How will PACE center racial equity in our philanthropic laboratory?
Earlier this year, PACE stepped further into our identity as a philanthropic laboratory by sharing the specifics of where we will focus our energy in the months ahead. In the ways we serve our members and the areas we make learning and experimentation participatory and actionable, we are weaving together a story about the power and potential of civic engagement in America today.
A philanthropic laboratory is a concept without many models to look to, and as an organization committed to learning, we have been reflecting on our learnings about what this identity means as we live it into reality.
Reality is a funny word, isn’t it? We acknowledge that reality has never meant the same thing for all of us. We also acknowledge that what was real life for many people 12–15 months ago looks nothing like real life today. We have lived — and are still living — a historic moment. A global pandemic, a polarized electorate, a struggling economy, a burdened healthcare system — these are just a few of the realities that have drastically shifted.
But one reality that we have been spending a lot of time sitting in is the reality of racial injustice in America. This reality, unfortunately, is not new, and the events over the last year — including the murder of George Floyd to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 — seem to have created a tipping point for acknowledgement, conversation, and action, especially in the philanthropic sector.
As a philanthropy-serving organization, PACE also experienced its own tipping point, and we made a commitment to center racial equity in our work as a community and through our engagement in the civic philanthropy field. In some ways, this was not new for the organization. In fact, we recently found some documents from PACE’s founding, over 15 years ago. What struck us in reviewing these words is how many of the same questions and values the organization experiences today were considerations at the time of its founding — including about race. We know racial equity was part of the very conversations that established PACE and part of its organizational DNA. And over the years, PACE has worked on projects and research that touched on it as well. It’s fair to say that we were making efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work. But we were not centering it or naming it as an explicit piece of our work. We have arrived at an understanding that for racial equity to be truly achieved, we have to be far more intentional.
Over the last year, we have been working with a dedicated consultant (Danielle Marshall of Culture Principles) to help us center racial equity in our strategy as a philanthropic laboratory. Danielle has been an important guide to our leadership and community, which resulted in the development of PACE’s racial equity commitment and an accompanying internal framework. The way we see it: the commitment outlines our intent and the framework holds us accountable to doing the work.
We wanted to share our commitment with our community, and perhaps as importantly, we wanted to share what we are learning so far about what it means to us to center racial equity in our philanthropic laboratory. Below, we offer a few reflections and learnings based on our journey to get to this point.
Before we begin, we think it’s important to say three things upfront. First, what we offer below are our reflective learnings. They are our takeaways coming out of our recent experiences in our process of centering racial equity in our work. We are saying the word “our” a lot because we want to underscore the personal nature of this work and that we are only speaking for one experience — ours. Second, and related, the resources we link to throughout this piece are ones that we leaned on in our process. We know there are a lot of important resources from great organizations in the world, and we share these resources simply to provide further insight into what informed our experience. We also spent a lot of time discussing and contextualizing these resources as a team, so we share them with that caveat as well. Third, we are certainly not the first people to know or learn these lessons. In fact, we’ve heard them before, and in sharing them, we hope to join the chorus affirming and amplifying them.
What we understand today about centering racial equity in our philanthropic laboratory
Learning 1: “We don’t do that” is not an option.
One of the core and frequent questions PACE asks itself is “What is our work to do?” This question has served as a strategic filter for almost anything we do — it helps us discern where we are uniquely positioned to advance our mission and make contributions to the broader field. We knew we had to get more serious about centering racial equity, so we asked ourselves this question again, and very quickly, it got complicated. PACE is a philanthropy-serving organization focused on civic engagement and strengthening democracy, which led us to ask questions like: When we are simultaneously an independent organization and a community of funders, what is the appropriate way to use our voice? When our mission is not explicitly focused on racial equity and we cannot achieve our mission without racial equity, what work do we do? And shouldn’t we get out of the way of the many organizations that exist to serve that role much better than us? At times, it felt compelling (perhaps, convenient?) to say “we don’t do racial equity,” but we knew that would be the easy way out. We believed we had a role to play in advancing racial equity, and in setting out to explore what that role was, we came to realize it was less about being an organization focused on racial equity and more about being an organization that centered it in our mission and leaned into it intentionally. So we moved forward with a commitment to center it as a practice, to be as pragmatic as we could be, and think about where we could be uniquely contributive.
