Inclusive Changemaking — Data Points for Changemakers in 2016
For Ashoka Changemakers, where I serve as web developer and product team lead, I have been undergoing an ongoing process to better understand our implicit bias as well as be more clear about where our unconscious tendencies are manifesting within our team, as well as within our greater organization. I am using data to better understand this.
The Changemakers.com platform serves approximately 90,000 visitors per month, most of whom are learning about how to be a changemaker as well as participating in our ongoing challenges to find social innovations around the world. Changemakers have had, since inception, tens of thousands of innovative ideas submitted by individuals and project owners, in the form of “competition entries.”
Recently (in the last three years) our team has begun collecting additional data in the United States on underrepresented minorities, asking competition entry authors:
a) if they consider themselves an underrepresented minority, and
b) asking additional information on if they choose from African-American, Latino, Asian-American, or Native/Indigenous as an option, as well as an option to specify their own.
Here are the relevant data points.
Diversity of our Entries
The years are calculated from February 28 of the prior year to February 28 of that year. Note that we have not had as many United States-based challenges in the 2015–2016 cycle, and thus have had fewer entrants. POC here refers to competition entrants who have self-identified as African-American, Asian-American, Latino, or Native/Indigenous (this is not required data). Note also, as a strong caveat, we only have data for those participants who have filled out specific demographic data (it’s not currently required information).
Geographic Data
For the geographic range of our entries, the vast majority of participants in the United States are in three main regions: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Boston/New York/Washington DC corridor.
Of the self-identified data we have collected to date in the United States,
37 responses are from African-American entrants,
6 responses are from Indigenous entrants,
26 responses are from Latino/Hispanic entrants, and
31 responses are from entrants who are an underrepresented minority.
Our Changemakers team and staffing at our highest levels of leadership (directors) include two women and five men. We are an international team, you can review our United States-based team members here: https://www.changemakers.com/about/team.
There are fast-moving changes in the overall population of the United States, as documented by think tanks such as Pew Research. I have circulated the book “Brown is the New White” within our operations and partnerships teams, with the explicit understanding that the daily net population growth of the United States is ~7000 for people of color, and ~1000 for whites (graph) and we as an organization need to keep up with these demographic changes, if we are to remain relevant, provide leadership, and influence social innovation.
A question that we internally struggle with is: how do we as an organization, and as a division of our parent institution, evolve and establish more reflective, more inclusive criteria, selection ideas, and practices so that our end outcomes and clients reflect our changing United States?
We’re having multiple discussions internally under the umbrella of our North American team. For now, our immediate commitments within our own team are to:
1) establish a “Rooney Rule” for new hires and staffing,
2) establish multiple challenges in areas of the United States where we are not well-represented or well-known, and work with our internal partners to highlight and extend existing networks (our organization works with colleges and universities, youth-serving organizations, middle schools and high schools, the media, and with Fortune 500 companies, so we have multiple opportunities to evolve),
3) reach out to our funders, partners, constituents, and other stakeholders to be more pro-active about discussing the importance of race and equity during our partnership engagements.
As background, our extended teams within the larger organization have been having internal discussions in a slack channel for #diversity since February 2015, with a group of interested participants beginning cross-team discussions in August 2015, and our organization receiving a first round of funding in December 2015 to explicitly focus in-depth on expanding our geographic reach.
On February 10, 2016, our overall executive leadership, North American team, and President gathered to learn more and lay the groundwork of how we as an organization will better represent, include, and back the spread of the idea of Everyone a Changemaker (EACH) — an idea which is central to our message. This internal kickoff was focused specifically on assumptions we each have, with a view of the data we’ve collected, and an opportunity to share our stated commitments as specific teams working together.
I personally am looking forward to our next phase of this work, which includes both internal understanding, external engagement, education and training, and using our data to better understand where we are and where we are headed.
I invite your feedback and participation. Tell me what you think in the comments below! I’m particularly interested in how other organizations in the social enterprise space are understanding, and grappling with, these questions of race, inclusion, equality, and justice in America, as well as what data you have been able to uncover so far.
Changemakers is seeking visibility into existing networks that are speaking out and working on dismantling institutional racism in the United States: nominate an individual to our networks.
