We’re excited to share the audio recording from the 2024 Collective Impact Action Summit Day 3 opening panel discussion on the current challenges of advancing equity work amidst anti-DEI backlash.
Without proactively removing the structures and systems that have contributed to inequity, place-based collaboratives can not make a meaningful impact on the lives of those most excluded and underestimated in communities. However, given the increasing anti-DEI political and cultural headwinds unfolding in the US and several other countries, communities are facing increased challenges pursuing their equity work.
To explore this topic, we share an audio recording from the Day 3 opening panel discussion at the 2024 Collective Impact Action Summit. The panel discusses the challenges collaboratives are facing in their work to advance equity and how collaboratives can navigate through this adversity to continue making progress towards their collective goals. This session was originally held on May 2, 2024.
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Resources and Footnotes
More on Collective Impact
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
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Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode, we’re sharing a keynote panel conversation from the 2024 Collective Impact Action Summit that was held this past spring. The panel discusses challenges collaboratives are currently facing in their work to advance equity, including a rising Anti-DEI and Anti-Equity backlash that’s unfolding in the U.S. The discussion also explores how collaboratives can navigate through this adversity so that they can continue making progress towards their collective goals.
Featured in this keynote panel are Monique Miles who serves as managing director at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, and Paul Schmitz and Junious Williams, both of whom serve as Senior Advisors to the Collective Impact Forum. Moderating this discussion is Collective Impact Forum executive director Jennifer Splansky Juster. Let’s tune in.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: As I mentioned I also have the pleasure and the privilege of being the moderator for today’s opening panel during which I’ll be joined by three incredible colleagues.
Today we’ll be discussing what we see unfolding here in the United States with respect to, let’s not mince words, the attack on equity. I’ll be honest with all of you. This is a very important conversation and I have struggled to find the right language for the conversation. What are we experiencing? Are we facing headwinds in our equity work? No, that makes it sound like things aren’t happening by design, like it’s just a natural phenomenon. Is it about polarization or division in the U.S.? Well, we know that our country and many other countries around the world are very polarized. But that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here either as that implies, as our panels have reminded us many times over the past few months, that people—when you're talking about polarization that implies people with a range of political perspectives are having a hard time finding common ground to achieve a vision of the future. So that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here either.
Having had many conversations with folks across the field and very specifically with our three panels today, I am compelled to name this what it is. We’ve living in a moment where the idea of a full multiracial democracy is under attack. A multiracial democracy living in a country where regardless of who you are people of all races and all forms of identities are safe. All people are recognized as equal members of communities where individuals are treated fairly and individuals are equally represented, where social equity is experienced by all members of our society. This is the vision for America that we are striving for and that’s under attack.
And we know that this threat to democracy and attack on equity is not only here in the United States. Equity work, racial equity, gender equity, equity for LGBTQIA+ and trans folks in the U.S. is under a systematic, coordinated attack. This is what we mean when we say democracy is under attack.
We see this at the federal level such as the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, not only the ruling itself for higher education but also the chilling effects that it has had across the country such as with nonprofits and the private sector well beyond the jurisdiction of the ruling itself.
So for example, these chilling effects are causing people with programs designed for people of color to fear getting sued. You may have heard of the Fearless Fund Case out of Atlanta. And as a result, people are changing their programming to be more broad, these changes not required by law but based on the real fear, the fear of being sued. As a small nonprofit with limited resources that risk is real. This is not only happening in red, red states. Nonprofits in places like California or Massachusetts are making these shifts due to the risk as well. This is what we mean when we say that there’s a chilling effect. We see this in policies passed at several states.
For example, restricting the rights of trans people, banning books, restricting the use of the term DEI, state policy offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion being closed at public universities. And we see at local levels school boards and city councils, places where local communities are not allowed to apply for federal funding if the funding opportunity has equity in its name or description, places where community school boards have banned social-emotional learning.
And for some folks, this feels different than where we were in 2020 and ’21 when many individuals, organizations, and companies were making commitments to racial equity motivated in part by the disparities that were laid bare during COVID, in part by media coverage and movement work after the highly visible murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans, people who previously refused to see this reality were given no choice. But this widespread support for equity doesn’t seem like where we are today in 2024.
And yet, at the Collective Impact Forum and you here with us this week we are committed to this work. Many individuals and organizations are committed. We have to remain committed to this work in spite of these challenges.
There’s not a better group to discuss these challenges and explore ways that communities can respond than the three people joining me today. These three panelists joining me are members of the Collective Impact Forum family and all three are all mentors to me, so I am honored to be in conversation with them today. I’ll provide a brief introduction to each and encourage you to please learn more about all three by reading their bios on Whova or on their organizations’ websites.
First joining me is Monique Miles. Monique is a vice president of the Aspen Institute, director of the Opportunity Youth Forum and managing director of the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions. Prior to joining the Forum for Community Solutions, Monique held positions at the National Youth Employment Coalition, Youth Opportunity Boston, and the Commonwealth Corporation. Monique serves on the board of Independent Trust and the Jeremiah Program. Hey, Monique, welcome.
