Learning and Development

Racial Equity 101

Recommended starting place for all-staff development. A three-day introductory course for organizations that are eager to commit to racial equity. Through this course, participants will:

• Understand the global nature and nuance of racial inequity.

• Identify patterns in racial dynamics, including in everyday interactions.

• Map racial advantaging and disadvantaging across 4 levels—from internalized to structural.

• Recognize the interplay of racism with sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression.

• Explore the transformative implications of practicing a personal and organizational commitment to racial equity.

• Practice tools to engage in analysis, dialogue, intervention, and repair.

When working with predominantly white organizations, this course is offered either entirely or mostly in three race-alike spaces (Black, nonBlack POC, white), so multiple diverging learning needs can be met.

Disarming Whiteness™

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A six-session intermediate-to-advanced course for participants who are white, raced as white, and/or benefit greatly from white skin privilege. Through this course, participants:

• Identify 3 social armaments that are used to uphold a global pattern of racial inequity that is deeply informed by white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

• Predict when these social armaments will be taken up to protect the racial status quo, and how they will function in organizations—many times in very subtle ways.

• Explore 5 roles whites must play to share the burden of bringing about a more racially equitable future.

• Practice 6 tools to disarm the social armaments of whiteness, destabilize the racially inequitable status quo, and bring about a more just world for all.

DEI Foundations for Leaders

Recommended starting place for leaders. A five-session introductory series that is ideal for leaders who are serious about defining and achieving outcomes related to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. Through this course, participants will:

• Understand the terms diversity, equity, and inclusiveness, what they look like in practice, and how to measure them.

• Explore the relationship between external outcomes (e.g. products, services, and solutions) and internal DEI outcomes (e.g. workplace health, conditions, and personnel outcomes).

• Deepen our understanding of the problem, including the historical and systemic nature of race/gender/class+ inequity.

• Identify 4 common DEI goals, and 5 roles commonly asked of managers and leaders in DEI transformation work.

• Practice 3 tools and 1 skill to see, state, and stop race/gender patterns in the workplace that play out on the interpersonal level.

• Dig deeper into internalized and institutional sources of inequity, and practice additional tools and skills to see, state, and stop race/gender patterns in the workplace.

Skills for Change: DEI for Change Agents

A six-session advanced series that is ideal for leaders, DEI change agents, and change teams who are serious about taking accountability for identifying organizational practices, processes, policies, and norms that produce the current inequitable and suboptimal outcomes, and transforming these organizational artifacts to unlock more equitable outcomes for all. Through this course, participants will:

• Uncover the common reasons why DEI plans fail, and explore 5 skills for change.

• Map vulnerabilities to advantage, disadvantage, and bias in your organization.

• Explore, practice, and critique a theory of change for DEI organizational transformation, and identify critical points for intervention to stop and prevent harm.

• Reveal what operates beneath the surface of the events you wish to change. Rewrite current organizational scripts and assumptions, to unlock your DEI goals.

• Build a measurable results-based plan to meet DEI aspirations by deploying 3 critical questions.

• Predict, prevent, and mitigate three common forms of organizational resistance to DEI transformation and change.

Managing Equitably

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Recommended starting place for managers. A two-session course where managers:

• Define the conditions all employees deserve

• Explore the responsibilities of all managers in ensuring a great workplace for all

• Trade in management practices that fail when managing across lines of race, gender, or both, for new manager practices that work better for all

Managers who attend this foundational course learn core concepts, build their racial analysis of situations, map conditions on their own team, and practice new ways of managing through live coaching and support.

Equitable Performance Management

Any performance management process is vulnerable to at least 6 common race/gender+ biases. In this session, managers, leaders, and HR professionals learn to recognize, prevent, and mitigate these biases, and practice a more inclusive and equitable performance management process.

Fair and Inclusive Feedback

Understand and mitigate 3 ways feedback (individual and program feedback) can unintentionally function as a tool of dominance in a feedback-friendly culture. Leave with individual and group tools and norms to practice effective, fair, and inclusive feedback.

