Equity Workshops

ATTENDING TO HEALING WORKSHOP (MARCH, 2023)

LEAD California and Saint Mary’s College of California collaborated with the National Equity Project to bring their Attending to Healing Workshop to the community engagement community. This three-hour interactive and humanizing event is via Zoom.

Attending to our individual healing is essential, and insufficient, if it is not also connected to our collective healing. Explore how to center and integrate ongoing individual and collective healing processes when working, collaborating, and designing for equity.

Healing is the work of coming home to ourselves again and again. Because oppression is persistent, healing must be persistent and on-going. Doing equity works requires continuous healing from the effects of oppression in order to tap into our resilience, access our agency, and express the fullness of our humanity. We believe that healing must be prioritized as we are simultaneously working collaboratively towards transformation and liberation, it can not wait until our systems are redesigned. Attending to our individual healing is essential, and insufficient if it is not also connected to our collective healing. In this workshop we will explore how to center and integrate ongoing individual and collective healing processes when working, collaborating, and designing for equity.

The National Equity Project is a leadership and systems change organization committed to increasing the capacity of people to achieve thriving, self-determining, educated, and just communities. Our mission is to transform the experiences, outcomes, and life options for children and families who have been historically underserved by our institutions and systems.  

INTRODUCTION TO LIBERATORY DESIGN WORKSHOP (OCTOBER, 2022)

LEAD California and Saint Mary’s College of California collaborated with the National Equity Project to bring their Introduction to Liberatory Design Workshop to the community engagement community. This three-hour interactive event was held via zoom and featured the mindsets and modes of Liberatory Design.

WHAT IS LIBERATORY DESIGN?

Liberatory Design is an approach to addressing equity challenges and change efforts in complex systems. It is grounded in an integrated part of NEP’s Leading for Equity Framework, which meshes human-centered design (aka design thinking) with complex systems theory, and deep equity practice. It is a process and practice to:

• Create designs that help interrupt inequity and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression
• Transform power by shifting the relationships between those who hold power to design and those impacted by these designs
• Generate critical learning and increased agency for those involved in the design work

Liberatory Design is both a flexible process that can be used by teams and a set of equity leadership habits that can be practiced daily. It can be used in a variety of ways and by a variety of actors, including innovation efforts, strategic planning, community-driven design, and collaborative teams. At the core of Liberatory Design are a set of beliefs:

• Racism and inequity have been designed into systems and thus can be redesigned;
• Designing for equity requires the meaningful participation of those impacted by inequity; and
• Equity-driven designs require equity and complexity informed processes.

WHY LIBERATORY DESIGN?

We are all living in challenging times that our past experience and training has not sufficiently prepared us for. Too often, well intentioned equity efforts do not succeed—and even produce unintended consequences. This can lead to frustration, hopelessness and cynicism.

It’s important to consider why so many equity efforts stall or fail to achieve intended outcomes:

• They do not employ a deep enough equity lens—for example, a diversity and inclusion focus as opposed to interrogating deeper causes produced by systemic oppression.
• They take the form of traditional linear, hierarchical plans that focus on strategies, goals, timelines, metrics and accountability. These efforts don’t recognize the messiness and complexity of the challenge, so they often are ineffective and, sometimes, even backfire.
• They are created in the context of dominant white culture, in traditional structures (e.g. committees, task forces), or in teams that don’t have an effective approach to the work. Common problems include:
  • group members unable to engage in authentic critical dialogue;
  • lack of trust, especially across role/power and identity difference, that undermines team efficacy;
  • the process doesn’t bring forward sufficiently creative thinking;
  • urgency leads to hasty, misguided decisions;
  • creative and potentially powerful solutions are not accepted by leadership.