Targeted Universalism: Our Path Forward
By Kathleen Osta, Managing Director, National Equity Project
“The way we respond to our crisis is the crisis.”
We are in a period of tremendous social disruption. Our ways of living, working, and schooling changed over night in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The continued killing of Black people by White police officers and persistent racial, economic, and social inequities sent thousands to the streets to demand justice. Despite widespread voter suppression, and thanks to years long efforts of women of color organizers across the country, Black, Latinx, and Native American voters turned out in historic numbers to turn the tide of the presidential election. Yet, we remain a country divided, beset with stories of “us and them,” when in truth we are all part of one human family living on one increasingly fragile planet.
This extended moment has the potential to be a catalyst for changes that many organizers, educators, activists, and policymakers have been working toward for generations. We are in the middle of a bridge from what was to what might be — we are in a liminal space. How might we recognize the sanctity of this moment to make transformative and immutable progress on social and racial justice? How might we slow down long enough to notice and reflect the transitional space we are in, to notice what is shifting and be open to new possibilities that are emerging? How might we lead in ways that facilitates healing and connection and ensures that everyone has power to co-design a future where we all belong?
“The antidote to injustice is to love…Love is a threat to systems and institutions that rely on disconnection. Love weaves connections that amplifies in orders of magnitude.” — Shiree Teng and Sammy Nuñez, Measuring Love in the Journey for Justice
Targeted Universalism
At the National Equity Project, we draw inspiration from the work of john powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley who has written for many years about an approach to policy making and structural change called Targeted Universalism. Simply stated, Targeted Universalism is an approach to advancing equity and justice that acknowledges our common goals and shared fate as human beings, while also addressing the stark contrasts in access to opportunity between different groups of people as a result of structural racism and other forms of systemic oppression and “othering”. Targeted Universalism centers listening to and understanding the experiences of people who we have most marginalized and who are experiencing the greatest harm in our current systems in order to expand what powell calls the “Circle of Human Concern”. Done well, this approach redistributes power so that the voices of people who are least well served in the current system are prominent in decision making and governance and their experiences and needs are centered in the development of priorities and new approaches. Through listening, we come to understand the policies, practices, and structures that are causing harm and that we must change to create more just systems and greater well-being in our communities.
We have seen the values and approach of Targeted Universalism resonate for systems leaders and decision makers, but we have also witnessed how our habituated ways of responding to challenges in our systems are often at odds with the approach that Targeted Universalism calls for. Leaders are incentivized to show up with solutions and plans — to respond quickly and decisively to urgent situations and inequities as if they have the answers. This urgency and action creates the sense that something is “being done” but does little to address the underlying belief systems and structural conditions contributing to the inequities we see. Plans are made, programs rolled out, and inequities persist. Targeted Universalism calls on us to move beyond programs tacitly aimed at fixing kids or families to focus on the structural conditions and ways of relating to each other that contribute to persistent inequities in our schools and communities.
Targeted Universalism grows out of our collective aspirations as human beings — for belonging, for love, and for the ability to care for our children and one another. It is a powerful antidote to the divisive and polarizing narrative that is dominant in our media and lives right now. It acknowledges that if one part of our human ecosystem is suffering, we all suffer — albeit differently. It is an approach that addresses the limitations of both “universal” and “targeted” approaches to policy making, but it is not accomplished simply by merging the two. Rather than universal policies which inevitably exclude groups from benefits because our starting points are so different (think of Social Security which is seen as a “universal” support, but did not include agricultural or domestic workers who are disproportionately people of color) or targeted policies which often lead to resentment and worse, leave structural inequities intact (think of racial quotas that may increase representation, but do nothing to change the inequitable structures) and often lead to resentment and further harm. Likewise programs aimed at remediation of groups of students that “don’t work” may lead us to blame kids for not succeeding without ever questioning the inequitable learning environments we are asking them to contend with.
Targeted Universalism offers a way forward that focuses on removing structural barriers, increases access to opportunities, and advances the well-being and thriving of whole communities of people.
Targeted Universalism pushes us to expand our thinking about what is possible, and addresses the shortcomings of other approaches in ways that are critical to this moment:
- It promotes bridging across differences within our communities and illuminates our shared fate as community members; it interrupts the us/them dynamic that so often derails change efforts in our systems.
- It is organized and energized by a shared, aspirational, Universal Goal in which all members of our community can see themselves, and assesses progress of groups of people relative to the Universal Goal (not in comparison with the performance of other or more “dominant” groups) thereby de-centering whiteness, middle class-ness, male-ness, able bodied-ness, etc. and other dominant groups. It stands as a commitment to work together to create something that is greater, healthier, and more sustainable than the current experiences and outcomes of any group.