Next, we welcome Paul Schmitz. Paul is a senior advisor to the Collective Impact Forum and CEO of Leading Inside Out. Over the past seven years he’s worked with collective impact efforts across the U.S. on building better strategy and culture. He is also the author of Everyone Leads: Building Leadership from the Community Up, and the former CEO of Public Allies where he helped more than 5,000 diverse young adults begin careers working for community and social change.
Finally, last but not least, Junious Williams. Junious is also a senior advisor to the Collective Impact Forum and the principal of Junious Williams Consulting, a firm specializing in research, policy analysis, collaboration facilitation, program development and assessment focused on increasing equity and social justice. He has worked over the last 25 years on a variety of multistakeholder, multisector collaborations, and collective impact efforts providing guidance and support in design, implementation, facilitation, management, and program improvement for initiatives spanning from full-service community schools to cradle and career pathways from Opportunity Youth education and employment to improving outcomes for boys and men of color.
So, welcome, Monique, Paul, and Junious. I want to start just by asking why do you think it’s important that we have this conversation now with the people on this call? Why does this matter to all of us? I am going to start with you, Monique. Welcome.
Monique Miles: Thank you for this question. It’s Important to have this conversation now for all of the reasons you articulated in that opening, Jen. Our democracy is under attack and it’s leaders like Michael McAfee at PolicyLink who remind us we all must have a founder’s orientation in doing the work to ensure that the all vision of our democracy comes to fruition.
Our country, states, communities, and families, including our children, are under attack and as we stand deeply anchored in the present organizing to win on our vision of a multiracial democracy, we have to remember how present history is even in this very moment of now.
As Nikole Hanna-Jones reminds us history is not only in the past. It is ever present. And the reason why history is ever present is because history has shaped the very systems, laws, and policies that create the current context and culture we live in today, especially the laws that decade after decade are by design. They are designed to reframe the conversation about race in this country so that any meaningful racial progress by any group that is not White is in opposition to Whiteness, to White supremacy, and to White patriarchy.
This conflict has existed since slavery, during Reconstruction, and even in the sixties and seventies with the passing of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, both of which were gutted first by Nixon and then ultimately by Reagan in the eighties. Time and time again we bore witness to the passage of federal, state, and local laws that are not only deeply racist, they serve to further fracture our democracy.
Like the Rockefeller drug laws of the seventies and eighties, which served as our country’s design to pivot and to mass incarceration. Fast forward to the opioid crisis which I lift up with lots of love, care, and reverence for the individuals and families impacted and to share that when the who of who was impacted with the opioid crisis was clear, the response was the opposite of criminalizing addiction. There was a coordinated care response centered around compassion and accountability.
So when we talk about affirmative action or Roe versus Wade or anti-DEI laws, we have to contextualize the strategies into a broader historical context and perspective of time because we’ve seen these strategies before. We know the impact that they have on our communities most especially our vulnerable places, the impact by design is intergenerational. Most importantly, there are historical lessons to be shared on how to tactically organize and we must continue our freedom dreaming. You see, freedom dreaming is at its heart about our ability to organize not just a multiracial vision of democracy, but a democracy that’s built on solidarity, mutuality, and a shared collective vision for humanity because once we do that, we can solve so many more challenges. That’s why it’s important to have this conversation now.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yes, Monique. Thank you so much for grounding us in where we’ve been in the history that gets us here and why it is as important as ever. So, thank you for that. Junious, what would you like to bring into the conversation? Welcome.
Junious Williams: Thanks for coordinating this, Jen. I really appreciate the initial framing that you did and the augmenting of it that Monique just did. I guess, for me, I would just kind of reiterate some points there. There is this attack on equity that’s part of a larger attack on democracy, but what’s most frightening is what’s being proposed in this is minority rule that just makes me shiver, and its abandonment of democratic principles that you see not only in polling but in discussions with folks, and that what’s going on is a really well-financed, well-coordinated effort to really shift the mindset of people in this country about the commitments to that multiracial democracy and to have people begin to question how we go about rectifying the past.
One of the things that’s most concerning to me is the assault on equity for me means we’re never going to achieve equality given the history of how we’ve discriminated whenever we found difference in this society. There’s no way to get to equality without equity because we have to repair the harm that’s going on and this assault on even talking about equity is saying that we are no longer going to pursue an agenda around equality. I am experiencing as I talk to people or they are experiencing folks trying to do this work a great deal of trepidation. They’ve invested so much in moving the equity agenda and now they're in almost a state of suspense.
I think one of the things that makes this a timely discussion is people got a lot of decisions to make, right? People have to make personal decisions about their commitment, their risk tolerance because this is going to be a rough road ahead. This is like the third Reconstruction that we’re entering, and it is about race, and it is about like ignoring the history that got us here and preventing us from achieving the future that we owe to people that we’re on the precipice of doing.
And that’s why the resistance is so difficult. Folks need to make some personal decisions. There needs to be some organizational decision making, not the fluff that we experience in the so-called period of reckoning in the post-murder period with George Floyd itself, but a real organizational commitment to what are you going to do? How are you going to get your house in order? How are you going to remain committed?
But the collaboratives need to make some decisions to those people who have gotten together and most importantly, communities have to make a decision because if communities are not supportive of an agenda of pursuing equity, we ain’t going to get there, and I'm talking about grassroots, the grasstops, to the elites, people have to come together and these collaboratives that we have through collective impact are one setting in which those discussions can occur.
That’s why for me this is really important and we’re on a place where we may be close to a point of no return on this, and that’s what frightens me most and gives me a sense of urgency that all of us need to get our heads right about where we are on these issues, our organizations and institutions, and then we need to fight like hell. Final point, I have a sense having been in some form of this struggle my entire life, I feel like we’re in retreat. I don’t like to retreat and I understand the need for a strategic retreat, but my feeling is that’s not what is going on now.
And it goes back to what Monique just said, there are some lessons from history and movement building that for some reason we aren’t applying to the current set of situations that we absolutely need to do so that we have some offense. I realize that sometimes we’re going to resist, sometimes we’re going to retreat, but if we ain’t got no offense, then we’re going to lose this battle because it can’t be holding the current state because the current state for so many people is not satisfactory. There’s too much oppression, too much discrimination, too much isolation of people, so this is not a state that I want to live the remainder of my life or leave to my kids and grandkids.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Junious, thank you for that, already starting with our calls to action. I'm going to want to come back to what more of that means for folks on this call. But let me bring Paul into the conversation and Paul, what is important to you in this moment? Why are we having this conversation now? And you are on mute, so just a heads up.
Paul Schmitz: Thank you, and thank you, Monique and Junious. I think that the context and history of White supremacy which I think Monique walked through and just how policies and impacts we’ve had were designed. They were built that way. Systems weren’t accidental. They were actually designed to produce the results that we have. The concern about minoritarian rule and the fact that we have to be on offense, I think all those are incredibly important.
There are three things that I think about specific to collective impact. The first is that the work we do is to move some type of population-level change in whatever community we’re in. If we’re trying do systems change it’s to improve outcomes for populations. One of the key lessons we’ve all learned is you can’t move population change unless you address disparities within population. And so there really isn’t a way to get to population change without having equity in the center of the work and thinking about how do we address the disparities that are probably the largest block on moving population change. So it’s critical that everyone doing collective impact to have a frame that centers this work.
I think secondly is this context in which we do our work, whether you're working in education or in public health or whatever, the forces that have supported minoritarian rule, the forces that have supported White supremacy policy, are the forces that have also been anti-public health, anti-economic development, anti-education, anti, you know, so if you are working in these issues, these forces will affect. Heather McGhee who spoke at our summit a couple of years ago who wrote The Sum of Us, writes about how so much of policy, and this is true history, there were grouped people who kind of drained the swimming pool rather than integrate the swimming pool so that no one could swim, right? And that’s a metaphor for a whole host of policies.
And so, you have to think about the context in which you're doing your work on education or health or the environment or safety or whatever, that larger context matters to the work you do and so you can say I work on this issue in this community but if the policies that come down from the state, from the federal that are influenced by these conversations have huge impact on everyone’s ability to do this work. So I think those are two.
And the third is just it has been a sudden shift. 2020, 2021, there was a lot of cosmetic and performative equity. At the same time, it was a moment where it felt like we were playing some level of offense. And I think that’s why the backlash has been so sudden and severe, and I think those forces were always there. We saw in the previous administration there was already an effort to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion training.
There were, you know, we can go back to the rhetoric and everything else, and I think the thing we have to remember is that for people trying to address these issues in a local level, at a state level, that there’s a national narrative that has empowered and enabled people locally and at state levels to drive this. There’s a national media infrastructure that is supporting and enabling people to oppose this work. So as Junious said, we have to go on offense. We have to be willing to play offense and think about it. Those are just some of my initial thoughts about why we have to do this and participate in Monique’s freedom dreaming.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thanks, Paul. And a point you were almost starting to go there when you were talking about big picture, and then when we think about how this is landing in communities, as a team we really parsed out, there are different kinds of context or situations in the way folks are experiencing this on the ground. One type or architect, if you will, is where you might have a state where statewide policies are very, what would we call it, anti-DEI. We can call it racist. We can call it hostile. Within those states yet, there are places where people in communities are maintaining their focus on equity, and their coalitions are committed to this work. So I’d love to hear a little bit about what you're seeing in these kinds of places and how coalitions and collaboratives that are committed to this work are working to move forward in this time. And maybe, Paul, I’ll go back to you here.
Paul Schmitz: Sure, I mean I think it’s such an important distinction. I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our county executive which includes the suburbs just won the highest percentage of the vote ever in the history of the county, something like 89 percent, running for reelection on a platform of racial equity as being the guiding North Star of the county. So I live in that county where it’s not controversial to do this work, where it’s not something we, you know, our mayor, our county executive, our elected leaders here yet I live in a state where we’re on the margin of a legislature that definitely would like to ban all of that work and make it very difficult, and is trying to pass voting laws and other things that are inequitable, and have made efforts to ban DEI work at the campuses and other places so I have a sensitivity to that which is different than communities where the community itself is the issue and the local level.
At the state level I think the thing that I’ve seen people talking about that are trying to deal with this in states where they have passed these things is, one, building and educating champions especially in civic leadership and trying to get some leaders with guts to stand up and to recognize that based on values or perspectives that they have, making sure they understand the data, the case, and the necessity of doing this work and building champions who get this and are willing to stand up to the state with organizations and groups.
The second thing is to be really clear within coalitions what different restrictions on different partners mean and recognizing that some partners legally can't take certain stands or do things, and not shame them out of it but recognize that and recognize that there’s others who don’t have that limitation and they shouldn’t act as if they’re limited.
That goes to a third point which is get legal help because one of the things I’ve experienced for the last 30 years is the nonprofit sector sense, what the law allows nonprofits to do in advocacy and lobbying is here, what most nonprofits think they can do on lobbying and advocacy is here. I’ve heard so many, oh, we can't do that, you can't—people are so unaware of what they actually can do and I think as we parse out these laws and rules that are coming down from states, getting really clear about what are the actual boundary lines and being educated on that so you can educate others and you can work with others on those things because I think so often we just accept that that means we can't do anything, and then we all act out of fear instead of really understanding the line so we know how to move the line and work the line instead of being afraid of going anywhere near it.
So I think we have to get the legal information. I think we’ve just got to get clarity among different partners about where they can go and make sure that those who aren’t limited stand up and make the points and recognize that some others may not be able to do that. It’s not that they don’t believe in it, it’s that they will lose funding that is vital to children and families’ lives if they do and we don’t want them to lose that funding but we have to be willing to stand up and make sure that other partners stand up and figure out how to manage that within the network instead of expecting everyone to be in the same place. That would be my thoughts on that.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s right, Paul, and that’s very practical, things you can be thinking about in your work based on what Paul is suggesting. Junious, what’s coming up for you when you think about kind of the practical, on-the-ground advice in these kind of situations?
Junious Williams:Well, this panel process has been really good for me in terms of having a chance to talk with all of you and crystallize some of my thinking because part of what is emerging for me is I was drawing some distinctions as all of us are between these sort of permissive environments versus the more restrictive, and then new initiatives versus ongoing initiatives but one of the things that has occurred to me more recently as I’ve interacted with folks in California is we need to be concerned about all these environments. The messaging and communications around this assault on equity have been pervasive. It has really impacted people and again, there’s been not very much countervailing messaging from our side of the equation, and I raise that because one of the things that I’m sensing in interaction and this has done is it’s created a permission structure around questioning challenging. I don’t want to frame it exactly that way but people are questioning and challenging the basic assumptions that went into a lot of the equity work, even folks who have been doing it for a while.
So my first point is that I think tactically it’s really important for leaders of collaboratives to do some check-ins with people, to do sort of a support and risk assessment. The messaging has been pervasive and people who are relatively new as opposed to some of us who have had long-term lifetime commitments to this, those folks are concerned right now and their support is a little shaky, and I think it’s really important that leadership go around, assess that, find out how people are thinking about this, what their risk tolerance is, what kind of holes people feel in their ability to defend what we’re doing in equity. So I think that’s the first thing is understanding whether and how people are experiencing hesitancy, resistance or questioning of this, and begin to develop some responses to that so that you don’t lose the people that have already come into the circle and are trying to do the work.
I’d make two other quick points, one about startups. If I were, as I’m doing in a couple places now working with folks but if I were myself doing the startup of an initiative, I would really tie myself or tether myself or somehow connect myself solidly to targeted universalism because I think there’s a framing in that that permits you to defend targeted action. So that’s the first thing, is really understanding targeted universalism and the universal goal that also demands though that once you establish that universal goal, you have robust, disaggregated analysis because I think part of the solution, and I know people who have been committed to racial justice want to stay focused on that but one of the positions may be you have to move back and talk about all of the populations that are experiencing disparities and opportunity to representation and outcomes to help people understand how pervasive the discrimination and disparities are, and while they may be really exaggerated given our racial history, they are there for a lot of people in a lot of ways, and that we have the technology and the ability if we really mine our data to understand all of that but what the targeted universalism does is it gives us a context in which to say, OK, here’s our universal goal, how does everybody that we’re concerned with and all of the subpopulations, how are they relative to that goal? So that’s the first step.
