What We Learned: New Orleans, LA Equity in School Cohort 20-21
In July of 2020, amidst dual pandemics in this country: both COVID 19 and systemic racism, Beloved Community launched our New Orleans Equity in Schools Cohort. This cohort marked our first all-virtual series in which we led eight synchronous sessions on Zoom. The series ended in March of 2021 and included four New Orleans schools and four education-adjacent organizations: Community Works, Bard Early College New Orleans, Edward P. Hynes Charter School, Lycee Francais New Orleans, Kipp New Orleans, Special Education Leadership Fellowship, and Youth Run NOLA.
Beloved Community is a non-profit consulting firm focused on implementing regional, sustainable solutions for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Through individualized and personalized support, Beloved Community fosters open lines of communication and realistic plans to create and implement tangible, measurable systemic change at work, at home, and in schools. Our approach is universal, achieving results for organizations in the not-for-profit sector, hospitality, school administrations, affordable housing and beyond.
We work with clients to ensure that historically marginalized people have real access and opportunity to live vibrant, productive lives.
Below, our Director of Education & Programming, Dr. Nicole Caridad Ralston (she/her/hers) shares some data and learnings from our Equity in Schools New Orleans cohort.
Equity in Schools
We like to say that Equity is a head and heart issue. It touches every part of our work life: governance, finance, operations, program, and culture. In this cohort we worked with charter networks, nonprofit partners, and charter schools, who all shared a dedication to operationalizing diversity, equity and inclusion into their school/organizational policies and practices. Regardless of the organization’s primary mission, our engagements focused on deepening their commitments via a culminating Equity Work Plan.
The Beloved Community Equity Work Plan is a three-year equity road map designed to support organizations in leveraging their equity data to turn their commitments into action. We support teams in operationalizing their equity agenda by defining three to five priorities and linking them to successful strategies and key actions for implementation, as well as clear metrics for accountability.
Each facilitated session builds individual agency and organizational accountability so that an organization’s DEI work becomes sustainable even if the leadership changes, the funding stream dries up, or staff turnover occurs. The cohort experience provides ample opportunities for organizations to do deep work within their organization while also creating a community of practice for organizations to share and discuss their strategies, successes, and pain points with similar organizations.
The full list of facilitated cohort sessions included::
Foundations of Racial Equity
Understanding the Equity Audit
Building & Assessing Belongingness for Adults
Building & Assessing Belongingness for Youth
Inclusive Community Engagement
Debiasing Talent Practices
Inclusive & Intercultural Leadership
Creating an Equity Work Plan
Additionally, we supported their leadership teams to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion expectations and practices into their ongoing work through five individual consulting calls.
New for 2020
Six-hour, virtual sessions. All sessions were held on Zoom. Facilitators utilized breakout rooms for small group discussions, polls, music, activity slides, and the chat function to create highly engaged, virtual sessions.
Icebreakers led by each school or organization. These icebreakers allowed each school or organization to build community with their peers.
Cohort workbooks & webpages. Each cohort member received a physical workbook that they could utilize in each session for notes, reflections, and resources. Each cohort member also had access to a webpage which held slide decks, resources, a PDF of the workbook, and an ability to submit regular feedback.
Virtual, closing happy hour with cocktails in collaboration with Turning Tables.
Our Cohort
Each school or organization brought seven to nine members of their teams to the six cohort sessions. In total, about fifty people participated in the cohort. Cohort members from each school or organization included the CEO/ED, Operations/Finance, Enrollment, Student Success, Principals, Deans, Data Strategist, Talent/HR, Programming, and Board Members.
Below is the self-reported demographic information of the cohort members:
Race & Ethnicity (cohort members were able to choose more than one, hence the percentages add up to over 100%):
Black/African American: 32%
White: 64%
Indigenous/American Indian/Native American: 1%
Hispanic/Latinx: 16%
Gender:
Female-Identified: 74%
Male-Identified: 22%
Non-Binary: 4%
Post-Survey Data. At the completion of the cohort we administered a post-survey to assess the learning and growth of participants, and to gather feedback about the experience. Below are the results from the survey:
Quantitative Themes
28.7% increase from the pre-survey in their willingness to intentionally incorporate diverse collaborators to my work and am willing to relinquish my own power, control, and air time to contribute to a more equitable community. I consider myself as an equal to all thought partners in a diverse setting.
Over 80% stated that they almost always or always advocate for the inclusion of diverse voices and opinions, and for shared power and accountability. An increase of 10% from the pre-survey.
There was a 20% increase in their ideal level of engagement in their organization with community stakeholders in decision-making and implementation. In the pre-survey only 32% of them stated collaboration as the ideal, in the post survey it was 52%: Collaborating: Enabling community members to participate in every aspect of planning and decision- making for new programs or services. Community members actively produce outcomes.
Collaborating is the second highest level of engagement in the Collective Impact Community Engagement Spectrum that we present in sessions.
Qualitative Themes
Biggest takeaways:
Shared Voice. “How long this process really takes if you want to do it intentionally and with true shared voice! We've talked about DEI for a long time but going through this year and having the space to really take time to talk about these things thoroughly (with great results) was an eye opener.”
Compensation. “The importance of compensating people for their time. We've been able to compensate student volunteers and participants, and I'm thankful we have the opportunity to do that. I'm hoping we can grow to compensate parents and families for their contributions in collaboration, including events like conferences.”
School Purpose. “Students need to see themselves as valued and schools should act as a mirror as well as a window to their future.”