- It focuses our attention on dismantling structural barriers in our systems and co-designing new structures to increase opportunity and thriving (and interrupts the dynamic of locating the problem within groups of people).
- It holds us accountable to design around the needs of the groups of people we have most marginalized while ensuring that all groups advance toward a compelling, aspirational shared goal.
Five Steps to a Targeted Universalism Approach
- Establish a universal goal based upon a broadly shared recognition of a societal problem and collective aspirations.
- Assess where people are relative to the universal goal.
- Identify groups and places that are performing differently with respect to the goal. Groups should be disaggregated.
- Assess and understand the structures that support or impede each group or community from achieving the universal goal.
- Develop and implement targeted strategies, focused on structural change, for each group to reach the universal goal.
Angela Glover Blackwell, President of PolicyLink and host of the Radical Imagination podcast made these ideas concrete in her compelling 2017 article, “The Curb Cut Effect.” Glover Blackwell wrote about how focusing on the experience of a group furthest from the goal of universal access, in this case people who use wheelchairs, and making structural change, in this case a “curb cut”, improved access for many others including people pushing strollers, riding bikes, or pulling suitcases.
“The Curb-Cut Effect, in its essence, asserts that an investment in one group can cascade out and up and be a substantial investment in the broader well-being of a nation — one whose policies and practices create an equitable economy, a healthy community of opportunity, and just society.”
— Angela Glover Blackwell, The Curb Cut Effect
The real work of equity, then, begins with listening. It is through listening with compassion to people’s stories and looking for patterns, that we identify the structural barriers that need dismantling and the new structures and ways of working and being together that are waiting to be created.
“When you get proximate to the excluded and the disfavored, you learn things that you need to understand if we’re going to change the world.”
In education, this means beginning by listening to our students and families who are experiencing the most harm in our current systems and building relationships based on shared power, trust and mutual learning. Through working in authentic partnership, listening with deep compassion and genuine curiosity, we will learn what we need to do next. Eliminating policies that are harmful, dismantling structures that do not serve our common good, and creating structures that increase belonging are critical right now to ensure that we come through this portal into schools, communities, and a country that works for everyone. Now is our time to go for broke.
How to Get Started
Our ingrained patterns and socialization as leaders may tempt us to look for successful programs or initiatives that we can replicate to address inequities in our systems, however, what is most important about this approach is that it begins with listening and building mutually respectful relationships with those who are currently suffering the greatest harm in our own communities — right now.
In education, this means starting with listening to the young people and families who we have most marginalized in our schools and communities.
- Listen with compassion and look for patterns to understand the structural barriers they are experiencing and the strength and resilience they are demonstrating.
- Be willing to get and stay uncomfortable. Notice and reflect on the feelings that get stirred in us when we hear the stories and experiences of our young people and families who are hurting and who we have hurt.
- Build relationships with students based on mutual respect and shared power. Trust the moral and intellectual capacity of young people to lead and resist the urge to dampen their passion or limit their dreams. (As a student in one of our Networks recently reminded us, Now is the time to be unrealistic.)
- Design formal and informal systems for listening to students and families in an on-going and sustained way using tools such as the Copilot-Elevate Survey, the UChicago Impact’s Cultivate Survey based on the 5Essentials, and the Youth Truth Student Survey and the Youth Liberty Squad Survey which were both created specifically to hear from young people about their needs during the time of Covid-19.
- Most importantly, partner with our students and their families as co-designers of their learning environments and include young people in governance structures and decision making processes in our schools — not in ways that tokenize, but in ways that meaningfully share (and concede) power.
This time has made life more difficult for many of our students, but it has also reconnected many of them to their own resilience and creativity. They have ideas about what they need, about what works and what doesn’t and they are ready to lead the way.
Listening to and co-designing around the aspirations and needs of student groups that are currently experiencing the most harm in our systems holds us accountable to those young people and their families and offers the possibility of creating learning environments that truly care for the humanity, learning and well-being of all students. In this way our equity efforts can be understood not as something we are doing for “those kids” because of something inherently problematic or lacking in them, but as an effort to reimagine the purpose and structure of school in ways that humanize and make school more meaningful — and even joyful — for all students. To lead transformational change in our systems, we will need to shift our focus from individual success and competition to a commitment to our collective well-being, sustainability, and an abiding belief in the words of the late former U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone:
“We all do better when we all do better.”
- U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone
