 Oh, we would like to thank the organizations who helped make our work possible and give us funding to bring an amazing guest like our main partner, our sponsors, Bank of America, the Bar Foundation. The Arts Boston team actually saw a version of the presentation you were about to see at APASA, the Association for Performing Arts Service Organizations in Austin, Texas in May. This keynote presentation is something that we've been mulling over and talking about our office pretty much every day since. Over the last two years, Arts Boston's program workshops that illuminate the importance of equity, diversity and inclusion in arts and culture. From Carmen Morgan and the art equity teams in terms of trainings to our hiring and retaining a diverse workforce panel last month, my colleagues and I have tried to provide insight and resources to those looking to include traditionally marginalized voices in the story and future of their organization. Many of our members at Arts Boston have rigorously engaged in this investigation of themselves over the last few years and Arts Boston has been alongside you in that. As a staff, we continue to have the difficult conversations about power, privilege, implicit bias, white supremacy and our role in all of the above. But I know some of you are also thinking, yeah, absolutely, we have done that. The soul searching has been excellent, but what's next? Using Practical Atlas as a case study, my hope today is that you take back practical tools and tactics to your organization which are values and interaction on a day-to-day operational basis. The work Practical Atlas has done is to dismantle power structures and promote justice in their workplace is nothing short of inspiring, but I'd like for them to tell you more about that. So without further ado, we are Courtney Hart and Lauren Ruffin to tell a story of Practical Atlas. Welcome everybody, I'm Courtney. I'm super excited to have this conversation with you all. Hi. I clearly am somebody who likes to talk, which is one of the reasons why Lauren said she likes to present with me. She used to be here. I like to take up some space about this, but I want to be clear that we are really open to having this as a conversation. So we're going to present what we're doing, we're going to talk a little about why we're doing it, but we're hoping that the majority of our conversation today is really kind of brainstorming with you and talking about your ideas, hearing your concerns and feedback. So just to give you an idea of what's happening, we hope that you are present and available and ready to go on this journey with us. So I do this super high-tech thing while Courtney is talking where I have to sit here and advance the slides. That's why we're here. It works for us. We are a dynamic duo. It's fantastic. So this is just a brief kind of roadmap of what we're going to do today. I like to be able to orient where we are and as we travel. So ultimately, who we are, who are we in the organization, who are we individually, and what do we do? What can you do? What do you want to do? That's super simple. Just to give the overview, for those who aren't familiar, Fractured Atlas is a national arts service organization. We serve artists everywhere of all disciplines and of all sizes of organizations. We have four major programs. They are fiscal sponsorship, which is our fundraising tool, insurance, which is a tool to help manager, person, your property, your practice. Artfully, which is ticketing and customer relationship management. And SpaceFinder, which connects venues with artists and vice versa. This is a brief overview of our number. So we currently have over 70,000 members. Fistly sponsoring for 100 active projects. We've helped them raise over $152 million, which is exciting for us. We're talking to Tim, our COO, and he was like, when did we hit 150? We actually got past 150 million before we could notice, which was exciting for us. We found over 17,000 insurance policies and serve a network of over 1.3 million artists. That's you. That is me. Thank you. One of the ways I like to start is to talk about my own journey into Fractured Atlas as an organization. I specifically had to talk about my first day, more specifically our first two days, my first two days. My second day, one when I joined Fractured Atlas three years ago. I was one of four people of color in the entire organization. And my second day, we had a staff meeting that we used to have monthly staff meetings. And we had our, a section of the staff meeting was Ask the EDE, which was actually just one of my favorite things. It was something, it was a moment of transparency where in the all staff meeting, you could just publicly ask the executive director at the time, Adam Huddler, what anything you needed to ask him. We had a colleague who occasionally would ask him, what's your favorite breakfast cereal? But it was a moment of transparency and action that I really enjoyed. And so it was my second day, so I was like, well, I just got here, so if I can get fired, let's do this today. And the question I asked was, you know, you've said that you want to be an anti-racist organization. I said, but what does that actually mean and what do you actually do? And I offer the power structure in that, again, I'm literally the newest person on staff at that point, asking our white male executive director in front of everyone, what does this mean? And for me, the stakes on that question were very much like, how do you answer this question that really determines if I'm coming back tomorrow? I don't know if you knew that at the time, but it was important for me. If you can't answer this in this space, then you may not be the right thing. And he gave me an actor which I loved, which was, I don't know, and I don't think we're good enough, basically. And being willing to say that in that space, and to be accountable to that when I asked the question again like three months later, like what did we do now? And then it became a moment where he's told me once that he continued to work through those things, partially because he knew I would continue to ask the question. And it was beautiful to me that he was always willing to engage in the question, that show that I was in a space that was willing to tackle the things. Because part of the journey of this work is being willing to do it, because it will never be done. We will never succeed. It's not going to be finished, because there are so many things to undo. But somebody who is willing to be accountable and open and take the steps to at least engage with the work is the environment. So if nothing else, that is the step everybody has to make. Not make the right answer, but you need to make some decisions. That's me. So I came to Fraction Atlas after primarily spending my career in D.C. doing homeless services work. I'm doing the right stuff, lobbying and advocacy. And I hadn't realized until my second day at Fraction Atlas that I had never worked with white people before. I've always been in predominant organizations, very large organizations that were led by people of color. And I just had never occurred to me. And I had a similarly sort of really earnest experience with Adam. The second day I was in the office was the day that Alton Sterling and Flando Castile were murdered by police. And while I'm not religious, I was always in environments where when something would happen, we would all take a moment as an entire organization. You know, I worked on an organization where we had a large campus and there were kids in homeless families. We would all go out and stand and hold hands around the entire campus and someone would say a prayer and we'd just take a moment of silence. And it was very weird being in an environment where no one acknowledged anything that happened. Everyone was obviously sad, but there was no opportunity for it in space for healing or for just talking or just to sit in silence. So over the two years I've been at Fraction Atlas. I think one of the things that we've gotten a lot better about was just having these conversations out in the open. And about the sort of trauma that we all experience in our country as an effect of racism. And having a space where folks can bring their entire selves to work. And we'll get sort of more through that, but I'm excited to be here today and to talk with you all. So that is who Fraction Atlas is, that is who we are. We're going to keep going, but it's important to talk about like, I know I won't speak for Lauren, but I can connect on this. Getting to be who we are at work was important to us because we are awesome. And we should get to bring all of that awesome to work and making sure that environment supports that. It's valuable to us personally, but also like, we'll talk about some of the ways in which a mercenary way is valuable to the organization. If you want me working for you, you want all of me working for you, you want me in my best capacity. And that is true, I believe for everyone. This takes us to like one of the defining concepts of how we talk about this. And it's the different types of organization. There are a variety of scales, there are a variety of types of organization. But one of the things we really focus on is this journey from being a shared employer organization to a shared purpose organization. So a shared employer organization is one where you go to work, you get your check. This is the only thing we have in common is you go to work, right? I used to work retail jobs a lot and it was like, we show up here to do a thing and we go home. That is, that is what we do. And on our job, literally here, is to just have the job, right? And that is a shared employer environment, right? And there's nothing necessarily negative about that, but it's worth acknowledging that that's a type of space. The next is a shared identity organization. And this is, I will say, mistakenly the type of organization most people think they want. And the shared identity organization is the organization where we're all friends and we all like, we get to maybe drink after work and we really enjoy being in this place because we are all the same. We are, in some ways we are also all in this together. It can be positive, but believe it or not, it's also extremely alienating if you are not in that shared identity. And you can all be the same, quote, unquote, but what are you doing that for, right? I say there have been plenty of places where just as a black woman I knew I was not in the shared identity. But I did a lot to pretend to be in the shared identity. I have a friend who talks about how much she actually hates work parties because they're like, they're still work, right? They're still like, I'm going to work and I'm still kind of, I have to in some ways perform my work identity because this socialization in this space is about me fitting in. And it's an additional burden for anybody who feels marginalized or anybody who doesn't feel that they can address what the shared identity is. Frequently shared identity organizations don't outgently say what that identity is. You just know this is where we get in the conversations about workplace culture, where we get into like, is this person the right fit? We get to a lot of coded language about who fits where. And so shared identity is one of those things that can look more positive than it actually is on a service. And lastly, it's a shared purpose organization. It's, what do we do? What are we here to accomplish? How do we make the impact? Ultimately, particularly working in the arts, our goal is to create joy for the rest of the world in a variety of ways. We are trying to make something magical happen. And if we focus on just being shared identity, we forget that actually our goal is to set the positivity out in the world. Our goal is to impact change somewhere. And if you're focused on what you're doing, on what your purpose is, on your true kind of goal, you can more readily appreciate a multitude of voices to get you there. You get less trapped in like, well, we don't do that and more about, well, why don't we do that? Or why can't we do that? Or why haven't we done that? Because it could lead to your accomplishing our purpose. If you don't know where you're going, we'll have a hard time knowing if and when you get there. That's another reason for having purpose. A lot of times we work on our missions and we're just doing things because we've always done them. But are we assessing are they working? Are they what we want them to do? This work is not theoretical. It's lived experience, right? We get very much into sometimes even with a shared purpose, get into this idea of like, this is what we're doing or we get into equity, diversity and inclusion work because we know intellectually it's the right thing to do. We know that we are like, it's time and it's timely and it's something that's important. But this is the lived experience of many people you're working with. It's why often I like to start this with how we came into an organization because