The second step and the robust analysis of the data are really important here, is to know your backup proxies, and the power of various proxies because sometimes the strategy, the strategic retreat has to be I’ve got to go back to proxies. That means you’ve got to really understand your data, and working with data partners could do robust, cross-tabular analysis so if you’re moving to geography, you know what you’re going to get out of moving your basis to geography. If you do social economic class knowing what that’s going to yield and what it’s not going to yield for you but I think that part of the solution for folks in that is tying on and trying to universalize some of this stuff to dance around it because in that context, then you’re doing targeted interventions for all of the populations that you identify and prioritize as experiencing disparity, and it tends to quell it.
Quick story, when I was working in southeast Ohio a couple of years ago, framing this—and Monique mentioned this—the opioid crisis to say, when you frame that widely, what’s happening to suburban young White males? Wow. Opioid addiction, emergency room, you know, that sort of thing, and what you’re able to say is our thing is about this diverse, multiracial society, and we’re concerned about any difference in outcome, and we’re going to pursue it to understand why it exists and whether and how we have an obligation to remediate that so we’re lessening the disparate impact on it so for me, that’s a big part of it for folks who are starting up. You’ve got to be careful in how you frame. I think there’s some different prescriptions to talk about people who are already there and have a bunch of strategies and interventions that are out there and potentially vulnerable but I’ll stop at this point.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you, Junious. We had a couple questions in the chat I’ll just quickly speak to about clarifying what we mean by proxy and disaggregated data. Some of my colleagues will answer those in the chat but quickly proxy is using a different indicator than, for example, race. If you are not able to use race, what can you do that might get you to a very similar population, and so that is what Junious was referring to, and disaggregated data refers to looking at data as it is identified by different identity groups, race, gender or others, and then looking at how trends might differ when you split the data by those different groupings. My colleagues are going to respond with more detail in the chat.
Junious Williams: And a quick note, don’t call them identities.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Sorry.
Junious Williams:People go crazy with that. You understand the point, yeah.
Jennifer Splansky Juster:Thank you, Junious. Monique, thank you. I know it’s been a while since we were able to loop back to you but I really am eager to hear from you here.
Monique Miles:Yeah, this is such an important conversation and I want to connect my response to Paul’s framing of how important context is, and Junious, specifically you’ve been weaving that thread around history like people who have historically been doing this work because what feels really important to pull out, to be really clear about in this conversation is that right now we’re having a conversation the messaging is around the word equity but this is not a language fight, right?
This is about like the heart of what we’re doing is fighting for who gets to belong in our democracy. Every decade, every couple of decades we’re having a fight that at the center is something about language but none of this is ever, ever about language and so it feels really important then when we really understand what the fight is, that then we start organizing our short-term strategies, our short-term gains, and our long-term gains.
We’re doing that short-term view and that long-term view because of history, because of the role that history has played, and we should be organizing for because in 100 and 200 years, here is how we will continue to win and here is what that fight looks like, and I just want to make sure we’re really pulling this out because, yes, we’re talking about anti-DEI or an aversion to CRT but that’s not really what this fight is about so that’s one, thinking about the long term versus your short-term gain in your organizing.
The other thing that I want to harken back to part of what Paul was saying about the collaborative is the other thing that we know, like the reason why that offensive strategy that Junious was speaking to is so critical is because when you think about what a collaborative can do and particularly what a collaborative can do in response to the—literally to play defense, we could get so exhausted if we are not really organized strategically on whose voice to do what best so when you start looking at this cross-system, cross-sector and who sits where in the ecosystem, organizing your strategy based on which lane people are in, based on what they can do publicly, privately, with the law, with policy, etc., also becomes really, really important in organizing our offensive game as Junious was speaking to. And then the last piece that I want to say is I want to contextualize all of this because we support something called the Texas Opportunity Network at the Aspen Opportunity Youth Forum.
That work is led by my wonderful, esteemed colleague, Dr. Hannah Gourgey, and what we’re seeing in Texas is public institutions that are gravely impacted by the state’s legislation calling for the elimination of DEI programming and strategies. One example, The University of Texas at Austin, released over 60 staff and faculty associated with DEI programming. Student organizations associated with racial, religious, ethnic, LGBTQIA identity have also been gutted at public postsecondary institutions across the state. State agencies in Texas, they’ve eliminated the term equity, racial justice from RFPs. It’s exactly what Paul was saying. This is tied to funding. This is tied to sustainability. This is we know the trickle-down of the impact of these policies, and community collaboratives are integral to what offense looks like at organizing at the state level but also locally so some of what we see are coalitions that are organizing and have shifted focus to do work that’s focused very specifically on the long game, and then they have an entire set of accountability metrics that they’ve put in place to really begin to document and tell that belonging story.
