A Deep Dive Into Our Guiding Principles: Joy & Rest
This is part three of a four-part series about our organizational values: Interconnection, Curiosity, Joy & Rest, and Action
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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 third value we hold ourselves accountable to practicing in our work – with each other and with our clients: Joy and Rest.
Joy & Rest
We prioritize joy and rest as critical acts of resistance.
What does this mean?
We make progress by working at a human pace and celebrating wins of all sizes.
We’re not interested in participating in the glorification of busyness. Instead, we intentionally create schedules and timelines that allow for the breathing room we know we all need.
We recognize that doing this runs counter to the dominant culture (especially as it is influenced by white supremacy culture), and this only increases our commitment to modeling an alternative way.
Excited about fostering curiosity in your DEI work?
Try some of these ideas:
1: Prioritize within your DEI strategy
When we’re designing project plans with timelines, we always ask about what other work is going on and coming up, both for our clients and for us. This allows us to make sure that the deadlines we’re assigning actually make sense given the priority level of the project (and the goals it's helping accomplish) relative to the priority levels of other projects everyone is responsible for.
Then we ask questions like, “How long do we think this part is actually going to take? Does that leave room for someone to get sick or for something urgent to come up? What might happen if this got done in six weeks instead of four? Who would be impacted? What other work would be impacted? Would that impact be aligned with our values?”
3: Set (and stick to) email boundaries
We’ve all had jobs where a part of our brain is always worried about who is waiting on us to respond to their email (or Slack message, or text). That’s terrible for abilities to be present, calm, and healthy. So we’re determined to model a different way.
Our clients know that we never expect immediate responses to our emails. Rather, if an issue is time-sensitive, we’ll let you know when we need a response, especially if they arrive outside your working hours, which may be different from ours. In return, we respond to emails during our working hours, when we have time set aside to do that. Remember, a constant state of urgency is a core characteristic of white supremacy culture. Let's work together to dismantle it.
2: Get playful!
DEI work is essentially about oppression – not the lightest topic. To sustain ourselves and our clients, we make sure to infuse silliness and laughter into our work when it’s appropriate. Sometimes that means learning about how ridiculously silly oppression is, in addition to how harmful it (as Sarah Cooper does beautifully in the image above in her book "How To Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings".)
Other times, it's as simple as having play dough and markers out during a workshop to help participants focus, or having a fun dance song playing when you enter the Zoom room for one of our workshops. More often than not, it’s unscripted – we just show up as our human selves who sometimes crack bad jokes, and hope you’ll laugh with us (or roll your eyes) and crack your own.
Whose work has informed this value?
adrienne maree brown’s work, especially her book Emergent Strategy, teaches us that our most powerful work is able to come to fruition when we “use our own nature and that of creatures beyond human as our teachers.”
Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry teaches us that we cannot create the justice we crave without giving our bodies the rest they need as part of our normal routines. Her teachings are centered on Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism.
Daniel Lim’s Qualities of Regenerative and Liberatory Culture gives us alternative ways of operating to unlearn white supremacy culture as inspired by ecological systems thinking.
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