we are people who walked in with experience and identity and how we live in the world impacted how we worked in that space. So equity, diversity and inclusion work isn't just an initiative. It isn't just like a plan or something that you know it's something you should get around to. It is in fact the lived experience of people in your organization if it's not yours. So your core values, your organization has them even if they don't, even if you don't know what they are. One of the things Lauren and I talked about before, one of our core values at Crackford Atlas is that we generally don't do early meetings. We're just, we're there. Everybody's working early, but we don't really schedule a meeting before 11. Yeah, that was a big cultural shift for me. Okay, when we do our stand-up they're like, 10.30, I was like 10.30, I've been up for six hours. How are y'all doing? That's not the beginning of my day. We were like, no, it's 11 o'clock. That's when you're going to get it. You're going to get some solid 11 to 3 meeting time. But it's nothing that's not officially our value. It's nothing that's on any of our paperwork, but it just becomes part of the way we work. It's an organizational value and we adjust. So you kind of start at the middle of the day and work your way out, but it's just how it happens and your values tend to be the behaviors that you reward or acknowledge. And so you can say you value transparency, but if you have a whole bunch of closed meetings, then you don't. Or if you say you value new ideas, but people tend to be punished for having new ideas by either getting no support or no backup or no ability to implement, then you don't. And like, I think that one, you might want to say that again. That's what you value, you reward. And so I've been in places where it's like we value integrity, but tend to reward backfiting. Right? Like we say this is what we do, but what do you actually do? And it's worth knowing. These are fractionalist values that we, these are our public values, right? That we embrace challenge, we make it happen, we see continuous improvement and be excellent to each other. We try to be excellent to each other. And I think it's funny, I think the way for our values is that we joke about our values in a way that is fun. And that like, frequently like if something breaks in the office, we're like, alright, be excellent, right? Like it'll show up. But I say that to say that we do value being excellent to each other around like, how can we take care of each other in the space? But the fact that we can joke about our values means we are actually constantly in conversation about our values. We recognize that your values are things you do, things you live. And so we can't say we have these without actually engaging with them. This is from Netflix's infamous PowerPoint presentation, but to talk about how values can creep up. So many companies have nice sounding value statements displayed in their lives such as integrity, communication, respect. Can you guess where these values came from? Nope, okay, we'll just go forward. These are in wrong values. These were displayed in their lobby. And so it just shows that again, the things that you say you do can be very different from the things you actually do, from the behavior you reward and from the system you have in place to support. So what do you all think these numbers represent? 15%, 85%. Alright, I'll give you a general hint. One of them is the number of people who are currently engaged in your organization, or the percentage of people who are currently engaged in your organization. Which one do you think? Alright, who thinks it's 85% of people who are engaged? Raise your hand. Thanks, John. I'm not sure I remember that. Alright, so 15%, 15% of the number of people in your organization who are actively engaged in your work. Most nonprofits have staffs of 10 or less, so that means one and a half people are currently engaged in your organization. Chances are your organization is less than 10 people and one and a half people are currently engaged. Yes, you. You're here. Which means that 85% of the people, everybody currently at the office right now, it's not as engaged as you are. I'm so sorry. The rest are, the yellow are disengaged, which in this case are neutral, but it is easier to turn a neutral negative into a positive. So the yellow are neutral and then there's two and a half who are actively disengaged. They are working against the thing that you were working for. Right? This number is, this is the number of people in your organization who are currently looking for a new job. 51%, there are more people at your job looking for new jobs than there are looking to stay. These are numbers from Gallup Poll. You can definitely talk about them, but this is, we put these numbers in to make the, I'm very big on the moral argument for equity first inclusion. It's the right thing to do, so we should do it, period. Black Lives Matter, but as they do, the end. However, it's helpful to know that it is also in fact the organizationally sound argument, because if half of the people in your organization are looking to leave anyway, how do you take care of them so that they stay? Something that Tim Arceo likes to put in as a comic that says, what if we invest in people and they leave? And then the other says, but what if we don't and they stay? And that is kind of what you're dealing with. You're dealing with this idea of the people who work for you are people, and they have needs and identities and support that is necessary for them to be good people and for them to support the work of your organization. And the numbers show that people don't necessarily tell you that they are unhappy. They leave. Sometimes they do. The person who tells you, I want to work with you on this, is engaged with you, who says I want to help. Most people will just show up, those yellow people in particular, they'll show up, do the bare minimum they need to do to get to the place that they actually will feel taken care of. So if somebody is coming to you saying that this is something they want to work on, they care, which might mean that if you're one person who cares, they may be that other half person who cares. And that is important to think about. Ultimately, work shouldn't suck. I don't think that that's that complicated. We spend a lot of time at work, and we may even spend more time working than we do at work. We invest a lot of ourselves into it, so the idea that work should suck, that part of it is just what we do, is something that I don't really accept anymore, because we can be doing good. We can be doing wonderful things and taking care of ourselves at the same time. We are just as valuable as the people we're supposed to serve. So the idea that work has to suck to be effective, actually for me means that you don't know how to execute your mission. Because if you don't know how to do the work you do, without burning through the people who do it, then you don't actually know how to do the work you do. Also, misperception is perception. Frequently, the pushback around this thing is not my organization. People love where I work. People love what we do. Nobody has any of these types of issues. 51% of the people in my organization are not looking for another job. I know that. Okay. But again, people aren't going to tell you they are unhappy. And you may not think you have an equity or diversity problem. You may not think that there is racism or sexism or transphobia or homophobia present in your organization. The math shows that there is somebody experiencing that. And if there is one person experiencing it, that perception, that misperception, is perception. That is real. You not seeing it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. So knowing that, like, you can say our organization isn't racist. But if somebody is like, yeah, except for these people, said these racist things to me, that is that their quote-unquote misperception is real and valid and is the perception. I also offered, in case you haven't figured out, I clearly have an agenda around this, but the question is not really the cost of doing business. It just isn't. We tend to support the status quo because it's a status quo. Like, that's it. That's what it does. And we tend to accept that, well, we just kind of have to be oppressive. It's just how we do things. It's just what happens in changing it is so impossible that we don't know how to do it. And especially if we don't know how to do it right, if we don't do it the way that fixes it, then we don't really do it at all. I always like to say that, you know, people have this misperception that the progress or that anti-racism is a train moving forward. We just get the train to get to all the places, right? We will have arrived somehow. And my metaphor, the metaphor I prefer, is that racism, oppression is the train. That is the train. And all we can do is throw everything in front of it to stop it. But if we do nothing, it will keep going, right? And so your job is to throw, you can throw a building at it, that's fine. But throw sticks, throw stones, throw whatever to stop oppression. Any little thing can be helpful. But accepting that oppression is just the cost of doing business and that the train is just going to go regardless of what we throw at it is allowing oppression, racism, every type of negativity to continue to prosper. We talked about why this worked, right? It gave you the business case, it gave you the emotional case. Why this fractured out? Let's do this. Why us? And the simple answer is because we did some stuff. The end. We did some things that had impact. I want to be very clear. I'm saying that these are the things you have to do. These are not even the things that we wouldn't necessarily do again now, right? It's based on where we were, based on the resources we had. We made some things, made some decisions, impacted some change and are continuing to commit to iterate and make more things happen. That's what I'm saying. Embrace challenge, make it happen. Those are two of our math pieces. We made changes that had impact. Ultimately, that's the beginning and end of the story. We're going to keep talking, though. I like it a bit. I said that. Good. But this is just to say some of the things that we did from 2012 to 2017. So we went from zero percent leadership and personal quality leadership to 50 percent. Lauren's going to talk. We're going to talk a little bit about our shared leadership structure and how that changed. But we went from a staff that was 10 percent people of color to 40 percent people of color. We went from 5 percent to 35 percent fully remote staff and from zero to 60 percent women software engineers. So stuff can change, right? We can have impact. Frequently, another kind of pushback conversation is that we won't be able to make change quickly enough, right? And five years in an organization is fairly quick, especially to make changes like this. And so you're going to be forever iterating again. If you're throwing anything at the train, it's valuable. So knowing that, make little changes. So we're going to go into what did we do. This is definitely where we can talk some more about specific initiatives. So I'm happy to hear feedback, happy to hear thoughts. But we're going to go through what we did. So the first thing we did was we created a staff baseline. And by then, we created a staff baseline for information, for understanding racism, anti-oppression, how we're going to work through it. Go to the timeline. So this is about three to five years of work in that. It started with two people on staff going to our people, the People Institute Training for Anti-Racism and Beyond. And then we had a task force of staff who was focused on diversity as an issue and just getting better understanding of how we could fit. Then our entire leadership team at the time went through the People Institute Training in different locations. They all went based on where they lived because there was a variety of people who were also remote. Then we had all staff trainings with White Hang Hong, an independent consultant around that, where we closed the office for three days over a year to really talk and work through these issues. And then we had additional all staff training for two days with a character court and the equity quotient team. So we made it a point to invest in these conversations by closing the organization and focus on having this internal work. We made it a part of how we talk about everything in a variety of ways. But we really wanted to make sure that we weren't just throwing information at people. We gave a variety of ways to engage. It also is part of our intake, our core curriculum. So when new people are trained, they go through our history. We can't take them back in time to the staff trainings, but we can provide. These are the takeaways. These are the resources we've brought. These are the ways in which you can engage. And this is also the way we're going to continue this training in a