We also see coalitions that are leveraging public funding streams specifically to invest in programming for youth and young adults of color, health funding being used creatively, WIOA, Workforce Investment Act funding being used creatively, even ESSER dollars. Thinking about alternate pathways for some youth and young adults of color in communities is also another creative thing that we’re seeing, and then the last piece and I’m so glad that Junious walked through it and really pulled the thread in the way that he should is targeted universalist approaches, absolutely.
That is one of, I would say, the four most offensive strategies we’re seeing collaboratives in places like Texas, in places like Montana use because, to Junious’s point, they can disaggregate to look at who is justice impacted, who is foster care impacted, who are our undocumented students, excuse me, youth and young adults, in ways that then help them get to a lot of what Junious just walked us through. Finally, there are places that are not changing anything. They are doubling down. They are really clear, we’re not giving up on our equity work and, if anything, we’re going to broaden and expand it.
Now we’re doing equity and healing work because we see what you’re doing and we want to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves now intergenerationally so we’re going to continue this equity work and we’re going to be even more strategic and thoughtful about wellbeing so that our children’s children will have an entirely different reality that they experience because we’re centering wellbeing, self-care, community love and compassion in our opposition work to the state. So that’s a lot of what we’re seeing in our network in terms of not just what’s happening but the organizing responses that are helping communities continue this important work.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Monique, that’s awesome. Thank you, and a big shout out to the Opportunity Youth Forum and the sites that are so committed to this work across the country and finding themselves in really different context and learning from each other so thank you for uplifting all of that. I want to just ask and maybe I’ll have—Paul, you mentioned sort of the rural/urban dynamic that you see in your home state of Wisconsin. Tell us a little bit more about what you’re seeing in some of the places where the local context is posing to be the big there—proving to be the biggest challenge.
Paul Schmitz:I just want to also thank Monique and Junious and show that this is my note so far on what you all have been saying so I really appreciate being part of this effort with two leaders I’ve known for a while and admire so much. So I had a couple thoughts here.
One is that I think at the—we always have to understand what is our goal. Is our goal to be recognized for performatively showing that we care about this stuff and preaching to the people who already care about or is our goal to bring more people along into our effort, and I’m speaking at a local level. I think sometimes what I see is a lot of people kind of circling their own wagons versus trying to build, and I think if I am I a local community, I’ve got to have a build strategy, and I think that is all about the relational. One of the examples that I think about is the marriage equality movement, and what they learned about moving people to support marriage equality was the number one thing that moves someone is when someone told their story about how and why they came to believe it was important. If they came in and tried to explain to someone why the rights matter and try to give them all the arguments about society, that didn’t move people but literally walking through their story gave people a permission to grow themselves instead of being like starting with like, well, I don’t know anything, I’m ignorant and you’re calling me ignorant. It was more like, oh, you can actually take a journey, you can do that.
So I think these so-called stories, I think if we’re meeting with people in our communities, we’re saying, listen, this is how we—this is how our coalition came to this, this is why we believe it’s important, this is why I believe it’s important, this is how I learned that, and when I started, I didn’t know that.
One of the things it made me think about as I was reflecting on this question is I was once in a city in eastern Texas, a small town closer to Louisiana, and there was this guy who actually sponsored my visit to this community was a rancher, and he told me his story about how he went from being someone who would have never supported this kind of work to supporting it. I wanted to put him on every stage in America because his own story of he said—you know, he talked about the moment where in his words, he had to kneel down and ask God to forgive him for his racism and like how he converted, and I was just like—and I knew the people that were part of his journey and I thought what if they had just attacked him or argued with him or opposed him versus the way they engaged and built relationship with him, and that enabled him to take a journey that led him to be a big supporter of these efforts, and so I think there’s this thing that we have to think about of like how do we bring people along, and I think to another former speaker, thinking of empathy and Brené Brown, we approach it in thinking of grace but also not—it’s not everybody’s work to do that and that’s something that’s really important but I think we have to think about how we build allies, how we help people along, how we make sure—I’ve spoken in small rural communities where I’ve had a few different people come to me, you know, I know a lot of people here don’t talk about these things but I’m so glad you’re here. I’m like why aren’t you talking to each other, right? Like find your allies, build more allies, do it through story, do it through your example, do it through how you got there. And that still means standing up when it’s important to stand up and when there’s issues in the community, being a voice for everyone belonging in the democracy, for everyone belonging in the community, not standing down from that or hiding that, being out there but also finding ways to do that in ways that can build allies instead of just get recognized or rewarded by those who are already there.
The last thing I wanted to share is my partner, Dominique Samari, has this thing called Kin Universe but what Dominique has really learned is she does this relationship building across this where people have to have five different conversations that are more personal, and then the sixth goes into race, and there’s a whole process by which they choose how they’re going to talk about it but her point is that build the relationship and then go there versus start the relationship there, and so I think we just have to really think of the relational at the local level and think about goal. I’ve seen a lot of people come into it again wanting to be recognized for being a leader on it without doing the things that can actually build allies and support and partners at a local level where a lot of people just don’t know, and you can actually bring people along through your own example of how you’ve gotten there.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you, Paul. I just want to note for everyone, this session is scheduled to end at the top of the hour and I’m going to ask forgiveness if we can run about 10 minutes long because I really want to ask a couple more questions to Monique, Junious, and Paul. You will still get a 20-minute break before your next session I promise so thank you for your forgiveness. Monique, would you like to add in here?
