Our Services
Discovery Processes/ Praxis Analysis
Discovery processes provide a sense of where you are.
Praxis is where theory and intention meet applied practice. Our Discovery processes are designed to gather perspectives and insights from your organization’s people, communities and practices through qualitative methods and an understanding of organizational processes and outcomes through review of quantitative data.
Identifying & Communicating Your Equity Imperative
Building a shared understanding of your organization’s equity imperative fosters inclusion and drives the work.
Why is equity so important to the success of your organization? And what will good look like when you have achieved your vision? What difference will it make and why is it worth the work and effort required for transformation?
The answers to these questions will make up your organization’s equity imperative. Having a shared understanding of what this means is critical to creating buy-in, inclusion and a shared equity-first culture. This is what drives the work.
Identifying and communicating your organization’s equity imperative provides an understanding of where you want and need to be, and why.
Equity-First Strategy Development & Implementation
Developing and implementing effective equity-first strategies is how to get from where you are to where you want and need to be.
Our team brings expert-level knowledge of how root cause dynamics related to race, gender, class, and other social determinants become entrenched and play out within systems – and how to dismantle their effects and build equitable systems through application of equity-first principles and concrete, actionable strategies and plans.
Building Applied Equity Competencies
An effective learning agenda equips your team with the knowledge and skills they need to successfully implement your strategies and achieve your equity goals.
We have a counter-intuitive stance related to providing trainings. We don’t. That is, we don’t present stand-alone trainings. When we work with client partners, we are determined to help them build context-driven learning agendas that are built in response to a key question: What does your team need to know and be able to do in order to enact your equity-first mission? To achieve your vision of what good looks like? From these answers, we identify key competencies – equity-related knowledge sets and skills – and build customized learning plans that can be presented in a full-range of formats.
Equity-Focused Leadership Development
Leaders who are working to transform systems are located at all levels of your organization. We want to help you help them do their best work.
Today’s most effective leaders are really good at building and supporting strong teams and ensuring members have what they need to do their best work: A strong and shared understanding of mission and purpose, clarity, a sense that what they contribute is meaningful and has an impact, space to learn and flex and innovate.
We can help key members from across your organization build and sustain equity-first leadership capabilities through integration of Adaptive Leadership Theory, culturally responsive/relevant equity theory and practice and Trauma Theory.
Bringing Together Robust Equity-First Communities of Practice
Equity work is human at its core and involves complex and emerging dynamics. We need connection and support from others. Liberation is cyclical and community is critical for sustained transformation.
Decades ago the theorist Bobbi Harro, presenting her “Cycle of Liberation” challenged us to ask ourselves who we’re partnering with “like us” and “not like us” in order to transform and sustain our communities.
As consultants and thought partners who represent a range of diverse backgrounds and identities and bring deep understanding of oppression and liberation dynamics, we create spaces and communities of practice for individuals to connect and collaborate. These energized collectives can then powerfully advance culturally responsive and relevant strategies and solutions.
We also know that we are all cultural beings. Strong and meaningful connections with colleagues and collaborators who walk with us as we do the hard work — and the heart work — of equity-first transformation are essential to our ability to sustain ourselves and continue our work.
Developing & Implementing Equity-Minded Measurement, Learning & Evaluation Frameworks
There is no such thing as value neutral research. Our focus is development of equity-first data & evaluation frameworks to achieve “Strong Objectivity.”
Historically, “research” has not served minoritized communities equitably. Sandra Harding is noted for her construct of “Strong Objectivity” that challenges the notion of truly “objective,” value neutral research methodology. Who we are and how we’ve learned influence how we know what we think we know. This influences how we conceptualize and apply research processes - the questions we ask, how we gather, review and make sense of data and how we interpret outcomes.
If we aren’t diligent, bias and disparities become entrenched. The only way to construct truly equity-first measurement, learning and evaluation processes is to understand how root causes of disparity play out in research processes and intentionally design to counteract their influences.
We are skilled at applying equity-first design principles to help you build strong objectivity into your data and evaluation processes.