Community Hour Resources

• Exploring Love: Insights from Bell Hooks’ All About Love: New Visions.

• What’s Love Got to Do With It?

• Love as a practice of freedom

• All About Love by bell hooks

Love as a Praxis Slide Deck

• 5 Proven Strategies To Combat DEI Resistance In The Workplace

• To Overcome Resistance to DEI, Understand What’s Driving It

• What role were you born to play in social change? | Waging Nonviolence

Navigating Resistance Slide Deck

• Individual and Community Trauma: Individual Experiences in Collective Environments, Lauren Weisner

• Defining intensity and visibility (not prescriptive) - contextual!

• Things to consider when crafting a response (validate/education, mitigate, advocate) 

• Instructions for practice response: 

  • Identify event, intensity, and visibility

  • Identify who is impacted (directly or indirectly on your team)

  • Who should be included in your communication within your team

  • Write your response (consider the platform you want to use) 

Managing Your Organization's Message Slide Deck

Equity Labs Critical Events Communication Matrix

• Urie Bronfenbrenner’s model and across systems development

Taking Responsibility Slide Deck

Cycle of Liberation by Bobbie Harry

Individual Strategies

• Engaging in introspection and reflection: Consider and reflect on questions like, how have I previously defined leadership? When are times I have felt truly supported by leadership? When are times leadership has silenced others?

• Get comfortable being uncomfortable: The idea of liberation already moves us towards an unknown, a place of leadership that isn’t the norm. Embrace the feelings of uncomfortability as you move through them. What is the story you are telling yourself? Is it true? How do you know?

• Educate yourself around leadership styles that resonate with you.

• Conciousness raising through critical analysis: pay attention to the thoughts, language, and actions and if they align with our new world view.

Interpersonal Strategies

• Imaginative liberation: thinking radically through different modes such as conversation, writing, reading, shared experiences.

• Binary Mindsets

• Expand metrics of success

• Share your power

Engaging in Liberatory Leadership at Work Slide Deck

• Our team utilizes and subscribes to the work of adrienne maree brown. She writes extensively on change and offers a liberatory approach to approaching change. Her Emergent Strategy series can be found here: books – adrienne maree brown

• The work of Michelle MiJung Kim offers clarity and action-oriented ideas on changing toward an equitable and just world (minus any shame-based language!). We recommend her book The Wake Up— Michelle MiJung Kim.  

• Finally, you can peruse our Equity Labs Blog and our LinkedIn to read more pieces written by our team and our community about DEIJ in the workplace. 

Reframing Change Management Slide Deck

Theme: Who Matters - New Employees

Employees are 69% more likely to stay with a company for 3 years if they experience a great onboarding experience.

Process is paramount.

Equitable onboarding design

• Inclusive/people-centered values that model equity and belonging

  • Include co-workers and managers in the process, information sharing, and relationship building from the beginning

  • Involve leadership even if for a few minutes to demonstrate the new employees' recognized value

• Design justice approach: bottom-up design (not just top down), outside in

  • Can be ever changing

  • Modify to new people, experiences, and ideas

  • Include various identities, lived experiences, economic status, ability, neurodivergence, learning styles, education

• Utilize a "first day of school" mindset - onboarding is not about a knowledge dump but an experience which can be carried forward

  • The emotions tied to "first day of school" can and will manifest in different ways including fear, anxiety, excitement

  • Include trauma informed approaches when providing information and designing the experience

• Incorporate various learning style opportunities: video, visuals, music, reflection

• Communication: do it in advance and do it often, include pieces like what to expect, and create space for the new employee to ask questions

• Make onboarding a process of spaced repetition with small chunks of formal training, on the job training, and observation

• Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up

Onboarding can be a mutually transformative process for both new employees and current ones.

Equity & Ethics in Onboarding Slide Deck

3 Frameworks

• American as People

  • Questions to consider: Maybe there should not be a definition of who is "American"? What is the cost of belonging in the American fabric? What has to be given up? How much do you have to endure? How much do you have to give? Can we imagine a world where that is not necessary?

• American as Material

• American as Idea(l)s

Teaching and Learning about Settler Colonialism - article by George Dabo

US Immigration: Rhetoric vs. Reality - article by the Institute for Policy Research

We Shall Remain - documentary series by PBS

Consumerism and the Crisis: Wither 'the American Dream' - academic article by Maria N. Ivanova

Follow Up Questions:

• Where do you learn to be or do American?

  • Under the information ecosystem Community Hour drop down, access the worksheet with a focus on where and how you learn about American. What can you do to diversify or differentiate?