Managing Remote and Virtual Teams

Explore the immediacy continuum, and what level of immediacy is required for each type of group task. Develop guidelines for when to use text, email, in-person, live-virtual, and shared work tools. Uncover tactics to ensure relationships, connection, alignment, productivity, and reliability across distances and timezones.

Building Bias-Immunity into Hiring

Understand 3 ways organizations practice fairness that predict the opposite, map 3 race/gender+ biases across 5 points in the selection process. Leave with individual and group tools and norms to prevent and mitigate race/gender+ bias in selection and hiring.

Balancing Social Power in Groups

Explore 4 patterns of dominance that commonly emerge in groups, and practice facilitation moves to rebalance power and restore an equitable, inclusive, and productive group space.

Building Interracial Dialogue

Practice dialogic tools to build understanding, healing, and growth across lines of race and other lines of difference. Participants let go of debate and discussion in favor of radical listening, validation, accountability, repair, and coalition-building.

Precise Language

 Learn what to say/not say when it comes to talking about race/gender+ in the workplace, and begin to develop a power analysis of language and narrative. Deploy 6 precise language guiding principles. Practice crafting language that is accurate, empowering, and inclusive.

Age and Ageing In the Workplace

Learn 3 ways ageism can hide in seemingly mundane language and practices in organizations, practice spotting language that is suspect, and commit to at least one action item that can improve relationships, fairness, and inclusiveness across lines of age.

Liberatory Narratives

Learn guiding principles to ensure data, narratives, and marketing materials are truthful, liberating, and relevant to all. Build analysis and skill to identify and counter dominant narratives including deficit narratives with more truthful, nuanced, self-authored stories.

Navigating Resistance to Equity Change Efforts

Most DEI organizational change efforts fail, overcome by general change resistance and unique forms of resistance and inertia that emerge when race/gender equity is part of our change goal. The good news is, resistance to DEI organizational change efforts is highly predictable, and there are actions we can take to anticipate it, prevent it, mitigate its impact, and keep change efforts on track. In this two-session series, participants will practice anticipating and analyzing resistance, and leave with a map and plan to prevent and mitigate resistance in their own organization.

Facilitative Leadership for Justice

In this three-day course, participants build knowledge, awareness, and skills to facilitate group learning, dialogue, and action. Participants enroll as an interracial pair (e.g. white, person of color), and work together to identify common group dynamics, identify ‘the work of the group’, expanding your toolbox of facilitator moves, address avoidance and resistance, and work in interracial co-leadership to balance power and get work done in groups.

Interrogating and Balancing Power

Develop a power analysis at the personal, group, institutional, and structural level; identify 3 ways power distance can have unintended consequences, and identify practices to balance power. Explore three ways that society confers power over others, and analyze how power over functions in your organization. Imagine and bring about ways of balancing power.

Building Immunity to Bias

While it is impossible for humans to be bias-free, we can build frames and practices that can prevent and mitigate bias. In this session, participants will learn how to identify and interrupt social biases in the organization or workplace.

Breaking Free From Group Dramas

Explore internalized social scripts (that serve to maintain imbalances in power and inequitable outcomes), how we play them out when working and relating across lines of difference, and what triggers the drama into formation. Identify positive and negative sanctions that maintain these scripts, and the benefits of writing new scripts in partnerships, teams, and organizations. Practice cleaving from predictable social scripts and writing new ones.

Decentering Dominant Culture

 Identify common artifacts of Dominant Culture and map how they typically function to uphold existing imbalances in power across lines of race and other lines of difference. Explore a framework for valuing multiple ways of being and doing. Leave with at least 5 tactics to destabilize power over others that is conferred through centering dominant cultural norms.

Allyship Fundamentals

Define allyship, assess yourself on 6 aspects of allyship, and develop an action plan to improve.

Allyship and Affinity

Examine case studies of individuals and groups throughout history who have worked for equity and justice through a keen awareness of their own positionality, power, and proximity to the struggle.

Race Caucusing

Launch race affinity spaces to examine predictable race dynamics through 5 lenses, and develop muscle to demonstrate antiracism in your practice, including through: coalition-building, interracial co-leadership, initiating healing and repair.