different way. But we make sure people are starting with a base of knowledge and conversation. We altered our hiring practices in a variety of ways. Go to the list. So one, we anonymized hiring, right? There's a service I believe we use that can help remove names and addresses and information before you're looking at resumes and coverage. We also removed our education requirements. We got rid of the requirement for a bachelor's degree because a bachelor's degree is a proxy for a set of skills you want, right? What we had to do was get better at assessing the skills you wanted because there are ways in which just, you know, getting a bachelor's is its own barrier. But there are many ways to gather the skills we need that aren't a bachelor's degree or a degree from a particular type. And so we had to focus on, as opposed to just using like this degree and equal this amount of skills, we had to really create new ways to assess what are the skills we actually need. Structured interviews, which means that we ask every candidate for a position in the same questions in the same order so that we aren't just rewarding people who are great storytellers, which, you know, is something I've benefited from once and for all. But we aren't just rewarding people who are great storytellers. We, again, are assessing skills, right? If storytelling is the skill, then sure, we can do something about that. But frequently interviews are biased toward people who can talk about what they do more so than do the thing they do. And there are ways in which structured interviews can balance that a bit. Can say, well, how do we, if we know we are asking these questions in this order, how can we compare apples to apples? It also minimizes the bias, the kind of interviewer bias because how many people have been in an interview that went well because you connected with the person who was interviewing you, right? We got a conversation, we just, you know, in some ways forgot about the questions. We were like, we were just riffing, right? But what that tends to reward are people who are similar to the interviewer, right? It tends to pull in people like you and that creates more shared identity space than shared purpose space. We train more staff to hire an interview, right? So also to minimize that more people are involved in the process. And we share all of our area of initiatives up front. Like we have community guidelines, which I'll talk a little bit more about. There are a lot of ways in which we were very upfront about this is a part of how we operate. Do you engage? And more and more people are coming to us saying, I heard this is how you operate and are prepared to have this conversation. And to be specific, we've actually added questions to our new process about folks' commitment, understanding of anti-racist and anti-oppression, which is really telling. It's a million interesting answers. You developed a shared leadership structure of which to learn our opinions apart. So I will let her talk about it. So we no longer, Adam Hotler, our founder and CEO, left earlier this year. And rather than hire a new CEO, there are four of us now on a shared leadership team, which really allows for diversity of opinions. We are four very different people. But we are now on a shared decision-making process with each other. And we spent a lot of time building team that way. But having four different opinions, four different perspectives, actually makes us so much stronger. And we would be if we had just had a CEO. And it's really been a great way for, I think, information to bubble up from various parts of the organization. Just by virtue of the fact that there is no sort of one-stop shop at the top. And that's been really inspirational, I think, for how we operate. And I think for how our junior staff members see the organization and feel like they're able to access just the information that we have and figuring out how do you work collaboratively to come towards some really big decisions for the organization. I will also say it's really helpful to watch our leadership team engage in conflict. In a way, it's very positive. But things are definitely presented as this is what we've come to. But it's never like, well, we unanimously decided that this is the thing and we're not going to tell you what the domain was to get there. It can be like, all right, I was for this. He was for this more. She was undecided. And this is how we got here. This is how we want to implement it. But it has been helpful to watch the model healthy conflict where everybody can be present and say, this is where I think this will work and this is where I think it won't. And then watch that, watch things progress. Yeah, and I would also say, so we have the helmet up there. We said a lot of time thinking about the military and how your current structure of having a CEO at the top is derived from folks who were managing, you know, 5,000 troops at a time. Most nonprofits don't actually need that. You're not managing that. Many people are really complicated processes like that. So why do we hold on to this notion of one person at the top? And it's really about white supremacy and control. So we really began to unpack that. And we make decisions really quickly. And because we like each other and trust each other so much, I know Tim's watching. Hi, Tim. But we, like, you can have people who are polar opposites in terms of both style, function, and understanding. But we're able to just sort of directly say, is that really what you think? Is that really what you like, how you feel? And it's like, yes or no. And I say, OK, cool. Well, we're rolling with it because I trust you. So it's a really interesting model that I think more nonprofits should think about. And of course, you know, in the arts sector, there are plenty of sort of co-directors, artistic director, managing director models, which is a shared leadership model I think folks don't think about. And in the educational sector, you know, you have co-principals, one person managing academics and another person sort of managing operations at school. So, but it really works for us. I'll also offer the leadership team, they have a weekly tactical, the notes from that tactical. Are they still transparent? I think so. But they used to email the notes from that tactical to the entire staff. So while they could have, you know, leadership conversations that require confidentiality and were there, like, the notes from it. And we could ask, we could say, this is what did this thing mean? What are you all talking about? I mean, it was a way to balance their needing to make conversations, have conversations that, you know, didn't necessarily involve local staff, but the staff also being able to at least see, like, what was on the docket? What was being talked about? What's up? What is on their radar and how can we engage with them? Crafting community guidelines. What we did was said, this is what we believe in. If you go to the word cloud, this is a word cloud of our community guidelines. You can find them on our website. But this is to show that we really are talking about oppression. We're talking about the individual. We're talking about treatment. Like this is a highlight for us what we are emphasizing, what we are talking about. And by making this on our membership sign up, you need this before you can apply for fiscal sponsorship. You have to acknowledge and read these things to be in community with us. And the partner of this is we also have a committee that reviews people who may be violating our guidelines, which has been an interesting turn for us. But there have been projects that we feel have been operating in ways that are hurtful or harmful or irresponsible. And we have a report form where staff or committee members, anybody can actually access the form to file a complaint and say, this is how I think this project is being harmful or oppressive. We have a review process that is also transparent. At the very least, it is transparent internally. All of our, we have a full process that our whole staff is aware of. But the idea is, I'm a believer in the idea of good fences build good neighbors in the sense that we need to show people how to treat you, right? And we can't say that we are anti-heresis and anti-oppressive if we are continuing to support and resource work that is such. And if we aren't giving people the opportunity to call out, having been harmed. Can you talk about who's on that committee? Sure. Well, we make it a point to, it is staff from all levels of the organization. At any given point, it's between, I think it's five to seven, but we want it to people represent each sector of the committee. There is a guaranteed leadership team member on the committee. But part of the reason why we don't specifically name who was on the committee is so that, one, the organization itself does take responsibility for the calls of the committee. That's why we have a transparent process so everybody knows how we got to where we got to. With that, people who serve on the committee aren't in any way singled out for harm or retaliation based on a negative response or reaction. But yeah, we may get appointed, but everybody has the opportunity to serve. And it is definitely a mix of everyone from the organization in a variety of capacities. This is one of my personal favorites, not just because I manage one of the caucuses, but we provided race-based caucusing. So we have monthly meetings of people of color and white people separately in their own space to work out whatever they may need to work out. They are equally resourced in that if one caucus is given funds to do a thing, the other caucus is also provided those funds, but not necessarily to do the same thing because people of color need different things than people in this space. White people need the space with other white people to do the work around whiteness that is necessary. People of color need to do space to be free from whiteness to navigate just being people of color. The more work I manage, clearly, the person of color caucus. And I like to say my favorite thing is the more work I see the white caucus doing, the less work the POC caucus needs to be doing. It is a space for us to be protected, taken care of and cared for. There are four agenda items on the POC caucus list and they are check-in, activity, we may have if we have like a guest, if we want a guest and then the last one that is frequently the first item to be removed is questions or responses from the white caucus. Because we need that space to be a POC-based space. And yes, prioritizing really equity over fairness. So the white caucus paid a facilitator to help navigate to provide resources, to provide work like they had homework. It was a very active space. We, and the POC caucus did not need that facilitator. But the amount of money that was paid to the facilitator was also allocated to the POC caucus. The other option, not the kind of guideline around that is that the white caucus has to report to the POC caucus. So whatever they do, monthly they have to come back. We have a liaison who tells me and then the other caucus members what is happening. Their notes that are sent to us, they are anonymized so we don't have to attach anything to a particular person. What they worked on goes to the POC caucus. The POC caucus can share what they want with the white caucus, but do not have to. And again, this is about in some ways correcting other imbalances, but also recognizing that the work of racism specifically requires white people to do work with other white people. And it requires healthcare for people of color and what can be hospital spaces. This is often where people have questions or pushback. I might have lost some of you, so I'm open for it. Yes. In the caucus saying do you create the difference between whites and people of color based on how they identify or how they are identified? That was a very good question. Did everybody hear it? Okay, so the question was do we create affiliations in the caucus based on how the person identifies or how they are extraordinarily identified by the organization? That was a great question. It is how the person identifies. The way we do it is we present what caucusing is and its purpose for in our core curriculum, in our orientation, our training, and we just issue invitations. They are voluntary. So we issue invitations and just say if you would like to join the white caucus this is who you can speak with. If you would like to join the personal color caucus this is who you can speak with. We have been known to reissue invitations just to say the space may be of value to you but it is always about how people wish to participate. We have had people multivariable people join caucuses based on where they were. It's always fun. People are like ethnic and ambiguous. We are all like which way is it going? It's like yeah, POC caucus! She always so excited. It's always just welcome. It's so fun to see somebody is like drafting for college fall. Yeah, where are you going? But