Recently, a friend asked me to put on my consultant hat and talk with her team of grantwriters about how to get better at centering equity in their writing. As part of preparing for this conversation-style training, I started jotting down a few ideas about how to introduce myself and my background, and it… sort of accidentally turned into a manifesto. Thought I’d share it here:
I’ve spent my whole life in the nonprofit sector, doing fundraising and communications and being on the leadership team of one direct service org for 10 years and then another one for 7 years, both of them white-led orgs located in and serving communities of color.
In 2017, I’d been at the next white-led organization, a membership association for philanthropy, for a few years when we decided we needed some DEI training. That was my understanding of it, anyway. And I thought I was doing pretty good around those issues, having spent my whole career “helping people of color achieve self-sufficiency,” as I used to say at the time.
So imagine my surprise when the trainer walks in and says, today we’re gonna talk about race, racism, and whiteness. And I’m like, WHOA.
That was the start of several months of training, with tons of structured studying and homework and peer discussions. It literally changed my life.
Ever since then, I’ve been on an urgent and also life-long journey to see and speak my truth and the truth of the world around me more clearly. So, I’ve been in lots of trainings and I read a lot and watch and listen to a lot of stuff and I try really hard to reflect and often then to write about it on my blog.
Because there is so much that I as a middle-class educated cis white abled woman etc. etc. etc. have not experienced or seen — and that I have been trained by our society and systems NOT to see, and certainly not to talk about.
And with all due respect to that trainer in 2017 — it’s really the talking that started this off for me. There were a couple of moments in 1:1 conversations with colleagues of color during the training series that really broke me open and made me need to consider what I didn’t know, what I didn’t see. And what I still don’t see. It still happens all the time that I don’t see things, and it will always keep happening because I sit at a certain perspective in life. I will never see from all perspectives. That’s not the goal.
The goal is to broaden my perspective as best I can, AND to broaden my readiness and openness to build relationships of trust with people whose lived experiences are closer to these issues I care about, so I can keep doing better at using my particular experience to lift up theirs.
Which brings me to my last point that feels important to know about me. I’m not coming in here as an expert. These days, I’m consulting on fund and organizational development to organizations that are somewhere on their social and racial justice journeys — but this is honestly the first time that I’m facilitating anything like an official training on so-called DEI topics, and my friend here had to talk me into it.
I ended up saying yes because I think and talk about this stuff all the time, because I want to learn about it all the time, and so I’m here for us to talk and learn from each other. I hope I can help us hold space for that to happen.
Because I do not have answers. To some extent, there aren’t answers. I mean, there are some answers that are pretty clearly wrong — in the sense of harmful — but here’s something I just found in my old 2017 notes when I was prepping for this. The trainer said, “I can’t give you a list of things to do and not do. There’s no list. It’s not a list, it’s a lens.”
So, I hope that’s helpful as a disclaimer and a bit of a mission statement for our time together. Onwards, okay?
Our first session was last week. They said okay. Onwards indeed. ❤️