Questions we are considering/grappling with:
- What feels authentic? Who can we influence? Where would we be noise?
- What does a commitment to racial equity look like for a philanthropy-serving organization that is both a community of funders and an independent organization?
Learning 2: Centering racial equity is a practice.
Over the last many years, it was not uncommon to hear about a company or organization that was “doing DEI.” We have learned centering racial equity is quite different. We need to let go of seeing it as a program in order to see it as a lens or practice that permeates how we do everything. “Doing DEI” creates the sense that it is something you can check-off a list or something that you can say is “done” at some point. Centering racial equity means we’re embedding racial equity into our daily practices; it’s part of our being as an organization. It’s a lot harder to see on the surface, but you can feel the difference in practice. For example, we have always considered ourselves an organization that asks questions, and we have shifted to include questions about racial equity in a more intentional way. We now use an “equity lens” as a practice, which shapes everything we do — from the questions we ask ourselves as we begin to develop a new program, to the people we engage and rely on, even to the ways we relate to each other as teammates and members of a community. As with any practice, we are getting better at it each day, and most importantly, we stay vigilant to avoid the temptation of complacency.
Questions we are considering/grappling with:
- Where is racial equity showing up in our work already? Does it feel centered or an afterthought?
- What changes can we make this [week/month/quarter] to deepen our practice?
Learning 3: It’s about systems, and people make up systems.
We acknowledge that many of the obstacles to achieving racial equity today are baked into the very systems and cultures we operate in. We have grown to understand racism and the privileging of dominant culture as “the water we don’t even know we’re swimming in.” An important part of our journey was to embrace this truth while also acknowledging that people make up systems and cultures. To that end, we cannot overlook the importance of doing the hard, inner work that begins to “re-wire” us as individuals to a culture of racial equity. We need to prioritize this in our budget, our weekly to-do lists, and our head/heart space. This isn’t professional development so we could do our work better; it is the work.
Questions we are considering/grappling with:
- Where are we, as individuals, on our journey to understand and dismantle dominant culture?
- How do we understand racial equity in our personal and professional lives?
Learning 4: There is a lot we need to unlearn so that we can learn.
As we took steps to understand what it means to dismantle dominant culture for us as individuals, we quickly identified many things we had to unlearn. For example, throughout this journey (especially early on) we felt like we were hearing paradoxical messages. We were hearing that we should be comfortable making mistakes, but also that the impact of mistakes could cause harm. We were hearing that it’s important to use our voice, but also that it was the time to just listen. On our journey over the last year, we have begun to see “either/or” thinking as a manifestation of dominant culture norms and have made efforts to unlearn this mentality. We now understand that embracing paradoxes, learning to live in “multiple truths,” and adopting a “both/and” mentality are core practices in striving for racial equity. This does not mean it was easy for us, and as was the case with the examples mentioned, the paradoxes make it hard to know how to tactically and strategically move forward. We are still figuring this out and learning how to get more comfortable in its complexity. And while we acknowledge that unlearning these things is about awareness and dismantling them is about doing the actual work, we have found that the process of unlearning is foundational to our ability to move forward.
Questions we are considering/grappling with:
- In what ways has dominant culture shaped our worldview?
- Where we are making changes to consider/adopt another perspective, how do we stay vigilant against muscle memory?
Learning 5: Language matters.
In our process of unlearning and learning, we found it critical to dig deeper into the language we were using. We were saying the same words, but we could detect that perhaps we were not fully aligned on the same meanings. Were we talking past each other without even noticing? We were only hearing certain voices or understanding certain perspectives? Were there gaps between what we were trying to communicate that filled with misunderstanding or even distrust? On our journey to develop our racial equity commitment, we spent time aligning on definitions — both about what we mean when we say our words as well as how they operate in various contexts of our work.
Questions we are considering/grappling with:
- Do we mean the same things when we say the same words? When is it important to agree on a term and when is it important to allow it to have multiple interpretations?
- When do words invite people in? Who might they unintentionally exclude?
- What assumptions are we making about audiences and partners?
- How are we including multiple perspectives?
We hope sharing these reflections and learnings will provoke, inspire, or allow us to serve as a resource to other philanthropic institutions on similar journeys. In the spirit of embracing a “both/and” posture: we know we both do not have the answers and have our humble experience to offer. Consider us an open book as we continue on our journey.
