Does the current national conversation have you wondering, "What’s my role?" In this session with The Justice Collective (TJC), you’ll have an opportunity to start considering how you show up in the world and in your work. You’ll be exploring ideas around identity and bias with an eye towards equity in all that you do. TJC will facilitate a conversation where you can gain a deeper understanding of privilege, power, and how you can leverage your roles to support equity in your work, organizations, and community.
Our Approach
We know that there can be a lot of assumptions about what doing anti-oppression learning looks like. We want to lift the veil on that a bit and assure you that our job is to ensure that this is a brave space for really important conversations to take place.
With that said, there are some things we'd like you to keep in mind about how we approach this and how we ask that you engage in this space:
We believe in meeting people where they’re at. This means a couple of things. First, that we don’t expect you to be an expert on anything but your own lived experiences—those are valid and full of wisdom that can be shared. We’ll ask you for them often, and we hope you’ll be comfortable enough to share. Second, we understand that we’re all trying to manage in a pandemic and that can mean different things for each of us. Go figure, we’re all human and this is a bit messy. Feel free to let us know how we can best support you and we’ll do our best to accommodate, with no judgement.
"Gotcha" moments are not our thing. We have no interest in shaming or blaming. It’s not compassionate and really, no one wins. We’re more interested in collaboration, understanding, unlearning, empathy and trust-building.
A little discomfort is OK. We live in a world that does not encourage challenging conversations, and in fact, makes us a little fearful of them. We want to take the fear out of it. The conversations we have are challenging, but they’re also joyful, critical, empathetic, and healing. We’ll also be supporting you the entire time.
Try it on. Be willing to “try on” new ideas, or ways of doing things that might not be what you prefer or are familiar with.
Practice “Both/And.” When speaking, substitute “and” for “but.” This practice acknowledges and honors multiple realities.
There will be no test. All we mean by this is that we hope that, as we learn together, you’ll see that this is about the learning and the adjustments we make in our own lives to be as compassionate to others as we can be in this world. There is no test to pass or certificate to hang on the wall. However, we do take every opportunity to celebrate milestones, vulnerability, authenticity, and “ah-ha” moments.
TJC invests in equity, diversity, and inclusion to tackle organizational challenges and leverages opportunities for impact with our clients. We have particular expertise across the educational, government, nonprofit, and private sectors.
Our work focuses and supports organizations to take bold action towards a just and liberated society, starting with the people at each organization we work with and guiding them from where they are to where they want to go.
Here are two causes you can donate to now to support social justice:
Black Girls Code Black@VMware Social Justice Fund