Monique Miles: A tiny bit actually because what Paul said made me think of two things. This is not to be reductive. None of this, none of this can ever be reduced or boiled down to any simplistic idea, notion or strategy. I just think it’s so important that what Paul is talking about in our relational work is centering our humanity, seeing each other’s humanity, holding each other’s humanity in a way that is antithetical to culturally how these laws and policies have served to fracture and disconnect us from being able to hold, see, and center each other’s humanity. It feels important to name that because sometimes we get super technical in our strategies or we’re holding the complexity of how adaptive the challenge is and how we need to be responsive in a very complex way but sometimes at the very, very core of this is our ability to see and connect in our most human and fundamental way.
I imagine and dream of what our democracy won't just look like but what it will feel like when we can hold each other in the intimacy of each other in such a simplistic, necessary healing, intergenerationally healing way, and again, everything Junious said about the organizing, being prepared to sue, being prepared for the legal fight, to take it to the courts, I also think we must not forget that this is cultural change work we’re doing, cultural strategy work that we’re doing which really is also about narrative change and narrative strategy because part of also what Paul was talking about is this zero-sum, the idea we know this, right? That if somebody is winning, somebody else is losing so we can, we should, we need to get super tactical on our legal strategies.
We need to get clear on our messaging, that campaigning, policy advocacy. All of that is really important coupled with let’s not forget to see and hold in really sensitive, empathetic ways each other’s humanity, and then let’s get really clear on the cultural strategies and narrative strategies that help us to not just tell different stories but the shifting of our hearts and minds that lead to different stories. It’s beautiful to hear that first you have like four conversations on being human before you then talk about the very constructs that by design fracture, divide us. They serve the other, they serve to do the opposite of bridging, the breaking that John Powell teaches us. Anyway, that’s what I would add to what Paul has shared.
Jennifer Splansky Juster:Thank you, Monique. Lots of love for that in the chat, the emojis. One of the things I just want to give a moment of attention to is we’ve been talking largely about how collaborative collective impact efforts can show up and move this work forward, and these kinds of efforts are one piece of the broader landscape, and this has come up in bits and pieces but I just wanted to ask a little bit more clearly what you would encourage folks working in collective impact to do in terms of connecting with the broader justice ecosystem so movement organizers, space builders, legal work. Junious, I’d love to get your perspective on how these efforts should coordinate and collaborate with other strategies in their place.
Junious Williams: Well, a couple things. I think you need to really be careful, right? If you’re a backbone organization, most of you probably experience this that folks around a collaborative table form this concept that you’re kind of aligned on everything, right? And so while the collaborative may take a certain position with respect to how they’re going to address equity either initially or on a continuing basis, you’ve got to make some decisions if it’s not satisfactory in terms of how you want to show up in the work. What gets problematic is identification of some of us who are leaders in collaborative tables that may constrain it. I guess I start with the point that you need to be really careful as you wade into the broader community around what impact, where you position yourselves around equity issues are going to impact what happens at your collaborative table. It’s not to say you shouldn’t do it but you should just be aware. I think the broader thing is I do or as you do your kind of personal, your organizational, your collaborative, and your community sort of assessment of where you’re going to go and how you’re going to try to do the equity work, you may get constrained.
As I was saying, the collaborative may say, no, we need to back off, hold up a little bit and not pursue something. I think individual members of the collaborative and especially the backbone and the leadership need to be careful about how they make their—how they do their personal work around equity in the same community. I’m just saying that people get confused if you're in too many positions about whether you’re representing the collaborative or the individual action. I think Jen’s broader point though is a good one, is that there are certain things that cannot be pushed through these collaboratives.
A quick example, we had a reentry collaborative table in Oakland that never got anything done around policy and systems change because the whole criminal law infrastructure was at the table and they didn’t want to change anything. What we ended up saying is we can't do it there. We’ll stay at that table and move it as we can but what we need is we need our own table to move this work. Now in Oakland and Alameda County we were able to do that and we created the Justice Reinvestment Coalition which was able to kick ass on criminal law reform issues not constrained by the fact that corrections department and the police jurisdictions and that whole establishment didn’t want to see anything change except a little program dabbling so I just say that to say you need to make some strategic decisions, where the people you’re connected with willing to go on it, how does that jibe with whether you organizationally, individually or as a member of the community want to go and navigating that carefully because your identity with the collaborative may carry around with you and send messages that hurt your collaborative work.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: All right, so I want to be sure we get to at least one audience question, and I know that we promised only 10 minutes long so I’m going to ask a clarifying question and then a conceptual question from the audience, and I’m going to ask them both. Junious, you had mentioned not to use the word identities when talking about my response to disaggregated data and several folks wanted to understand why and what a recommended alternate term would be so we’ll take that for hopefully a quicker answer and then I’ll ask a bigger question.
