Making Anti-Oppression Work Part of the Air We Breathe
I met an interesting woman who told me that the organization she worked with helped government agencies seeking to work better with diversity. This brought to mind the “initiatives”, often headed up by HR or the executive leadership, I’ve seen in some of the places I’ve worked – campaigns with goals, plans, ways to measure progress, etc. And to be truthful, it also brought to mind painful discussions that seemed to “go nowhere”, were perceived by at least some as taking away from the “real” work , and that caused enormous rifts between groups within the organization. It’s hard to do this work well, and I really want to give a shout out to the folks like the woman I met who are doing just that.
At Good Collaborations, what we’ve been finding ourselves more interested in lately goes beyond those campaigns or initiatives, beyond a particular office or lead, to ask of every single thing we do both internally and with our clients – who’s here, who’s not? Who benefits from this way of doing things, who doesn’t? Whose “normal” way of doing things is reflected here, and whose isn’t? What would this look like if someone else was leading the way, building from their lived experience and knowledge, focusing on aspects they’d consider most important?
I’m a pragmatist – for this one concrete thing in front of me that consumes my work hours, how could it look different and with that shift, serve staff, partners, and community members better? For this everyday thing in front of me, this essence of “the work,” this work-related air I swim through every day … how could or should it look different to be more inclusive, more reflective of the wonderfully creative and diverse set of humans in and around my organization or team?
One example - I’ve been a trainer/facilitator for many years, teaching how to become a mediator within the community mediation center model. With the support of good trainers and thought leaders around us, I and others took a look at how we’d been doing that training. The organization I was working with had built our way of doing such trainings on some very talented shoulders, including some of the creators of the state’s first multicultural mediation training manual (more vocabulary to deal with, but it was cutting edge at the time!). And still, when I and others looked more carefully at the training and how it fit into the organization, we began to see all kinds of “little” (and big!) things that could be improved. A few examples:
We rewrote roleplays to address gender and cultural assumptions better. We also added more specific follow-up training to address confusion we were seeing on specific topics like gender/sexual orientation and pronouns.
We worked on accessibility to and format for our training materials, along with when and how we were making them available.
We reviewed all our training activities through the lens of folks who might be differently abled or experiencing significant trauma issues, making several adjustments along the way.
We explored new models for addressing fees, scholarships and payment plans to ensure better access to the training for people who might not have been able to afford to participate otherwise.
We really looked at the pipeline that had created our trainers and coaches, and the obstacles in the way of having more people of color in those roles … and we experimented with new ways to partner with local POC trainers that didn’t require the same formal mediation background.
We went way beyond what the legal mediation training guidelines required to bring anti-oppression principles and cultural questions into our curriculum, throughout the whole training (not just one or two sections).
We looked at trainer/coach patterns of interaction with participants to identify and name the ways our own unconscious bias was playing out in the training room, and started work on some internal codes of conduct and better feedback loops to address questions of calling out/in on training issues.
And over several years, there was a lot more that happened, and not all of it “worked”. And while this was happening in the training “air”, other work was happening on this elsewhere in the organization. We weren’t getting it perfectly (and knew the search for perfection was itself an issue), we knew our work wasn’t done (this is not a world for checkboxes or demographic counts), and we knew that we had to balance celebrations of our little victories with an acknowledgment that we sometimes harmed people and experienced hard emotions related to our way of being in this world.
But we kept on. Nothing big, no ribbon-cutting or ceremonies, just tending to the air we breathe, letting new ways of being emerge, sitting with discomfort, seizing moments of inspiration and curiosity, delighting in the unexpected partners and supporters we found along the way … and continuing to breathe in, breathe out, and ask ourselves, “what now?”