it is one more and more people are excited to be a part of either space there is definitely different social impact but I will say as a person of color it is beautiful to know that the white people have a place to work on this stuff. It is I cannot stress enough how glorious it is because the conversations we have been able to have as a result are amazing because they have done the work. They are coming to me or any other person of color asking for labor. Now it is a conversation. You are asking me to do work for you. You have done the work. Now you want to talk about what does this mean? How do we implement this? And that is glorious. Can you say asking me to do the work? Can you give us an example? I have given specific examples but a common conversation as a woman of color is where somebody presents to you how do you feel about Barack Obama as a question? Is actually a question that requires work because often times when a white person is asking that question particularly unprompted there is a lot of nowhere the implications behind that question are one you have to justify whatever position you have on this person you don't even necessarily know why there is a feeling that they have been having a conversation with you that you haven't been in so now you also have to catch up that's labor I thought there is coffee I don't understand how we got here and then if you may say something that they disagree with there is a concept white fragility where all of a sudden now you are an oppressor so you spend time trying not to be the aggressor for a conversation that you did not start that is labor that is labor because this one question has prompted a series of thoughts and work and deciphering that you have to do I don't want to speak for anybody but that is a way that has happened for me now the conversation is not just this big open question that requires you to defend the thing that you didn't even know you had to defend now it's an actual conversation about an issue or it's a conversation with you as an equal where it's like I saw this thing and I had these feelings can we talk about did I miss something can we have an I would like a better understanding I now understand that this may have not been an okay interaction that we had can we talk about it which again invites somebody in as opposed to making them do the work to deal with whatever feelings you have is that more clear yes so how do you assure that sense of vulnerability or allow for that sense of vulnerability in these caucuses because I imagine people sculpting their titles and sculpting and I can see how it can be more effective in a flat organization but in a hierarchical organization how are these caucuses set up so that an individual would feel comfortable to disagree with saying senior leadership part of it is the way in which conflict permeates our organization being able to have healthy that's why I said watching the leadership team engage in healthy conflict is a great way for all of us to engage in healthy conflict you know I was going to say I think it starts well before you enter a caucus room I always feel like in POC caucus I'm very clear about like I am taking my leadership hat off and I'm just a tire black woman right here you know like it's not there however if you have questions that relate to leadership I can say I'll put my leadership back on and I can provide clarity, explanation whatever and of course confidentiality abounds in these spaces but I don't think we've had I can't speak for the white caucus I haven't heard anything with regard to sort of titles but we're not a super hierarchical organization and I do think we model that on the leadership team we want people's opinions and perspectives and we don't want anyone to feel like they're going to be penalized for having a thought that's not what it's about and there have also been moments where leadership has through schedules whatever the leadership team isn't always present at every caucus so sometimes if there are spaces where and the great thing is also there are people of color and white people at every level of the organization so information can travel but it always travels with respect and confidentiality is important we're very big on like what's learned here leaves here but what's said here stays here so we've had some really great lessons but it's never like so-and-so said this and yes leadership team, Lauren and Pauli our CPO are very good at kind of identifying at least changing like what hats they're wearing or what the context is around it Pauli and I try to make sure one of us is there mostly because questions come up that are salary questions or what's the sort of direction of the organization so it's important for one of us to be there just to answer those clarifying questions but I've always felt like folks were very open about bitching if there's something happening and that's cool, that's what the space is for and the check-in is for the POC caucus the check-in can be the whole caucus when you bring your feeling, whatever you're talking about so sometimes we just go around the room, it's like alright we all dealt with that and then we're done for the day and one of my kind of greatest moments when I felt like it was just really working when people started really asking like when is the caucus, when do I get to go there when do we get to be in the space again because it shows that it's necessary and sometimes it feels like we're just hanging around and having a good time but that's the point that is both the way it feels and the point to be a space where you can just be and we also joke that we do have the unofficial POC caucus and that's the hour where the white people are having their white caucus and all of a sudden they disappear it's just kind of fascinating we're like oh wait, we are here in the unofficial caucus I think we we had a couple of other questions yeah I'm curious how big is your staff and I'm getting the drift that participation is voluntary in these caucuses is that correct and if so have you seen like have you seen like rough percent I'm just curious like what percentage of staff is participating and has that grown over time and do people have to go like do people come in and out just depending upon their schedules or is it really like if you're participating in the caucus you're making those monthly meetings and they're prioritized as such so our staff is roughly 35 folks from all over the country this is like a question that gets really sticky because the caucuses are very different purposes and we all have schedules you know but you do find white people avoiding the white caucuses they don't want to do the work I mean that's just fundamentally you know we were talking earlier like there's research that says white people hate being called white being in white spaces, you live in white spaces all the time you know I have any black friends no friends of color so you're actually moving a white caucus your entire life but if you do it in the workplace and the typical pushback is you know from white women is why don't we have a women's caucus you know my gender is oppressed so I'm not going to the white people caucus I'm not going to have a gender caucus and I use words that are very strong about that which is this person's fundamentally sabotage any effort you have to get rid of oppression and we have had staff members who said they weren't going and my colleagues and I have had frank conversations about the fact that it's mandatory because those people need you to do the most work and those are the folks who were having random conversations about you know why I voted for Hillary I didn't ask if you voted for it you know like why are we talking about that you need to go to white caucus but so it's not mandatory attendance but you know at some point you have to kind of challenge people like are you really committed to this work that we're doing we've been transparent about where we're going and even if you're on board or not and if you're not this might not be the right place for you and that's a hard conversation to have with people but it has to happen that's a good question I'd like to pick up a little bit more so if you you know you could have made that decision and I understand that these are two different organizations with different purposes but specifically for the white caucus would you see benefit structurally in making that a mandatory requirement for employment you know I this is my personal opinion I don't think it should be mandatory but I think you can tell a lot about someone's commitment based on how they spend their time and how they prioritize their time so it's all you're always as someone in leadership you're always gathering information and that's just information like if you find out you're not really working on anything you just don't want to go or again like it's the point about like while we have this caucus why don't we have this one is really a way of undermining the fact that you actually think racism and white supremacy is not a real thing and that's just what it is you're just using coded language and I know what that is so I don't think it's mandatory it's all just information I also to support that is that the choice to engage in the work is actually I think one of the hardest parts of the work there are a variety of things that are difficult but forcing I think forcing particularly white people to engage in the work is just a means to create microaggressions is a means to create resentment to encourage the space so mandatory making it mandatory will also allow many a wolf in sheep's clothing to show up because they have to be there and have to be present and I would much rather somebody who is not ready, willing or able to engage in this work to be able to opt out so that I can I can know where we stand around around our shared purpose I think there's another piece of code for a great piece I'm plus or minus talking a lot of time but he wrote a piece about knowing your whites have you read it? Yes and I think about it a lot as we're getting into about white caucus and how people are choosing to spend their time people of color have had to pay a lot of attention to white people to survive in this country like we pay attention to everything and especially if you have young staff members of color they're trying to figure out how safe in the space that you created for them so if they see people not going to white caucus they're constantly paying attention to that so it's not flying under the radar because survival has like taught us through generations that we have to know exactly where our white colleagues are where our white neighbors are what they're doing how they're spending their time and it's a great piece I wish for it because it's really just good to think about spend time thinking about what you're projecting out into the world and I think a lot of people don't do that Is this so when when people are let's say coming to apply for a job at Fractured Atlas is all of this pretty sort of straightforward and transparent to them at that time so that there shouldn't be an issue moving forward Yes It's actually transparent to everyone if you go to howwework.fracturedatlas.org we have a list of our policies as well as our caucusing our area of like you can go anybody who's that we is interested in the job in job descriptions or job applications go to this site to see how we work so yes we try to make it clear on a variety of spaces Yes I'll clarify part of my question but another question in essence though aren't you saying it's mandatory though if you say that if this isn't something you're not interested in and maybe this is not the place for you that creates a sort of back door to saying you either belong or you don't belong here based on this non-mandatory perceived policy how do you deal with have you had any questioning around that and for the folks who are at the organization before the policy came into effect so do you want me to take it I mean I have thoughts I would like to and I'm going to own this this is not fractured out this is Courtney speaking if you do not want to work on antiracism I do not want to work with you we are and I'm not that is not fractured out speaking again that is Courtney Alicia Hart saying this is how I feel about this but and I part of the reason I work for fractured out was they took a stand saying this is what we do we are our organization however we are committed to antiracism nobody is required to work here right so if you want to work for us antiracism is a part of what you do and we are again very transparent about that in a variety of spaces so coming in and then being upset or averse to working on antiracism is I don't it is the whole bunch of like their problems that I can't I can't relate to because part of why I thrive in this space is being able to do this work yeah I would add there are things that we can negotiate around but people's humanity is not one of them and so this feels suddenly in the humanity category in a way that where you went to did