Part 1: How The Civil Rights Movement Is Inspiring A New Change at YSYS.
Note: Last month the team got together to create a vision board — we curated pictures and words that spoke to us and best described the YSYS desired impact; history — change — legacy — advocacy! Inspired by the moments during the Civil Rights and its leaders, going forward we’ll be doing things a little differently at YSYS …
Group centred leadership
At YSYS we are big fans of social gatherings and believe IRL meetups are super important for establishing deeper personal and professional relationships. That’s why every month, we’ll be gifting one community member with free office space and a budget to host a social gathering of their choice — this can be anything from safe spaces, exploring mental health with founders, to community sports days (check out last year summer bliss). We believe the most energised communities are the ones led by their members.
…. so, drawing inspiration from Ella Baker, an unsung hero of the civil rights movement, we’ll be adopting a group-centred leadership style towards our community management.
Ella Baker was a community organiser and political activist . She played a key role in some of the most influential civil rights organisations of the time, including the NAACP, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Baker stressed the importance of empowering communities with responsibility and innovative agency, she believed group leadership was a much more sustainable model than single leadership, because the community success was not tied to one individual. That’s why at YSYS we’ve decided not to have a Community Manager but instead, share the responsibility across the team and the community, so we’re all leaders!
In Black Religious Intellectuals, Clarence Taylor describes group-centred leadership as a collaborative:
“.. approach to leadership with three main principles: The first was to appeal for grassroots involvement of people throughout society in decisions that impacted their lives. The second principle was to place little reliance on hierarchy or the shift from hierarchical structure. The last principle was to call for direct action as an answer to fear, alienation, and intellectual detachment.” (184p)
Ella affirmed repeatedly that leaders must create opportunities for people to learn from each other and to reflect on the best ways to take action as a community. For this reason, we’ll be focusing more on value-driven partnerships that provide live and direct opportunities for our community, with multiple pathways.
What does this mean?
The narrative in the startup ecosystem, has been riddled with statement “no pipeline.” VCs argue they can’t find black founders, scale-ups complain about the lack of female engineers applying to their roles and the story goes on. But at YSYS, we are certain there is a pipeline — it just hasn’t been tapped into or been provided with an accessible pathway. Our aim is to close the gap by focusing on partnerships that provide multiple pathways for underrepresented communities to thrive.
A prime example of this is our partnership with Jolt, providing 6 month learning scholarships to 7 hungry-to-learn individuals. Through this partnership we’ve identified three pathways to provide our community with the opportunity to grow and develop.
- Activation: 6-month Jolt scholarship with a variety of classes ranging from marketing to product management.
- Retention: Dedicated personal coach to support with ongoing learning.
- Sustainability: Discount off future Jolt classes once the scholarship ends.
Rather than focusing on one single benefit, our aim is to establish three streams of support for our community, which are flexible and accessible. Our mission by the end of 2020, is to impact 100,000 diverse individuals and know we cannot do that alone, so we’re calling on our community, partners and the ecosystem to join forces and help us make transformative change!!
If you’re interested in getting involved, drop me an email at deborah@thisisysys.com
Thank you to Mori Abdul, for helping us dream bigger!