• How does our understanding of American change now as it has in the past?

Being American: Doing Ame Slide Deckr

The Intersection of Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace

Research and Resources:

The Likability Trap by Alicia Menendez

Emotional Stereotypes

Strategies:

Intrapersonal

Building Self-Awareness & Self-Regulation: 

• Importance of the Pause

• Body + Mind Awareness

  • Notice and acknowledge where your body is activating and what it may be telling you.

• Meeting Needs

The Practice of Empathy: 

• Tuning Into Your Capacity

• Pushing Past Discomfort

• Correcting Self-Talk

Interpersonal

Cementing Communication Skills: 

• Active Listening

  • Nonverbal and verbal can help ground you as a listener in the practice of active listening.

• Nonverbal Cues

• Verbal Cues

The "B" Word: 

• Knowing Your Boundaries

• Accepting Others' Boundaries

  • Can be direct and ask co-workers what their boundaries are (I.e. Whe is the best time for us to schedule meetings?)

• Manipulative Boundaries

Meditation Exercise

• Meditation script “Leaves on a Stream”

Community Organizing Slide Deck

Recruiting for your Community Organization

• Priya Parker’s Generous Exclusion

Community Organizing Strategies/Frameworks

• Community Accountability: Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan - Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators

• Non-Violent Civil Disobedience: Southern Christian Leadership Conference Article

Information Ecosystem Pt. 2 Slide Deck

Critical Evaluation Methods

• Introducing idea technologies into Job Descriptions

  • Idea Technologies: a process or mechanism to create, de-construct, transform, collate, organize, and transport ideas

• Asking good questions

  • A good mix of questions includes thinking, acting, and being based questions

  • Good interview questions should give candidates the opportunity to share ideas on the different ways they think, how that impacts their actions, and to share how they show up in the world.

• References and reverse references

  • Use References to validate what you know… not seek out new information

  • Give the candidate the chance to update/alter references

  • Offer reverse reference opportunities

    • Ask employees to act as references for those who are participating in the interview process. Give applicants the opportunity to ask current employees about their experiences.

• Equity and justice in mind during the hiring process

  • Pay attention to biases in evaluation… especially around motivation

  • Reframe from “culture fit” to “culture add”

  • Reflect before you evaluate

Information Ecosystem Worksheet

Strategies to Diversify

Empathy in the Workplace slide deck

Empathy Mapping Activity

Blank Empathy Mapping Activity

Hiring Veterans by Leanne Smullen

Recommended Resources:

• The G Word with Adam Conover on Netflix (resource for government/civic process 101 with executive producer Barack Obama)

• 7 Strategies to Promote Employee Civic Engagement

• 3 Easy Ways Employers Can Support Civic Engagement

• Civic Alliance

• The Participation Project

• The Root Causes Network

Resources and discussion:

• What is civic engagement? An individual and collaborative effort to address and participate in public areas of concern (voter engagement, organizing, mobilizing, dialogue, advocacy, lobbying, citizenship promoting). This includes:

  • Education in the workplace and dialoguing about the different pieces of the civic process

  • Bring topics that are/will affect your employees/co-workers and create power bases (communities of power and change)

• Ways to bring civic engagement in the workplace:

  • Participate and facilitate dialogue on public issues

  • Offer resources for engagement that make it accessible - time off and flexible civic hours (voting, poll work, etc.)

  • Run or sharer information sessions on upcoming elections and candidates

  • Provide info on when and how to register to vote

  • Reward employees engaged in civic activities (drawings for engagement, make it fun)

• Civic engagement isn’t just about the elections but having influence in the decision-making processes (local, institutional, and governmental)

• Different ways folks have provided civic engagement:

  • Provide information on what is considered lobbying and what isn't lobbying to non-profit teams

  • Share and provide information/resources on specific topics and not specific candidates

Visa Information

Discussion Points for creating a positive multinational workforce:

• Consider your hiring processes: include your visa/international hire information in the initial job posting and include international hires in your hiring budget.

• Leadership team: build a leadership team that values the creation of a trusting and empathetic culture. Properly utilize active intervention and know when to step into potentially harmful situations for international employees.

• Reframe what it means to have different identities and perspectives on your team. A group of folks with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives opens up your ability to understand different audiences and tell different stories

• Keep in mind that people with work visas or who are in the process of getting one may experience fear, anxiety, or worry about work opportunities, visa processes, and more. Proceed with patience, compassion, and empathy.