you go to Harvard or Yale does not and so there are some things that we are not going to negotiate around back to the question about interviewing we ask people basic what do you think diversity is how have you actively done this in your life and there have been times where we have hired someone and I've been like this isn't going to work like you decided to treat that and it's been interesting working with my college leadership team as they try to figure out how do you assess someone's fit with regard to this particular area not anything else but the folks that give kind of shitty answers to that question because this is basic it's 2018 everybody's talking about race do some reading this is like not hard we're in New York we can't find people in New York that understand diversity equity and like oppression at this point but we hire people sometimes for some roles and I know like within the first two weeks I have an interaction like this isn't going to work and typically it's it's because the folks who have stayed in the organization people are committed there I've worked for this woman a long time ago and I remember my interview I said you know tell me about your culture and she said I can't describe culture as a leader you should necessarily have to describe culture she said but our culture is so tight that I don't have to tell people I'm not the one besides when someone's not a good fit the culture pushes the person out like a bad tooth and I was like I'm not a bad tooth that is that's like yeah I would never forget that but on this particular issue we're almost at the point where colleagues will come to a manager and say this person might not be a good fit and that's how and that's how you know that and that's not you know your identity our purpose at this point is being anti is being anti-racist and actively and there are people who have left and they it wasn't a good fit yeah follow up on that so the people who have left were they pushed out like a bad tooth or did they choose to extract themselves as a team I think it kind of happened at the same time yeah and was there and how how are you guys functioning around the challenges around that I mean there was a point where we had a fair amount of turnover related to just the nature of and when I started to fracture that was I think our average tenure was like more than five years and we had a really young staff and I remember saying that's a long time for someone to stay in like their first job and so part of it I think was just typical but again like these are HR issues just like any other ones we have a really good staff and the folks who left just the folks who said essentially like I signed up to work for an arts organization not like the ACLU you know like unless you could make that choice and it's you know we don't to continue the bad tooth metaphor we don't like we don't like send anybody into the city limits like we aren't tarring or feathering anyone you know we are like it's not it's not it's not in any way a violent exodus but people prioritize differently and you just find that you're having conversations and that is also the down side but it's the other side to this work you're going to lose good people who don't wish to fight the good fight do we talk about compensations I don't think so so the other so part of our commitment to equity is around our compensation model so everybody at every tier gets paid the same and there are and that's you know we all know there are certain groups of women of people of color who don't negotiate salary who are actively lied to oh yes exactly so for years we've had a flat tier structure we've just made some changes now there are two steps in the tier but we advertise your salary when you start we don't negotiate on it this is just like your parents to the job this is what we pay you everything's transparent with our shared leadership team when we you know when we were prior to moving to a shared leadership team we all had different salary levels now we're all at the same level and that becomes very hard for folks to stick with because they don't understand our salary structure and the way that compensation works is actually tied to our commitment to equity and that tends to be there are folks who come in who feel like they should have make more money they were upset they could negotiate you know during the interview hiring process and it comes up with sort of repeated it's weird people asking for salary increases a lot which I've never had an organization outside of like an evaluation structure it's very weird just when I asked for more money but after they sort of bump up against that oh you guys are serious about this compensation thing that's another reason why folks tend to transition out they want more money they think they're worth more and they don't understand that we don't negotiate on salary was there another question over here I think here's the name so just a practical question for the so you've carried 5% of folks who are working remotely how do you manage that space even just having a regular meeting with remote workers can be on both sides it's easy to disengage or forget about the person on the phone or the person on the phone puts it on mute and just kind of hangs out so how do you manage those spaces with that kind of dynamic I think this goes back to the earlier answer about how to create the safe spaces that there are ways in which it permeates the organization like we're getting very close and we aren't actually like 50 to almost 60% remote at this point so our organization is built to include remote workers just like how we operate in general so having video chat is helpful but I'm a full time remote I live in Albuquerque and I'm on video all day long so like our work culture just includes this idea that we are making space for people on video chat we've done we did our training with video chat we made sure to use the individual the breakout group session and Zoom and we make it a point to use our technology to create equitable spaces by acknowledging that we have people there we try to do an outing and like want to see okay what can we do how can we use some of our funding to like get the people who are remote in like how can we support that and not make an additional burden there are a variety of ways in which we try to engage with that two thoughts I guess one is that you have the caucus spaces and those are voluntary but you also do two or three trainings a year and those are not correct so it's not like they can totally opt out it's just that they're opting out of the voluntary portion correct yeah I mean I should say we don't have a problem people opting out at this point I think they've become for a while our white caucus was just there was no one leading it no one really felt like they learned advanced enough in terms of like their own personal education to lead it so we brought a facilitator to do that and attendance went up for a while so this is not a waste of time and it might have been so I think again we're at the point it took a while to get there maybe 18 months but for the most part I don't think we have an issue with mandatory I mean you have to make it worthwhile for folks yes and then the second part of that is you have a flat compensation how are you determining what that compensation level is so several years ago we did a salary we brought a consultant into the salary study so it's all pegged to market I mean I think we are very competitive with the sector that we're in and yeah we step increases with COLA and various sort of regulations but I think our starting salary now is at 48 and so we're competitive with the market and then also I want to offer there are benefits that just kind of support the whole person so everybody has a thousand dollars professional development to use a year we have $350 in what we call our ticket allowance so that is to go see the work of people in our communities we have unlimited vacation days which means if you are delivering the things this is one of the joys of shared purpose if you complete the purpose you can go home which is nice and so we have a lot of I love that I can talk to leadership and say this is the thing I need to take care of myself in service of the work in that conversation and that's enough reason to not have to be at work you know like that is and that becomes something that it is both about equity and it's about being able to be present and have very honest conversations about like what it means to be somebody at a job somewhere don't quote me on that salary I'm saying like it is to be spent at 48 I don't know I just hired people and I don't know what we are but it is it is transparent is everybody at a level makes a thing and makes the same thing and you can do conversations about that should we try to we have a couple more slides and so we will continue the conversations what time is it? 11.15? we're okay develop the negative interactions document I promise we're going to get back to your questions more time for sure but this is also something that I'm personally really proud of personally because it came out of the POC caucus and so this negative interactions document is a means for people dealing with negative interactions majority of our customer service staff is actually young women of color and one of the things that I found was happening and we all talked about is that people were staying in terrible conversations for way too long in a sense of good customer service which I personally believe this was one of our unintended core values I was shocked when I was like why are we staying on the phone with these people? it wasn't edited in a core value because people were staying on the phone assuming that the customer is always right because that is a permeating thing and I remember I had a conversation with Adam before we got to this and I was like, you know, I've just gotten to a point in my life where I'm okay with losing my job with somebody if somebody gets an appropriate on the phone there was a decision I made that if I have to, that's fine and he was like, why would you think you need to lose your job? and I was like, because that's all on the line based on the way people talk but as a white man it never occurred to him negative phone interaction could result in having to choose between letting this person speak to me however they want and my job and I was amazed that he was amazed it was just a moment of like, oh, you've never I've worked retail a while I've worked customer service a while I just made a decision that there are some things that just weren't going to happen for me but that required a lot of work it required me being in my career for a while and understanding that there are other jobs but I'm not 22 fresh out of college I'm not in that same space and the conversation just started where a lot of our younger staff was really like why would I think that I can get off the phone or that I would be supported in what this person if somebody said something to me and I retaliated or I responded and we wanted to create a document that created options but my favorite option they can hang up the phone you've given our staff permission with the full backing of the organization to simply hang up on someone and if you hang up, you're not going to get caught asking why are you sure did you interpret that right was it really racist or sexist or there's none of that what you think it is in the moment and we also made a point too that I think any one of these options over another because there was originally some preliminary conversations some people have a capacity to engage some people don't and that individual capacity also changes day by day based on what's going on you can just hang up we value who you are and the work you do for us more than somebody being racist sexist or just outright rude to you on the phone we value our staff as members of our community and if other members of our community are mistreating them it is the mistreating members fault it is not our staff because the additional burden of having to listen to what people say really oppressive things and then having to engage and having to teach them and walk them through and still provide service is more work than anybody should be reasonably asked to do and so this document is almost it's less in fact about the individual solutions on it there's nothing on here that is revolutionary these are just ways to engage but it's more about this document means explicitly these are the ways the organization will support you in an interaction that is negative and we leave it to the individual to determine there is no racism bar it doesn't have to be this much racist it doesn't have to be this much sexist there is no there's no burden of proof in this scenario if this impacted you you can respond however you wish I learned recently that our TOO does not actually like this slide but he said I can keep it because of human resources the phrase human resources is limiting people attach some very specific things to it but until I find a better