3 Next Steps for Leaders Who Want to Be Equity Champions
Committees with no structure and vague lip service are not the answers
It's hard to find mustard seeds when times change. It's hard to find those small reasons to keep the faith. And yet, progress for civil rights, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has always depended upon people finding and sowing those mustard seeds in our gardens. That, at least, hasn't changed.
In this moment, it is imperative that leaders empower other folks to be equity organizers. An equity organizer is someone who is able to use 1-1 conversations to help other people see why it is valuable to join the campaign for equity core values and practices. An equity organizer knows that they need to build a rapport (often by simply acting on those 7 habits of highly effective people like seeking first to understand and thinking win-win) just like the many teachers who know about how the ways that our brains learn new information. Equity organizers, unlike upstanders and bystanders, are part of a team that works to expand the population of people who want to campaign for equity too.
Advocates for equity probably already know that they can't be equity bystanders and they need to be equity upstanders. To me, that doesn't feel like enough and I suspect that it won't be enough for others because we try to be equity upstanders already. People who care about equity probably want to try something new for difficult times and it can't feel like a waste of time. It is not enough to be an upstander because it doesn't really change the number of equity upstanders. An equity organizer, though, can have faith in the future because they actively seek to be understood and supported by people who do not initially agree with them (i.e. people who have not publicly shared a commitment to be an equity champion at all).
Leaders already have access to the three tools for success. First, leaders need to convince their equity upstanders that they need to try to be equity organizers. Show that it's a mustard seeds for them because they can access the work from educators about the social, emotional, cultural, and intellectual needs of learners. My favorite is Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain; if you read it with other adults in mind, you will learn how to approach 1:1 conversations with people who don't already agree with you or want to be an equity champion at all.
Second, leaders need to be clear about their non-negotiables for equity. The term equity is a broad term and so many people try to show how everything is “aligned with equity” without specifying what equity even means. Identify the 2 or 3 core values that help to define what equity means. Imagine trying to be a professional or a volunteer for a campaign with no specifics about the candidate except “they want to improve the lives of other people.” You can't help people find some win-wins when you can't even specify what the campaign is even about. My core values include instructional equity, restorative practices for cultural conflict, and servant leadership. I have faith that everyone would benefit and barriers would be removed for underrepresented groups of people if these core values were treated as non-negotiables by my fellow leaders.
Lastly, leaders should use a credible plan and structure for a team to help equity organizers be successful. Specifically, leaders can use the 4 Disciplines of Execution so that members of the team do not feel like it is all a waste of time. Those 4 Disciplines are: identify a wildly important goal, act on the lead measures or those key activities that will have the most progress towards the goal, create a cadence of accountability, and keep a compelling scoreboard.
For the equity teams or equity committees, the goal can be “we will go from 0 to X amount of people who feel competent and confident that they can be effective equity organizers” or “we will go from 0 to 10 new people who agree to join our team of equity champions who seek to promote, defend, and improve our campaign for equity.”
The lead measures can include things like “we will do a book study that focuses on the brain rules of learning” and “we will develop 5 talking points to use when we want to initiate conversations about our non-negotiables for equity and why these are win-wins for them too.”
The cadence of accountability could be weekly check-ins for half an hour to track progress and provide some useful coaching for peers who are struggling (often due to anxiety in my experience).
The scoreboard would include the number of new equity champions that were the result of effective equity organizing + the lead measures that the team identified as good campaign strategies and tactics.
If leaders put money, time, and other resources for equity organizers, and if they avoid the powerful temptation to deviate from these plans and treat it as lip service (which is the tendency of equity work in this country), then they would drop some much needed mustard seeds for their fellow equity champions.