Inclusive Parent & Family Engagement. “This cohort made me think carefully about how we engage parents and students as stakeholders. While we always strive to put students and families first, it is not always backed up in our engagement of those groups in our planning and decision making process. The audit tool was helpful in surfacing that.”
Balancing Urgency with Patience. “This was one of the first opportunities I had to participate in a DEI training that was this intensive so I am extremely grateful to be a part of this cohort. One thing that I learned is that these deep systematic changes take time. I am still working on balancing urgency with patience, because widespread change is long overdue. I also learned that this work never stops, there is no "end point". I also learned that DEI must be rooted in the foundation of the work we do to achieve sustainable changes.”
Organizational Improvements on DEI (as a result of the cohort):
Intentional Use of Data. “I see an attentiveness across our staff and board to having the accompanying systems to always have data to support our conversations and goals and initiatives. We are better able to pull reports to see how and where we are spending our money, asking questions like "does the race of a team leader seem to impact the outcomes of program participants", etc. and have the data and systems to explore that.”
Alignment with DEI Values. “We have done so much in the last year around this to walk the walk not just talk the talk. Examples: Taking and providing DEI training with admin and program staff teams. Reevaluating our outreach, hiring, and onboarding practices, creating more transparent communications and more opportunity for shared voice. Incorporating things like land acknowledgement, DEI icebreakers, and teambuilding/belongingness practices with our teams. Really moving forward with a youth advisory council!”
Intersectional Data Collection & Tracking. “We have been doing more to build the data tracking to support our understanding of and operationalizing our commitment to DEI. We're looking at program participants' and staff and board outcomes in the context of racial and gender identities, we are constantly asking for feedback and interviewing/surveying to gauge belonging, and we are looking financially at the distribution of our resources.”
Funding the Work. Secured PD for our entire network, created the first Black Lives Matter writing contest that is now a regional annual event, hiring for a DEI leader - a first in our org, systematized leadership hiring practices that made process transparent and garnered us a large increase of Black leaders in our schools, among other things.
Inclusive Curriculum. “I have looked into the curriculum and how it represents those that are marginalized. I am in the planning phases of creating a youth advisory board to help make school site decisions. I have invited parents and families of color to work with me to form a focus group. This group will work to educate teachers and staff on biases and to help inform the way we celebrate success.”
Equitable & Inclusive Talent Practices. “Intentionally recruiting and engaging identities that are representative of the communities we work with, through hiring and staffing, professional developments and training, decision making and evaluation. We have expanded our professional development monthly offerings to offer training and workshops that center on the topics of DEI. We are actively building and recruiting for a Youth Advisory Council.”
Testimonials
“I enjoyed each and every session and looked forward to my "DEI" day. I learned much about myself and my privilege. I have become less defensive and found it possible for me to have really hard race related conversations with my staff and my own family.”
“I really appreciate all that you have done and continue to do! This was a great experience and y'all role model so well of how to create that safe and vulnerable environment while talking about some really serious stuff! I hope to continue to work with and learn from the Beloved Community team!”
“A lot of it was really having the space to think about and talk through these things (especially in a world where there are so many things to do and talk about already)! I also really loved being able to share these ideas with people outside of our team. I'm a big believer in community of practice and this was great space for that!”
Beloved Learnings
Here are a few of our facilitator and project manager learnings, coming out of this cohort experience.
We can still deliver on our model, even virtually. We quickly adapted all of our in-person content to a virtual format. We learned that it takes more Beloved staff to execute smooth, engaging virtual experiences for our participants.
Six-hour long sessions are beneficial. The six-hour cohort model allowed for protected team time for our participants to work within their teams, and to engage in deeper cross-team conversations. The six-hour model also allowed for a reduction in pre-work before each session, because participants were able to complete work in the session.
We challenge neutrality throughout the cohort process. We open our cohort sessions by stating that we do not believe that neutrality can be an option for organizations who are ready to commit to sustainable DEI solutions. We also model that as facilitators - we do not pretend to ever be neutral or objective. We believe that we are all navigating our lives, jobs, and organizations through our social identities which color how we view the world. We challenge individuals and organizations from the start of our series to consistently interrogate where “neutrality” is actualizing into harmful policies or practices for those existing in the margins of their communities.
Feedback is love. We value and adore feedback at Beloved Community. We collect high-level feedback from cohort participants after every session, and deeper reflection at a mid-point coaching call. We utilize this feedback to make shifts between each session and to curate tailored content to use in facilitations and coaching sessions.
We help you turn your equity commitments into action. Among most of our organization leaders, we found that they were earnest, but unclear about how to move their commitment from talk to action. We built out practical post-work in between each of our sessions to move organizations forward in actualizing their DEI commitments. In every engagement, leaders shared with us how helpful our tools were to provide them with a clear framework for and confidence to lead their change strategy.
Readiness still matters. We firmly believe that our cohort is for organizations who already understand that this work is imperative and important. For those who are not at that “2.0” level, or who are not yet comfortable naming race, class, power, and privilege with us, we refer them to local or national trainers who could help them deepen their knowledge base.
Our Beloved Community
“The larger your beloved community, the more you can accomplish in the world. “
- Thich Nhat Hanh
None of our work would be possible without a growing beloved community supporting us. We are thankful to the following organizations who welcomed us into some of their most tender moments during the cohort series:
Community Works
Bard Early College New Orleans
Edward P. Hynes Charter School
Lycee Francais New Orleans
Kipp New Orleans
Special Education Leadership Fellowship
Youth Run NOLA.