way to say this thing this is where we are core value an understood core value fractured atlas is this human resources are humans first resources second that is something that I think really permeates how we operate and recognize that there are people who work for you they are not just tools to get something done these are human beings and being able to start a conversation at work as a human being is a privilege not afforded to many frankly I've been in workplaces where I had to be a worker or an employee first and had to stop being a human being to be able to get something done and that has been changing it's been life changing to experience so this is the more fun part of our conversation what can you do and what do you want to do so what can you do is one of the things that is proactively recruited if you see people who out in the world who are who you think are aligned with what your organization does have conversations with them like it's very difficult to change an organizational culture if that's something you're looking to do one person at a time we're just putting an open call out and like hoping that the right fish bite you have to see people who are doing the change or impacting the change that you want and seeing if you can have conversations with them yes so I love that and my question is how can we make sure how do you make sure that white-leg organizations or leadership don't go around just finding any person of color and just seem like hey you're with it right how do we make sure that that also I mean personally I do like the idea of a future where people are just walking around throwing jobs at people of color like I know that's not the point but if I just like the idea of you you want it to I I'm totally into it so as a by-product I'm kind of here for that we're with another black president so exciting he's just the wrong president right I just love like somebody with stacks of like ED positions they get a great job right that would be ideal so I know in the series of like this idea of like tokenizing there's also this really great article about like the life cycle of a black woman specifically in an organization and the idea how frequently black women are pulled into organizations to change them and then when they start changing them they get pushed out and so there's a it's a really great research around that and so where people are pulled into organizations and they're basically asked to fix it but when you fix something you might lose things where you have to you know change and then they're like oh no we don't want that we need you to fix that without actually challenging our own racism or institutional policies or you know anything and then they're their power has generally taken away and then they're usually upset there's a life cycle around like a year and a half until we don't want to continue that cycle so proactively recruiting is something you can do once you've made sure your environment is safe for people of color because I will also say don't ask people of color to come into your hostel environment like I don't I don't do that right and if you don't want to change to go back to my like this is not the work you want to do then frankly don't just like for real there is an ethical thought reason to be anti-racist, anti-sexist all of that but if that's not if you're not ready to support that that's not what you want to do if you want to continue with business as usual like I would much rather you do that and like say that there are people who will work for you you will continue to thrive probably for at least for a little while longer maybe after 2020 I'm not 100% sure but at least for a little bit we'll still be able to do that and then let people who don't want to be in that environment be elsewhere but I would also I want to get into that questions I think it's really good when I remember again being new to the arts I kept hearing about this like pipeline problem and I was at a foundation meeting right after I started and I just I just had to say I think I was quiet the whole day I don't know what the hell they were talking about but there is this idea that you have to have a perfect candidate of color like folks want people of color to be perfect for them before they hire them and we'll take any old flawed white person and put them into leadership roles I know that's hard but I remember when I was interviewing at Fraction Atlas you know they had sort of four things they wanted I had two of the four sort of overarching qualities right I can fundraise watch your wallets y'all I'll probably be out $5 before you leave here I will fundraise and I'm a solid communicator and I get policy but they also wanted someone with like a lot of marketing experience and sort of a background marketing products tech products specifically I don't have that I remember being really clear I can figure that stuff out this is what I do this is what I don't do how are you going to support me as an organization and making sure that I can be successful in this role because I am not a perfect candidate and I think that's the hard part which is not just recruiting but how do you retain what is your professional development like how are you giving people feedback do you give people of color feedback as a manager or do you just let them struggle because you don't want to have a confrontation but you have to give people constant evaluation constant feedback and that's where it gets hard for people to call it a thriving leadership role people will just ice them out and then they'll leave or you fire them and tell them they're already a culture pin which is not cool so I think that's the underlying point there are no perfect candidates so how are you going to support them to make them if people push your mission as far as you can so my question ties back to your response because I've heard kind of like the chicken on the egg cycle but you need to have employees of color to change your organization culture but then you also have to have and then the other argument is the culture needs to be there before you bring in individuals of color so I'm wondering how do you reconcile that the organizational culture isn't there but you don't want to bring other people of color into a hostile environment I want to be clear I'm not advocating for critical mass I am advocating for a non-hospital environment so I maybe contrary to what I've spoken I believe white people can create a safe environment but one of the things that has to happen in that space is for white people to recognize that they may be in a hostile environment so there are and they're definitely I was willing to be one of four four fractured atlas because I felt like the environment was safe and I tested that environment a variety of ways right but it wasn't so for me it wasn't about the critical mass of majority of staff of color it was about have they done the work where this environment is not possible or are they willing to address the area if I can point out and say this section feels a little rough will they deal with that and so I'm not talking about a perfectly like glorious environment talking about have you addressed the ways in which your environment could be hostile and one of the ways to do that in proactive recruiting is to ask that person or to answer Lauren's question are you willing to give that person what they need to thrive in this space right and if I answer if you don't get answers now then let them be what suggestions do you have to change or start that conversation to change organizational culture because that's for my personal but that's what I've experienced in my organization and it's just oh we can't do it yet because leadership isn't on board so it's just kind of it's it really is I know that's not helpful I'm going to say something that is helpful but part of it really is like this Lauren said we don't debate humanity and if somebody is willing to debate you about your own humanity they are not ready for you and you can't you can't change that and I wish you could but I've worked in plenty of spaces where it's like you are not if you're still on the fence on whether or not I'm a person we can't talk anymore it's just not here it has to make the decision for how much of that they can take and yes there's a certain level of dehumanization like everybody has to decide what their limits are and some people can compartmentalize in a way that allows them to like be here and do this thing and then go out and like be a person elsewhere and like want but you can want deeply to change a thing but if somebody is still debating about whether or not you are a person of value then the debate is actually over and I also think I had a friend who was in a really just difficult work situation and I finally had to say you can get another job you are talented you're brilliant, you work your ass off go get another job anybody would be happy to hire you and there's a when you find yourself in toxic work situations that are it's just a cycle of abuse go get another job good people want to continue to invest in those relationships and you can't change everyone so figure out what your own personal level is and I mean people have to walk and staff members will walk they do and I think organizations I know organizations lose very talented people of color very talented queer people especially I would say people of color queer people who are super talented they're in hostile work environment and no one wants to address the fact because it's good for you white guy it's actually straight white man it's actually terrible for everybody who works for you nobody wants to have that conversation should we hot to these lines? kill your darlings and admit defeat so one of the ways to recognize this is everybody is like we don't have a capacity we don't have money, we don't have time we can have staff or whatever one of the examples is killing your darlings but nobody is actually benefiting from it this is where if you're clear on your shared purpose you can really assess whether or not the things you're doing are going for that purpose and almost every organization has something they do well because they love it and they have the resources and it's fun and people like it and it's not but it's not actually serving the community it's not actually executing your purpose to be clear and that is a darling and it needs to go out maybe you can do something like write up the model for it write up how you execute it and give it to somebody else who can do it so it still gets done maybe that's not what you do or you can just decide to end it or there are a variety of things the fracture atlas has killed a few darlings the other one is admitting defeat and you admit defeat on the things that are probably serving the people you need to serve you're not executing the purpose but you're not doing well and or know that people are actively doing better and that's hard it's like this is the thing that I know people need but we're struggling to get through it or it's just not like all of our resources are not there and sometimes you just have to admit defeat we are not doing this maybe we can support or amplify somebody else who can do this better maybe we can find another way to serve to accomplish the same goal but it's just about what you're doing but when you kill your darlings and where you admit defeat what you're also doing is freeing resources staff time, personal time, mental energy you are actually not doing something to be as impactful as doing something if you are thoughtful and intentional about it because when you do that you can do the next thing which is build competency and partner responsibility like now that you have resources or space time anything you can get better at doing something right and that's one of my build competency you can, if people aren't working 10-12 hour days to execute this program that you're no longer going to do this way that you're no longer going to operate they can also then go to anti-racism training they can go to events like this they can be resource you can put in that hour for caucusing once a month you can make you can build competency you can get better at a thing whatever that is you can also now partner responsibly if you know that somebody something needs to happen and you maybe can't do it yourself but you know other people just need the little push you can provide or the support you can provide that's how you know what you can do one of the things I like to talk about is our insurance program we partnered with Lockton Affinity to offer insurance to our projects and then Lockton also partnered with the NRA for a policy we found unethical and problematic and we held our partner accountable to that actually on our site had ways in which you could actively protest this policy we for a minute were saying we have an insurance program that we are advising you to maybe look at our options we were saying because again we have these values and this is a thing that is not that goes against our values and they are they have since