Junious Williams: Yeah, because identities is charged and is part of the cultural warfare, and if you go there, you’re going into that conversation. I tend to say demographic characteristics of the population. I do something soft that is very inclusive of everything. That can be from geography to identities, it’s all there but you don’t focus on identities which is a flashpoint.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Very practical, thank you. So folks appreciate the reference to targeted universalism and I know all three of you really look toward that methodology, and someone asks what if folks, when you recognize and take a targeted universal approach still see this as equity or a DEI angle and push back on it or remove themselves from the conversation when they even hear targeted universalism? What would you advise?
Junious Williams: You want to lead off, Monique?
Monique Miles: Sure. So I have to say I have two thoughts. What I’ve been thinking, what’s been building up in me that I think I’ve been speaking to in some ways is that’s why actually what Paul said being really clear about our goal is important because then this is a semantics fight. You’re fighting over language but this is not really what the fight is, right? This is a fight over the future of our democracy, who belongs in our democracy so that feels just really important as a disclaimer because the culture war is this ongoing war that is so often fought around language.
So that’s my first thought but my second thought around targeted universalism and maybe for some places that’s a nonstarter, I have two thoughts. I think the first is, and we see this in some of our communities, you continue work with the people who are willing to do the work, and that’s why it’s really important that, at least in our network, we have communities doing work and communities are tethered to state networks and so you really are able to have this multiprong strategy that is about helping you build allies in different places when language is a barrier locally that can't move the agenda. The other things though that I do want to say is that communities across our network use a range of strategies.
I lifted up some of what’s happening in Texas but for places where this is completely a nonstarter, the conversation is about mental health, and mental health is a way in to being able to do this work more broadly. Sometimes the conversation, I’m thinking of Del Norte Native and Tribal lands, the conversation there was a conversation about healing so based on where you are, based on context, based on public will, you do have to be creative about where you might want to start to be able to meaningfully move the agenda but let’s not forget that even in our local fighting efforts, we have to be tethered to broader coalitions that help us move different levers at different times in different ways.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s really helpful, Monique. Thank you.
Paul Schmitz: I just wanted to recognize that in the chat and questions we’ve shared the UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute’s website on targeted universalism but also the article many of us worked on for the Forum on centering equity and collective impact and the toolkit that collective impact efforts can use to actually try to—has practices for implementing it through your coalition and your effort which includes a section in both the article and toolkit on kind of the data and targeted universalism piece, and so just encourage people, those links are available and I think that I would encourage people to really did into all three as places to go for more information and learning. And I agree with everything Monique said.
Junious Williams: I’d make two quick points, one of which is that part of the strategy in using targeted universalism is that ultimately you get down to the individual pace, right? Because you’re going to do something for people who are experiencing diversity. It is inconsistent with helping people to ignore who they are, right? And I have trouble figuring out a way that people—once you get everything framed, keep in mind that you don’t ever exclude anyone from any intervention no matter how targeted it is. We had manhood development programs in Oakland that started with one for Black males, then we did Latino, then we did Native folks, and then we did Asian so everybody had one. Nobody could discriminate so if I as a young White male wanted to go to the Black male achievement program, I was totally free, and not only free to go there but I was welcome there because I was expressing an interest in Black culture and knew the environment so I’m saying that’s an important part of this, is that you’re not restricting anything, and what you're doing is saying what are the needs of this individual, right? And we’ve got this panoply of strategies and interventions that we’re going to fit to the needs of this individual. I think it’s very hard for people to impose these arguments about you being racist. You don’t want me to fully serve this individual? I don’t care who they are, they’re eligible for everything we have, and I’m looking at their individual circumstance to get the best individualized set of strategies to help them achieve the outcomes that they want in their life.
Jennifer Splansky Juster:You all, thank you. As I said when I opened, you are amazing. You are mentors to me and now to all 300-plus folks on the line getting to benefit from your reflections, your wisdom, and your brilliance so thank you, thank you, thank you. I know I anticipate many folks want to continue to learn with you so please, you all, see these folks as experts, and also, I will reflect that they are also big learners and want to keep learning with you also so please, from all of us at the Forum and the extended Forum family, please share with us what’s happening in your communities and how you all are responding too.
(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
In Forum news, we’re excited to share that registration is open for our fall workshop series titled "Essentials for Collective Impact.” This is an online workshop series focused on building practical knowledge and understanding around four key areas that support collective impact efforts. These focus areas are collaborative planning and engagement, building a data culture within your initiative, implementing and strengthening community engagement, and avoiding common challenges that can stymie the work of collectives.
You can register for the full series of workshops or just the topics that interest you most. You can find out more about this online workshop series in the events section of our website at collectiveimpactforum.org.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.