Building Common Ground

< Back to Roadmap

It will be important to get used to these conversations, get comfortable being vulnerable together, and be ready for challenging moments that require bravery. Also, be ready for solidarity!  Here are a few ways to get the ball rolling.   

• Create a visible racial equity environment. How can you show that your business cares about racial equity? White allies should avoid tokenizing images.  

• Make sure folks don’t get left behind. Ensure that you aren’t creating a clique of people who care about the issue. Call in white colleagues who aren’t participating and ask them what’s up. Find ways for staff to participate and continue learning. 

• Have an equity team with the CEO participating. 

• Switch up the learning styles and make sure learning is accessible. Not everyone has the same level of access to these sometimes academic terms and discussions. Be genuine and work on having videos, articles, discussion groups, buddy coffee dates – whatever it takes! Create opportunities for storytelling and sharing experiences. 

• Don’t make assumptions about where people are on their equity journey, or how someone feels based on their race.  

• Share the labor of racial equity work.  One person in an organization cannot do this work alone. And it should not be upon staff of color to own this work. It should be shared labor across all levels in the organization to move racial equity work forward.

• Develop workplace cultural agreements together. Think about ways to have a series of warm up conversations that ask employees things like: “What are some of your values with how we approach DEI work? What are ways we can increase safety for folks of color and other resilient communities in our DEI approach?” This can help you get started with cultural agreements to utilize as a grounding point when there is tension or a lack of safety for BIPOC.