Deep Equity
Deep equity is the work towards love, dignity, and justice that requires addressing multiple structural, institutional, interpersonal, and individual causes of inequity (both historic and current), and recognizes the social construction of identity, power, and privilege over time.
Change Elemental facilitates in-depth change processes focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and liberatory practice with organizations, philanthropic institutions, networks, and other groups of people. Through these partnerships, we support individuals and groups to develop shared understanding, deepened capacity, and courage, and to chart pathways forward for equity in their institutional cultures, structures, programming, operations, and leadership. For partners based in the United States, we center race in our equity work while holding an intersectional lens across multiple oppressions.
Change Elemental brings compassion, integrity, and experience into our partnerships with groups seeking to deepen their equity capacity. We work with our partners and clients to identify and address the most undiscussable issues in your organization, while supporting your capacity to more deeply understand the meaning of equity for your work. We believe that advancing deep equity requires ongoing attention to hearts, minds, behaviors, and systems. This means working toward outcomes in ways that model love, dignity, and justice, without re-creating harm in our structures, strategies, and working relationships.
Offerings
- Comprehensive equity assessments of organizations, philanthropic institutions, and networks
- Crafting and honing shared vision to deeply embed equity throughout an organization or group
- Strategic, multi-month/multiyear change processes, and actionable plans to address structural inequity
- Advancing culture change and relational shifts to promote healthier organizational and group climates (including healing at individual, team, and organizational levels)
- Processes to deepen understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion; power; privilege; (conscious and unconscious) bias; and liberatory practice
- Individual and team coaching
- Lifting up inner work as core to deep equity
- Designing multiyear strategic frameworks, with short- and long-range change strategies to guide next steps
- Implementation guidance and support, including building the capacity to implement with depth and fidelity to equity and your mission
- Building confidence, courage, resilience, and will for individual and collective equity practice
- Gathering and sharing lessons that help build capacity for advancing equity and collective liberation
“While FSG has always been made up of people who are passionate about contributing to social change and progress, we had not always had a shared understanding of how social injustice functions, nor a consistent and intentional approach to pursuing equity in all our work. Change Elemental conducted a comprehensive equity assessment of FSG and worked collaboratively with us to develop concrete recommendations for bringing a deep—rather than superficial—focus on equity into our work. They also pushed us to examine how we think about “competence” and to expand the ways we work to be more inclusive of a range of ways of thinking, being, and doing. Their work led us to experiment with new opportunities to partner in pursuit of social change, particularly with organizations that have been deeply focused on equity and social justice for decades. They gave us honest feedback, grounded their approach in love and a shared vision for what is possible, and enabled us to dig more deeply into who we are and how that informs the work we contribute to the world…”
Veronica Borgonovi, FSG