HR. We are equally clear that DEI and HR need to closely collaborate - it is critical that DEI be integrated into HR practices, just as it is critical for DEI to consider the role that HR plays within the organization when it comes to creating a culture of equity, inclusion and belonging where diversity can thrive.
What we have found though is that HR is often seen as and therefore functions as the culture keepers, in other words, responsible, to varying degrees, for culture.
Read MoreSomething that has been particularly striking to me recently in our work is how white people often have a hard time understanding what they have to gain from dismantling white supremacy.
There’s a certain approach to DEI that is about white people recognizing their privilege and that they need to give it up in order to “do the right thing.”
Often white folks have no idea what they themselves have given up or how they have been harmed in aligning with whiteness.
Read MoreWe talked a few weeks ago about people pleasing, and we’ve been talking on the CCI team about how this leads to folks trying to make friends and develop “personal relationships” in the workplace.
We want to work with people that we like, right?
And so it makes sense that we would hire people that we like, right?
Read MoreSomething that happens so often that we generally accept and take it for granted is the way that accountability rolls downwards.
What do we mean by that?
What we mean is that individuals in an organization are often held accountable for things they don’t actually have any ability or power to control and should really be the responsibility of those further up the organizational hierarchy.
Read MoreSomething that often happens when leaders, white leaders in particular, “recognize their privilege” is that they react by concluding that what they need to do instead is step back, be quiet, listen to others, and let other lead.
While well-intentioned, the impact of this approach can also be harmful. When those who align with systemic and institutional power fail to use it, it leaves those who are less aligned with that power to do the work, often while feeling tokenized, unsupported, and under-resourced.
Read MoreFor those of you following along at home, NYC public high school decisions came out this week (on Thursday after school). Miraculously and unexpectedly, decisions were released in a relatively thoughtful and orderly fashion although not without various mishaps - I’m just saying, it could have been a lot worse after going through what was for many a harrowing, complex and inequitable application process.
One discussion struck me today though and reminded me that I feel like what is often not taken into account is that some kids work hard and don’t get good grades, and some don’t work hard and do get good grades
Read MoreI never thought that so much of the work I would do as a DEI consultant would be about giving and receiving feedback - mostly about receiving it and, by extension, inviting it.
But it turns out that a big part of co-creating inclusion is about getting feedback from those who are impacted by decisions in order to make better decisions.
Read MoreLately, we have been diving into the impacts of people pleasing, and there is a lot to unravel, especially when you consider that we have all been socialized into people pleasing a little bit differently, depending on our various and intersecting identities.
We’ve been having conversations with each other on our team at CCI as well as with our clients about our identity stories through the lens of people pleasing asking questions like:
How has people pleasing shown up over the course of your life? To what extent are you or are you not a people pleaser? Have you been around people pleasers? How does this show up now in your role at work?
Read MoreA few weeks ago, we started what has turned into a four part blog post series on hiring an internal DEI leader and/or consultant.
Today, we are closing out the series by discussing the process of hiring an internal DEI leader, assuming your organization has considered some of the questions we’ve already raised about the stage of DEI organizational development you’re in, and whether it’s the right time to hire an internal DEI leader.
Read MoreImagine a system of violence that doesn’t just turn white people on Black people, but Black people on Black people, Asian people on Asian people, and white people on white people?
Read MoreMore often than not, especially for small to mid-sized organizations, DEI is considered to be part of the HR function and initial DEI efforts are lead by HR.
In fact, it is often, although not always, HR that reach out to us about hiring us as DEI consultants, and we have worked successfully with many of our clients this way.
However, we are increasingly of the belief that DEI should not be conflated with HR and that it is beneficial to have DEI as a separate function from HR.
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