As our curriculum expands we are proud to present these NEW tools in Stage 1 of the OF/BY/FOR ALL curriculum to debut in our June 2023 cohort.
The OF/BY/FOR ALL Change Network is a self-paced, 12-month online program that provides structure, tools, coaching, and community to accelerate your goals toward making your organization more of, by, and for your diverse community. It is both structured and flexible to remain nimble, responsive and fluid as a change organization should be. It’s explicitly presented in the name, CHANGE. As our curriculum evolves we are pleased to present some positive additions to our Stage 1 tools that we are excited about. We’ve also shared an overview of all 5 stages further down in this article.
Stage 1 is all about creating a vision. We ask our members to imagine the future that they long for in order to practice making it a reality within their organizations and alongside the new communities they want to build stronger relationships with. So here’s what’s new.
1. Creating Intentional Relationships (Exploring & Creating Relational Protocols)
First and foremost, Stage 1 of the Change Network curriculum focuses on building the foundation needed for creating intentional relationships within the change making team. How a team operates internally is a direct reflection of how an organization as a whole relates to and works with its community. For this reason, we start things off by guiding our members through developing protocols for creating intentional relationships that they will revisit throughout their journey in the Change Network.
“Relational protocols” are systems of boundaries and practices that can be used to build and maintain healthy relationships that are meaningful, caring, safe, and generative. This new tool helps teams reflect on each individual’s personal protocols, explore real-life examples of community protocols, and create shared protocols for their change-making team.
These protocols are meant to be shared understandings and guidelines, not punitive rules or regulations. If built with clarity, they can transform relationships by making care and respect for all participants a routine and transparent practice.
The core question of relational protocols is: What agreements can guide us to be in healthy relationships with each other?
Protocols are also not meant to be static or stagnant. They can be challenged, shifted, and renegotiated to serve the needs of individuals, as well as the group. The goal for our members in this exercise is to develop, expand, or rethink their protocols to make space for nuance and complexity. It may feel easy to see protocols or Community Agreements as unnecessary or even performative. But taking the time to create protocols with intention is a crucial first step in moving towards the bigger transformation we say we want in our organizations and in our world. When we do not create protocols that support us to be in relation with intention, we ultimately default to and perpetuate harmful and oppressive ways of being that harm our relationships and maintain inequity. If we hope to achieve our goals for equity and inclusion outside our organization’s walls, we need to start inside first.
2. (Re)defining Equity and Inclusion
The next tool brings members to reflect on OF/BY/FOR ALL’s 10 Equity and Inclusion Concepts that are integral to the Change Network curriculum and consider their team’s and organization’s relationship to them. The goal is to discuss, collect knowledge, and create a working definition for these terms that applies to their workplace and their change goals.
The 10 Equity & Inclusion Concepts:
- Community-First Design
- Curiosity
- Asset-Based Thinking
- Radical Partnership
- Community Accountability
- Power
- Harm
- Institutional Trauma
- Unlearning
- Radical Imagining
Through this activity, they can identify whether these ideals are already in alignment with their organization as a whole or if they are something they will aspire to work toward. We encourage our members to revisit this exercise with partner organizations and the communities they build with e throughout the change-making process.
3. Uncovering What Brings You to the Table & Understanding Team Ecology
This new tool asks each individual team member participating in the Change Network program to reflect on why they decided to be a part of this work. They are challenged to do this reflection individually and then come to the table to share with their team and discover the connective relationships they have with their other colleagues in what brought them to this work.
We encourage each person to bring their whole self to the table, and to lean into vulnerability and honesty. Human experiences can be powerful change-making tools and they are welcomed during this process to reflect on Equity and Inclusion not just as theories, but as lived experiences that hold value and lessons that the entire group can learn from. We also know this may bring up challenging experiences, wounds, and difficult reflections for participants so we offer teams to return to their relational protocols for support as they enter into these vulnerable conversations. And as part of our conversations around care, we also encourage people to have and hold their own personal boundaries, engage in self care, and to be accountable to one another whenever harm becomes present. This is another space to practice embodying care, agency, accountability, and liberation, and we continue to encourage members to step up to that practice throughout the program.5
4. Reflect on Your Organization’s Alignment to The Team Vision of an Inclusive Future
Members are challenged to critically consider whether their team vision is already in alignment with that of their organization as a whole or if it is something they will aspire to work toward. Beyond the organization, it is our strong recommendation that members revisit the exercise of creating a vision and redefining what equity and inclusion means with partner organizations and the communities they have come to the table throughout the change-making process. Most organizations find that what they thought their vision was or should be in this beginning of this process changes dramatically as transformation occurs in each individual and within the organization – all informed by what they have learned through their relationship with their community of interest.
