Going Deep To Cope With The Everyday Realities Of Seeking Equity
Going Deep To Cope With The Everyday Realities Of Seeking Equity
2020 was a year that challenged our assumptions about almost everything...our health, safety, how we work, how we communicate! And it revealed many new nooks and crannies about how we work for and achieve equity in our society where the equity chasm seems to grow by the day.
For most of us the everyday challenge lies in our ability to shape our own and our organization’s actions to make sure that “fairness” is not masquerading as another barrier to equity. We might think to ourselves: “Oh I would never do that; I am sincere about trying to achieve equity.” And yet how easy it is for inadvertent inequities to get past us.
A client recently gave me the example of how her city opened up the distribution of COVID vaccine. In an effort to be “fair” the city designated one of its big stadiums as the staging center on the assumption that people could get there, park and/or drive through. It would be the most accessible place in the city and the size of the facility would give lots of people a fair chance to get their vaccination quickly. Unfortunately, the stadium was located in a mostly white/middle class part of the city and mostly lacked access to public transportation. In effect, it was a location that enabled car owners and those with the time flexibility to drive to a somewhat unknown area of town to navigate an unfamiliar place to get treated. It was a location that favored those with resources and those who felt they “belonged” in that location. What looked like a “fair” approach from the perspective of city hall turned out to be anything but in the lives of many everyday people who probably needed the vaccine the most.
Another client described her organization’s aspirations to choose scholarship recipients in ways that would assure equity. Like most scholarship funders her organization required applicants to submit an essay about themselves and their goals. In a deep dive into the data, they kept about their scholarship selection process they realized how many students used English as a second language. They realized quickly that the long essay format was a heavy-lift for these applicants. In a search for an “equitable” solution they decided that a short format Q and A would accomplish their goals while also leveling the playing field for the ESL applicants.
In most settings the details of achieving equity and/or embedding equity in large social scale changes are often hiding in plain sight. Another client working on an ambitious statewide organizing campaign to increase women’s economic participation and well-being engaged leaders in every sector throughout the state to help identify the barriers to economic equity. Most of the communities said that the most significant barrier is childcare, and the communities committed to help work on it. Almost overnight the women’s economic equity organization transformed much of its work into efforts to form community collaboratives around childcare and increasing the amount of childcare available in their communities. Along the way the leaders are also discovering that what looks like childcare is not always childcare. An honest foray into an equity strategy is taking them into transportation issues, housing and health and more. They could not have imagined in the beginning how an economic rights strategy could land their organization into leadership on childcare.
Developing strategies for equity can be tricky. The real reasons for inequality can be hidden from view or invisible to us because of the assumptions we make about how things work. With the equality/equity meme in mind here are a few helpful questions to answer before committing to an equality/equity strategy:
● If I pursue this solution, who has the easiest on-ramp? Who faces barriers?
● If I implement this solution what will be the short-term results? Is there a pattern?
● If I stick with this solution what will change in the next 2, 5, 10 years?
If you want more help developing a program or organizational strategy that produces equity (and not the illusion of equity) Schedule a Discovery Session with the SWIM consultants to help you plan and organize your decisions/resources.
Author: Stephanie Chlosey