Our Racial Justice Process
Versions of this quote and sentiment have been attributed to Emma Lazarus, Maya Angelou, Janelle Monae, Lilla Watson and the Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970’s, among many others.
Introduction
The point of this blog post is to provide transparency and accountability for our internal organizational work around racial justice. We will update it every 3-6 months as we do our Quarterly review and planning process and from time to time as we get feedback and reflection from experts, BIPOC, and our teachers. Are you a social justice expert and/or a person of color with something to say? We’d be delighted to listen.
We think this goes without saying, but just in case it isn’t obvious - racial justice, as well as all intersecting forms of justice are critical elements of a heart-centered business. It’s not enough to feel good and have good intentions, truly heart-centered entrepreneurs get gritty and real.
Why focus on racial justice (vs. other kinds of justice)?
#1 Racism is the most prominent area in which neither of us co-founders, Harmony and Noé, have lived experience. Between us, our lived experiences of being a womxn, Queerness, trauma, and chronic health challenges deeply (and intuitively) inform our work. It’s important to us to give special attention to racial justice to compensate for our blind spots.
#2 It’s the area most lacking in our community (although happily this is changing). Our community has historically been made up of primarily white women, trans, and non-binary folks. We have a ton of people in our community who are in the LGBTQIAA rainbow. We’ve got folks of different ages and with various abilities (deepening our accessibility is also an area we are focusing on). What we have historically noticed though, is that our community has been majority white. So we are working to shift this.
#3 Because oppressions are interlocking and because of the particular way race affects everything else, we believe that focusing on racial justice, especially from an intersectional lens, is one of the primary ways we can deepen all areas of justice across our business.
Our commitment
We commit to continually face our own racism, to work to undo white supremacy (and its supporting structures of inequity) within ourselves and our business, and to use Worth The Journey as an engine for racial justice and equity.
We know that both apathy and blind rushing to action are side-effects of white supremacy, and that real work takes time and intentionality. So part of our commitment is to stay in the uncomfortable space between doing nothing, and rushing to do as much as possible.
How this started
At the end of 2018, as we did our yearly review, we asked ourselves a question we ask every year - what’s working and what’s not working about the business? One of the “what’s not working” answers was around the lack of diversity in our community. We know that diversity is a symptom of deeper inequities (rather than a problem in and of itself), so we began to examine the deeper issues. We know that Seattle can be a very segregated city. We also know the health and wellness industry has been white washed, as has the entrepreneur community. But we also know that there were both individual unconscious biases at work as well as systemic ways our business was set up that were resulting in this, so we have set about to do work on both.
This blog is primarily focused on our organizational shifts, for a couple reasons:
We want to make sure our focus is on accountability, not virtue-signaling and any list we can come up with for our individual anti-racism work just sounds like we’re trying to give a Good White Person Resume.
It’s important for us to do our individual anti-racism work in containers that allow for us to be imperfect as we’re learning without harming BIPOC. We don’t think a public blog is a safe enough place for us to do in depth processing.
Our goals
2019 focus
Prior to 2019, our monthly event, Homebase, was always a workshop led by us (Harmony and Noé). It was part of the way we offered free teaching to our community. We realized that this set up meant that our regular speakers were always white - because they were always us! So we made a decision to shift the framework of our monthly event to bring in guest speakers so that we could uplift and learn from people of color (as well as other missing perspectives). We spent all of 2019 working to shift and refine our entire event structure to allow us to recruit and manage events with guest speakers every month. We have gotten good feedback about this shift from BIPOC in our community and we will continue with this framework for all of our events moving forward.
2020 focus
This year we will be expanding our team of contractors. Our racial justice focus for the year is to create a process for recruiting contractors for our agency that is diverse, equitable, and just.
We will also be creating a regular reading list - roughly one book per quarter for the leadership (aka Harmony and Noé) to read, discuss, and work to implement within the business. More details along with our current reading list TBD.
Gratitude
We want to close by expressing our gratitude for the wisdom we have been so fortunate enough to receive both from our formal anti-racism teachers as well as every person of color who has ever been gracious enough to teach us about the things we can’t see. Thank you for helping all of us get liberated.