A Deep Dive Into Our Guiding Principles: Interconnection
This is one part of a four-part series about our organizational values: Interconnection, Curiosity, Joy and Rest, and Action
Prefer to listen to Natania read this post? Here you go!
About our Values
If you’re here, you likely value building and retaining demographically diverse teams, treating people equitably, and having an inclusive workplace. Our work is about helping you bridge the gap between those values and your day-to-day actions, putting sustainable systems in place so that practicing what you preach is core to how you operate.
We know that we’re not going to be very effective at helping you with this unless we’re well-practiced at doing it ourselves! With that in mind, here’s a deep dive into the first value we hold ourselves accountable to practicing in our work – with each other and with our clients: Interconnection.
Interconnection
We center the experiences and voices of those most directly marginalized by systemic oppression, through the lens that because all oppression is interconnected, all liberation is interconnected.
What does this mean?
As DEI practitioners, our work deals with countless forms of systemic oppression (think racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, classism, transphobia, homophobia, fatphobia, xenophobia, and more). We don’t believe we can successfully address any of them in isolation — they’re interconnected, so our practices for divesting ourselves from them must be interconnected as well.
The existence of systemic oppression means both that:
Those with more marginalized identities experience a greater proportion of discomfort and harm in our workplaces than those with fewer marginalized identities, and
All of us are harmed by the oppression of any of us.
Therefore, our work aims to redistribute discomfort so that all employees and leaders – not just those who feel the need most urgently – share responsibility for making their workplaces more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
Want to foster interconnection in your DEI work? Here are some ways you might see it show up:
Interconnection shows up in our work most clearly as we design equitable systems that are shaped by the feedback of those who have been most negatively impacted by society’s and/or an organization’s default, inequitable systems.
We avoid any work that lifts up one marginalized group at the expense of another.
Here are four examples:
1: Pay Equity Analyses:
When we conduct pay equity analyses, we always examine multiple demographic categories (like gender, race, age, disability status, etc.) to see if anyone is being systematically under- or overpaid. We know that when pay equity analyses look only at gender, they perpetuate racism by further underpaying women of color relative to white people.
2: DEI Goals:
When we help our clients write strategic plans for accomplishing their DEI goals, we always recommend that these goals cascade down through each department, team, and individual in the organization, and that each person is held accountable for accomplishing their DEI goals through the performance review process. That’s because the alternative model we see is one where DEI work often falls on the shoulders of volunteers, and those volunteers are usually folks from marginalized groups. Because they’re not compensated or otherwise substantially rewarded for this work, this perpetuates workplace inequities rather than reducing them. Redistributing discomfort means that for an organization to make progress around its DEI goals, everyone must be held responsible for moving the work forward – not just those who notice the need for it most in their day-to-day work and therefore feel the most urgency to address it.
3: History Month Activities:
We love a good Pride celebration as much as the next person. But if you’ve got limited resources for your DEI work, we’re never going to encourage you to spend them on programming for a history or heritage month. Rather, we’re going to direct your attention to activities and initiatives that you can engage in year-round to make a substantial impact on the experiences of your staff from the groups those months celebrate. Instead of helping one group at a time, these practices often help multiple groups simultaneously.
4: Workshops and Trainings:
When you attend a workshop or training we facilitate, you can expect to leave with concrete tools to use in better aligning your behaviors with your or your organization’s DEI values. Rarely does that mean getting a checklist of “ways to be an anti-racist” or “here’s how to treat women at work so you’re not being sexist,” or even, “here’s everything you ever needed to know about x demographic group.” Those lists are a fast track to harmful, performative DEI work that doesn’t honor your critical thinking skills. We’d rather teach you sustainable practices for shifting your behaviors to be more values-aligned and accounting for the multiple identities that each of us holds.
Whose work has informed this value?
Audre Lorde (a self-described Black lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, and poet) taught us about the importance of centering the voices of those most marginalized when engaging in anti-oppression work and the dangers of approaching it from a single-issue perspective.
Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading scholar on critical race theory, coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989, though other Black feminist scholars had been working with the concept for some time.
Want to get future blog posts delivered directly to your inbox as soon as they're published? Click here to subscribe to Natania's newsletter!