Making Lasting Change - Equity Across Four Dimensions
The Equity Labs team is focused on providing well-researched, expertly designed, and rewarding workshop experiences for our partners. We understand diversity, equity, and inclusion work is a commitment of time and energy as well as a financial investment – our team works to ensure our offerings are more than worth your time and money. One of the ways we do this is by operating from a framework that incorporates critical theories from communications and education. Our framework assumes change is most sustainable when enacted across several dimensions of an organization. Our workshops offer compelling ways to grow and change intrapersonally, interpersonally, epistemically, and institutionally.
I come to this work through the lens of environmental education and ecology. I spent time diving and studying coral reefs in the Florida Keys, exploring natural history on foot throughout North Cascades National Park, and teaching a range of environmental education topics to elementary and middle school students. I love being an educator and environmentalist and I take seriously my role in these systems. It is with the same sincerity I assess my role as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practitioner – I work on my own perceptions of myself, evaluate how my identities show up in interactions, think about my role in the DEI movement, and diligently focus on making changes at a systemic level. I practice radical love and deeply believe people are capable of change.
Let me guide you through the dimensions of our work and highlight how they are relevant to you, your team, and your industry regardless of your field or area of practice.
How We Define Intrapersonal
An individual’s understanding of themselves, their identities, positions, values, perceptions, and worldviews.
What We Mean
As an environmentalist, I often find myself stuck in early 2000s messaging about sustainability. Messages like “if you make one small change you can save the world” were popular during this time and propped up a rhetoric of individual action as the path out of the enormous challenges posed by climate change. Today we know one person using a reusable bag instead of a plastic bag will certainly not change the outcome of climate change. The work to be done is much deeper and requires cooperation between people, organizations, and government on a global scale.
I raise this example of my disruptive moment because changes in environmentalism required me to rethink the way I thought about my place in the movement, to upend the ways I thought about my actions, and to realign what I perceived as a moral way of being in the world. I spent at least a year feeling angry and disillusioned about the personal revelations I made – I felt helpless and aimless in my environmental work. I felt betrayed by my own mind that I could have made it this far not realizing the immense amount of work ahead of the environmental movement. I felt like I wasted time promoting actions that would not result in long lasting change.
Intrapersonal work, I argue, is some of the most difficult work involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Reflecting honestly on aspects of ourselves we love, dislike, or never thought about before is emotionally intense. It can feel lonely or disheartening to unflinchingly examine yourself. The moment of disruption will look different for each person (think the murder of George Floyd, the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the COVID-19 pandemic) but Equity Labs is here to support you in those moments. We care deeply about our participants, and we want to offer you new ways to think about yourself, your place in the world, and to support you through the hard work of sticking to the path you choose to take when it feels uncomfortable.
How We Define Interpersonal
The way two or more people interact with each other including communication, conflict management, and advancing the work of the organization.
What We Mean
One of the most difficult working environments I experienced was working underwater. I was limited to hand signals to communicate complex messages. People I was diving with would often look at me with an unfiltered gaze of “What? Huh? Uh…?”. I laugh upon reflection, but in the moment I felt frustrated about the misunderstanding. I thought my hand signals made sense and clearly communicated what we were supposed to be doing. Something I perceived as simple, like asking someone to stop what they were doing, could be taken by that person as a signal to swim back to the boat. With limited air in our tanks and fragile equipment, our lives depended on successful communication.
The misunderstandings are what we hear about a lot in equity work. The moments of frustration when something goes wrong get elevated and become cautionary tales or roadblocks to authentic engagement. The Equity Labs team wants to create opportunities for mistakes or misunderstandings to happen and to provide you with skills to navigate these moments. Not all industries operate with lives at risk, but the equity project relies on the continued commitment to effective communication. We view interpersonal interactions as opportunities for connection, collaboration, and clarity. We want to deepen the experience of all your interactions to incorporate an understanding of identities, power, and positionality.
How We Define Epistemic
How an organization understands itself including how an organization understands its stakeholders, its practices, and the ethics that govern its discipline or industry.
What We Mean
Something I never considered until I was in my mid-twenties (I am naming my privilege as a suburban, middle-class, white, straight woman here) was the big picture perceptions of education as an institution – things like schooling as an extension of capitalism, neoliberal approaches to schooling, and the implications of a system intended to conform. Aside from processing the personal shame around this, once I became an educator, I spent what felt like an inordinate amount of time thinking about the entity of education. The social, historical, economic, and political context for education came into focus and completely reshaped who I was becoming as an educator.
This effect rippled out into the kind of work I decided to take on, the way I saw students in classrooms and outdoor education settings and informed my interactions with fellow educators. It forced me into a paradigm shift and required me to lean on other educators in ways I did not expect. Like the disruptive moment I talked about in my intrapersonal shift around environmentalism, the aha moment around the big picture of education changed my world.
Our workshops are places to consider your work from a 30,000-foot view. How do you see your work? How does your team perceive its impact? How do your clients view your industry? Answering these questions, and staying connected as a team while doing so, opens a door to staying the course of equity even when you reckon with institutional identities.
How We Define Institutional
The policies, programs, and processes that dictate the overall function of an organization in advancing toward meeting its end goal.
What We Mean
I have absolutely no poker face. If I am confused or angry or ecstatic, you will be able to see it on my face. I call this my involuntary accountability mechanism. In most interactions, this serves me well. It paves the way for further conversation, question-asking, or most often, honesty about the situation that may not have come to light otherwise. I will say it does not always serve me…but that is another story!
Accountability is a non-negotiable part of any equity work. Systematizing or operationalizing accountability practices is one approach. As a systems thinker this is my first inclination. It is important to Equity Labs, though, to honor and recognize that accountability mechanisms will look different for all organizations. Accountability can take shape as a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, quarterly team check-ins, a line item in the budget, a climate survey, an accessibility audit, diversifying products or program offerings, or considering your parental leave policy. Imagination is key when we arrive at this part of the equity project. Sometimes you may be generating something your organization has never done before or you may be deviating from the way it has always been done.
Our team thrives when we can support long-lasting change – we love witnessing and supporting this work for our clients. We stand firmly on our framework of intrapersonal, interpersonal, epistemic, and institutional dimensions associated with making this long-lasting change. We are here to collaborate with you and your team and leverage our collective experience to build the equitable world we all need.
Related Content