ended the policy for a variety of reasons but we had to know who we were partnering with and we had to know what our values are for that to happen where previously we would have just let that partnership be and not recognize it had a negative impact on our values but because we had the resources to be aware and active in this partnership we were able to do more and last is whatever you can anything all of it whatever you can throw at the train throw at it these are if you look at the next site these are four areas in which you can impact change there are many more but language and practice there are ways that you as an individual no matter what power you have in an organization can make a change as an example adding pronouns to your email signature it's just a way to normalize the idea of asking for pronouns I doubt we need anybody's permission to update your email signature but it can have an impact it can let people know that this is a conversation they can have in your practice like I made the decision that there are some things people just couldn't say to me on the phone that is a personal practice that is something I have not asked anybody permission to forward so how one reacts is this is just where it goes and that is a way of being able to impact change because I can have conversations with people this is how we can interact going forward then you can get into full on policies our community guidelines and having in the resulting review committee is a policy and then you can make programs something that says how do you actively serve how do you kind of change how you are operating in a way that operates your programs because the majority of things I have talked to you about aren't program related we didn't make very few any programs these are all policy and practice spaces so many people think that equity and inclusion is like a program how do we do our outreach we haven't gotten there yet one of the things we have done is to be more accessible we are now doing live captioned and live interpreted webinars we have a few of those coming up that is a small program but that is not the point we have had to do a lot of other things to get there those are my slides this is where I want to hear some thoughts, some questions where we can really talk about ways in which you can engage with these in your own work thank you all for your time I was just curious about the work that is done in back to caucus' conversation about the POC caucus it seems like there is a great opportunity to create the type of work that has been done because there is dismantling there is also issues within different POC groups there is such a big term that involves so many different groups so some of the work we have done everybody get a question what is the work that has been done internally in the POC groups frankly my approach the facilitator of the group we only do the work that people do in the moment because it is actually one hour at work where work is not on the agenda for a variety of reasons so if people want, we have had questions, we have had conversations about intergroup racism we have had conversations about the intersectionality of people's different identities conversations just about the group space what happens what happens in that space we have had some very candid conversations but it is very much been about what do people need in the space I am super focused on this idea and people can operate it differently but on this idea it doesn't necessarily need preparation all it needs is your presence so if you show up and if that is what you want to talk about today you have to check in that is what we can engage in because I don't want the POC caucus specifically to feel like another task where you have to perform being of color we have to do, you don't have to be anything but present and available I think people have been served in that space there is nothing that you can't bring up sometimes you have conversations that are super light, this is what my day was like I am here if it is cool we had some real real conversations about what it means to be us in space we once had we had a conversation about compensation and our caucus was immediately after that we all just sat and we were like we need to do this without them for a minute we had a whole conversation about what it means to be people of color having this compensation conversation and what it could mean for accountability those are just topics so all of that to say it is addressing but the work that happens is the work that needs to happen in a given moment we very much try not to set an agenda so it doesn't need to feel like another meeting yes off of the caucus point again when the people of color have conversations and the person who comes from the white caucus to report is there another step after that where issues that may have been brought up in either caucus get addressed between the two caucuses no so the idea of is there a full full form for everyone and no actually it has just been helpful to us it's not that we are kind of opposed to that space but it has been helpful to us to have these separate spaces to deal with them it is yeah it's been funny is that only the white people have asked for an integrated caucus which is a sign to me that we do not need one yet but none of the POC have been like when do we get to talk about this with the white people because of that it shows that there may be a need for the white caucus to show the work that they are doing and the POC are not ready for that we are seeing the work in other ways what may feel like a performative meeting so we aren't pushing for it and if the needs change then maybe I realize I'm looking over here I'm going to come over here why do you think that your flat tier salaries support your goals so I'm so used to hearing pay for performance and how does this help yeah so I I'm a paid for performance person I don't know if you guys heard me say how much I love money so I had a very hard time with that and back and forth because I have a really hard time with the notion that someone who is a super high performer gets paid the same as someone we're about to let go I just fundamentally can't wrap my brain around that I think high performers should be rewarded however I also have to balance understanding with the notion that I know plenty of women and plenty of people who have found out who have found out they're making a lot less than folks who aren't as competent as they are I know plenty of people who have a hard time asking for a raise who go years without ever asking for a raise so I have to balance that and the step tier that we have now the two step increase that you can get and I should say one other problem I have with it learning to negotiate your salary is really important we have an overwhelming young staff many folks come to us there first and out of the job and I'm like you have to be able to justify your value because when you leave Fraction Atlas you can go out into the world most places don't have flat salary tiers so the step compensation is the push and pull of me trying to balance all those things talking with my colleagues Tim being awesome about Tim, hi Tim again talking again in the room Tim being aware of there might be ways we can tweak this and improve it but in the process help our staff begin to be able to say concretely these are the goals that I met this year and this is why I deserve X step increase so it's a balance and we're still figuring it out I also want to offer I'm somebody as much as I like to talk like negotiation is never in my strong suit and that's not true I tend to believe people are negotiating with me in good faith in a way that I have found is not great there are studies that show the predominant kind of science has said that women particularly women of color are not good negotiators and they found additional studies it's actually not true that women are lied to specifically in negotiations so it's less about not being a good negotiator and more about not actually negotiating on honest information so I offer that as a counter to like I'm somebody who very much supported the cheers or not that you supported the flat salaries because it was nice to just know that I could come in and like operate at an exceptional level and not then have to do the additional second work of justifying the work because I've always I've found as somebody who I like to consider myself a high performer I do good work is that I have to do the work and then I have to go back and justify or explain why this work that was super valuable until people started talking about money like everybody appreciated and recognized as valuable until the conversation but about compensating me for that work and then it was like well now there's numbers and metrics now there's an additional like burden to go back and like justify the stuff that was valuable until I asked you to pay for it so for me the notion of the flat tier was like this is what I do this is what you're going to pay me these are the ways in which I can do and it was less emotional labor to have to then do the pay for performance also additionally behaviors there's also studies that show that behaviors in black women are not seen as valuable in the same way that they are seen for a white man simply so the same type of performance behaviors that can be adjusted or that can be evaluated or paid for so if I behave the exact same way that a high performing white man did I would be viewed as less valuable for those exact same behaviors so it would also impact the negotiation because I would be doing the things but because I am me it would actually be viewed as a judgment and not as a positive I really like this slide and the suggestions for personal things to do to change your language and things you can implement in your own personal practice something that I've started with is how to manage up and sort of infiltrate leadership with the importance of these these values of I mean to work on this as an organization do you have advice for for leading up I do I'm going to offer the advice it's also connected to like my personality some stuff I just do until they tell me I can't do it anymore and then because I found this is one of my kind of tricks around racism it's really hard to get people to argue for racism often and this is real in the sense of it's easy to say it's easy to fight against like making change like oh it's too expensive it's too expensive to have the policy but if a thing already exists it's harder for somebody to take it away because then they are fighting for the oppressive policy people's own like instinct they don't want to be that guy so sometimes it's worth it to see how can you set them up to be that guy how can you say we did the thing and you didn't even know this it didn't cost any money and this is where we are and I own that that's a risk but sometimes it's worth it to just what can you do that you don't necessarily need permission for and then if somebody is like why did you do that you can say oh well it impacted these three things and to not do it would do these terrible things what do you think and it's a great way to let people be on the right side of history just accidentally they just showed up there because it is harder it is harder to make the moral case to stay racist and oppressive than it is to it is to do the inverse there's still questions I'm going to put the slide back I just wanted to ask how often are you a host of coffers every month? it seems like nowadays a lot of organizations are getting more comfortable using the terms diversity inclusion but anti-racism and being anti-racist I think is a more radical term and I'm really envious of I think your organization's kind of ownership of that word and I'm just curious was there any journey to get to that word or what you kind of see as the differentiation of those terms or that work that we can kind of take back to our organization you have more of a history with that we've never in the two years I've been there we've never said DEI or anything else we talked about active anti-racist and anti-oppression part of what it was was the idea of fighting all oppression was too big in EDI equity diversity inclusion can feel generic and there are some very hard elements that I believe that are connected to the idea that racism particularly in this country is like the foundation of a lot of the oppressions if you can start here you can also get to other things I'm not excluding any other ism as its own individual thing but there are ways in which the structures in this country are built on racism and layered also other oppressions on top of it so when Adam a former CEO focused on that it felt like the chunk that you get honestly committed to so we are an anti-racist organization and that's the focus that we're giving it that doesn't mean we're like pro-sexist we are fighting oppression in a variety of ways where we're hanging our hat right now is anti-racism because it gives us purpose and it gives us clarity and I would also put a finer point