Alvin Schexnider and Equity by Design

How can we operationalize racial justice within our organizations?

Alvin Schexnider is a Design and People Operations Leader on a mission to help civic institutions become more effective, innovative, and equitable. He’s the Chief People Officer at the Illinois Department of Human Services and a Professor of Equity Community Design at Loyola University. Alvin is also the creator of the Racial DeckEquity card set, a design-thinking tool found on his Etsy shop.

Alvin recently sat down with me, for Episode 2 of Slalom’s Equity Journey podcast series, for a deep dive on how human-centered design enables racial equity work and why qualitative data is every bit as vital as quantitative data. Here are some of the highlights of that conversation.

So, you have a really unique background, and I think a great place to start is who is Alvin Schexnider? What is the work that you do?

So, all the things that I do are essentially in service to equity and justice. For me, that’s the through-line that I’ve always followed in my work. That’s how I’ve endeavored to take design-thinking principles and fuse them into operations and then vice versa. In my day job, I work as the Chief People Officer for the Illinois Department of Human Services, which is the largest state agency in…