on that with regard to this sector in particular working in sectors I came from home with services and education the disparity is really clear you know that children of color in certain zip codes have a much different educational experience regardless there's not a gender conversation the education sector has is just about race this sector everybody is like a special unique person with all of their special unique experiences so I do think it's really important when I talk I talk about racism I tend to not talk about gender I tend to not talk about disabilities and none of that because it is that racism is the foundation of the structure of this country and if you don't center racism there, everybody wants their specialness to bubble up and you have conversations about nothing and you're just trying to avoid everyone's feelings so it's important to be specific and I've been in a number of conversations with white people white women in particular who center themselves in a way that's really hard to have a conversation and I think it's really easy to be on white guys especially white women show up in a way that's really hard to handle and it's hard to get some the reason you feel this way is because racism, like racism taught every other is how to behave and that is maybe not unique to this sector but it feels very different than other sectors I've worked in one of the things that I found fascinating about your work is how you guys created the staff timeline I mean it's the staff with the trainings early on for organizations that are exploring you know we're in the early stages of exploring that kind of work for our own individual organizations can you talk a little bit about how you decided to go with Wai Ke Hong and Carol McCord and equity quotient team was it recommendation, prior experience with them how did you decide to go with them my understanding I will preface this by saying always ask for references and really there's a way to do anti-racism training that moves your organization forward so I think it's my understanding is that we've always put up bits and sometimes Saloh has been afraid sometimes maybe not trying to be delicater but I would suggest getting started by asking folks who have had positive experiences and who have a staff of trainers depending upon your organizational size like you wouldn't put one teacher in a classroom with a hundred kids or we know that 20 is kind of hard for one person so if you have a large staff a largest staff make sure that the person you work with has capacity to deal with with your organization and the complexity of your organization but mostly I was just you know passing around who's done some good work who's had positive experiences with a facilitator that is direct I should also say that I it's important to have different frameworks so one of the things that I'm kicking around right now is you know by K-Brock perspective that was anti-oppression and anti-capitalist Carol brings the perspective that talks about the role of the arts plays in furthering racism and then folks personal identities how those identities are expressed and received we might do another session with Carol maybe and then we'll find someone else who might give another framework maybe it'll be someone who has a health perspective maybe it'll be someone who has an educational perspective and talk about how we're trained how people see black women's pain in a way that's totally different than seeing white male pain so I think it's important to have a variety of frameworks and what we want to do is give our staff a well-rounded understanding of all the different ways that our experiences are shaped this is where understanding what you value is helpful as an organization it's also knowing how how will your organization respond to that something another fractured atlas like value that is unofficial we show up and we also get real deep real quickly as a space and it's something that we never would have that's not on again not on any of our hiring documents or whatever but like if we are present we will we go and that was also something that came out as a surprise but like we did these trainings and people were just like out feelings ready and we're like oh ok this is the thing we do this is how we are we are present we will be here this is what happens and knowing that allowed us to you know make different choices as connected with other facilitators like but we we're good at especially if we're all in the room we can we will there were tears there was feelings we were there and it was supportive but it's a collective energy that like whatever reason people are engaging with if that is not how your space operates being aware of that is helpful so it might be like we also did like a half day training then we did a full day training then we did like a two day thing so also knowing like how does the space work how do you how does this how does this type of conversation go it might be worth it just to see who can you get to do a small thing just to see where does this energy how does this room operate when we are in here are we ready to be vulnerable in this space and have these difficult conversations just carried this you know even before that taking those steps how can you know the art sector that are either you know white led or those centric institutions how can they recognize that a lot of the diversity work that they're doing is performing because there is great value in coming out and saying oh we have these values you guys have to pull us a lot of the law and it looks value is on the grant and you get that big donation at home ever I think that quite frankly personally is something that is that is a big hurdle but I think a lot of art development is just not just in Boston but a lot of us really have to recognize and get over it in order to move forward. That is a difficult question because it also comes back to this kind of humanity debate question for me like are you actually impacting something for someone for people and then are they willing to engage with their us too and if they're not there's very little to be done there right which and I don't want to sound so like negative but it is a real thing there's a legit wall between being willing to address equity from an honest and actually impactful space and performative and you can't push people through that wall. You can call people out on it but that is a bunch of labor and sometimes it can be like antagonistic and it can be difficult to do to say like you did this thing but the actual impact was no but people have to you can't necessarily force people to have a change of heart I kind of maybe I'm cynical but there's a part of things like I remember when people didn't sound racist all the time if you're just doing training so you can be quietly racist and just sound like a regular ass person that'd be really cool like it's the I think we're again like politics matters place matters time matters if folks are being trained to at least do 30% of the work they were never going to do and some of those performative actions are actually furthering a better experience for people of color and for folks who are sort of not straight white people I think that's you know that's kind of important too because more in a time when like every little bit every little thing you could do helps right because what we're seeing is this slide we're like well is that actually is it racist or if I say it like can you just sound like you care about my community right fake it can you fake it that is helpful yeah I mean I know that's cynical but that's kind of where I am with it yeah I mean yeah I'm also a big believer I like the idea for like racism being inconvenient for people so this idea like is there a way that we can I mean forcing people to argue for racism is a way to make it inconvenient so if you if somebody's doing something informative and if you have the opportunity to ask a kind of bad faith question and the bad faith question is I saw that your intended impact was X did you feel that this thing accomplished that is a great way to start a conversation and then you can there's yeah to the internet there's so much research just to be like it looks like actions like this don't tend to have the intended consequences that you want have you all what have you all done to counter that I know you've read this thing so like talk to me about what you've done and it's manipulative but it's helpful to recognize that people don't want to people don't necessarily want to appear racist whether or not they want to be racist sexist whatever you know but they often kind of don't want to appear that way and so being able to have a conversation that puts the onus on them to say why what they're doing is helpful can sometimes be a way into that conversation I mean you talk about money I mean that's the other really real thing with the sector is the inequity in funding is the sounding right like and my understanding is that large sort of probably white institutions effectively code programming organizational color and once that shifts and that starts with funders using the fund organizations that are that large you probably don't need anything else and with the organizations themselves saying I actually don't need this much Malcolm Gladwell did a podcast a while ago and he had the school the community college that was close to where I grew up in South Jersey this huge $10 million grant like in the early 90s which totally changed you know the sort of funding race that's happened with colleges so he does this conversation with the sort of the development officer who secured this $10 million grant which was transformational for World South Jersey and so the development folks and the daughter of the guy who passed away with the daughter of the guy who gave the grant and then he goes and talks to the provost at Stanford and Stanford now is in the midst of like I think it's the first like multi-billion dollar capital campaign and he essentially says if someone offered you you know 100 million or 200 million or you know a billion dollars and you've already you've already finished this billion campaign would you ever turn down this money and his response is really interesting because you can he says like how would you spend it and the guy's like wheels are turning and his idea was he would use this one billion dollars to do a really exclusive you know new engineering program for 100 students Rowan used their $10 million gift in the 90s to do an engineering school for anyone they try to get as many students in there as much as possible to do the most they could with that money their building is now you know 25 years old but they're still you know they're graduating like five or six hundred engineering students primarily from low income rural communities so at some point like why does she have to ask how much is enough like do you have enough to do what you do and if so and the other insidious thing about the Stanford was it says Malcolm Gladwell asked him like well would you ever refer them to one of the UC's and he says well you know the quality of your student body isn't great you use some coded words about color and he says I wouldn't know I couldn't refer them because I wouldn't trust them to use the money like I couldn't vouch for the fact that I could they could be trusted to use the money the way they should it's like the insidiousness of of how whiteness works it's a fascinating podcast because if someone asked me like how would you I mean I would obviously go I would like build something for the masses right he said he wanted to serve a hundred students and that's the hard pill to swallow which is like your institute fundamentally your institutions have to change because the institutions are already through yeah exactly it's just in the walls right I keep going back to one you can do whatever you can for whatever you can at it but two there are some things you can't change right you can't shift the Washington monument like three feet to the left right you can't do it it is it is where it is right you can tear it down right but you have to know what type of battle you're facing and like it's so it's worth it to understand that you know go where you're wanting in a variety of ways and so the thing to do the onus that you can do is ask the institutions that you wish to take your resource to if you are wanted there and then if we can if we make it so inconvenient for people to not want anyone more places will be valuable right like if we can if everybody finds that the resources that are us are going to places where they are wanted people will have to change just practically and that is part of it's part of what we're getting at so admitting to feet is a thing that you can do personally I'm not going to move the Washington monument three feet to the left it's not going to happen so I have to either have to tear it down or find a new task thank you so much for being here please take some food as we go out also post workshop survey in your inbox thank you thank you all