5. Understand the 4 P’s for Relation Centered Organizing
We understand that articulating how organizations create relationships with communities can be challenging. It’s important to be able to identify the “how” so that the powerful work can be replicated, adapted, and iterated. This takes deep listening, learning and an understanding of the following:
- Protocols
- Practice/Praxis
- Process
- Pedagogy
For a deeper dive into this concept of Relation Centered Organizing, read our recent blog Change Work is Constant and Constantly Evolving.
Overview of All 5 Stages
Stage 1: Creating a Vision
As mentioned above, the beginning stage of the OF/BY/FOR ALL curriculum invites members to radically imagine what a bright, inclusive, community-focused relationship with their organization could look like. This imagining requires a true reflection of a multitude of relationships on all levels. Relationship to self, relationship to other teammates, relationship to organization, and the relationship that exists between the organization and the community.
The foundations for the deep revolutionary work members will engage in begin in this stage when teams:
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Create protocols of care and communication;
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Define what inclusion and equity mean to the team ;
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Consider personal motivations or experiences that led them to this work;
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Align the vision with the larger organization; and
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Understand and begin to embody the concepts of relation centered organizing
Stage 2: Selecting a Community of Interest
It is not until teams become clear on how its individual members can relate to each other in honorable and intentional ways that they can select a community of interest that they wish to grow their relationship with. We emphasize choosing one very specific community so that members can practice learning about a community’s unique interests, concerns, strengths, and perspectives. Historically, many organizations stay in this stage for quite some time, as it can feel difficult to select just one very specific community to focus on. They often think about all the communities they imagine being present in their space, and their passion urges them to make as many big changes for as many communities as possible, all at once. However, this stage is an incredibly important part of the Change Network framework, and one we do not negotiate on. It is inspired by the theory of Targeted Universalism, which teaches us that when you offer intense focus on one targeted community and break down barriers for them, you inherently break down barriers for many more communities in the process. This also invites members to slow down and take their time, not only to get to know this community in their nuances, but to also practice building the muscles for deep community engagement with more communities in the future.
Stage 3: Listening and Learning
Stage 3 asks teams to listen to and learn from their selected community of interest. This requires vulnerability and genuine interest in connection between the members and those they hope to build with. In order to achieve this, we guide our members in creating a safe, open, and curious dialogue with community partners so that their community of interest’s voices can not only be heard, but also given space to inform tangible changes within the organization. We encourage members to make space for their community to develop a sense of ownership in organizational programming and decision making, and to see themselves as allies in actualizing changes in service of their community’s needs and interests. This listening and learning process is different from mining feedback and energy from communities in transactional ways. The invitation is for members to challenge themselves to share institutional power with their communities and change systems and practices to truly make their spaces representative of, co-created by, and welcoming for that community of interest.
Listening and learning might seem like a simple concept; however, we support our members to listen in a deeper way, and we provide tools and frameworks to teach them how to do so — such as our most popular tool to date, Partner Power. Through this process, most members uncover that their former notions about their community and what they wanted or needed were formed by assumptions and even unconscious biases. By building a safe and caring space where these community members can share in a vulnerable, unfiltered, and honest way, members discover not only opportunities for exciting changes in their programs, but also surface harmful systems and practices that must necessarily be shifted in order to become meaningfully and sustainably more equitable and inclusive.
Stage 4: Creating a Change Plan
In Stage 4, we move from reflection and conversation to putting the care teams practiced throughout the previous stages into action. Stage 4 is all about creating tangible and actionable deliverables informed directly by what they heard and learned from their community of interest in Stage 3. The Change Plan is a one-year strategy plan of five to fifteen very specific changes that organizations want to make based on what they heard from their community. Because the relationship building process is ongoing and is not intended to end in Stage 3, Change Plans also can and often must change as they continue to develop deeper, more trusting relationships with their community of interest.
The Change Plan is a clear roadmap and set of measurable actions that provides an avenue for organizations to be accountable to their goals, as well as accountable to their community of interest and other stakeholders invested in this work. The Change Plan also becomes a way to share the change internally within and throughout the organization so that colleagues outside the Change Network team can understand the ways the organization is shifting to become more equitable and inclusive.
We encourage organizations to continue to be in partnership with their community of interest in the development of the Change Plan, as well as with the OF/BY/FOR ALL team, so that all can provide supportive feedback and acknowledge where things can shift and grow. We remind our members that it is highly important to keep the community’s voices at the center of the Change Plan throughout its development and implementation, which comes in Stage 5.
Stage 5: Making Change and Creating Continuity
The point when the Change Plan is implemented, but it is not about reaching a finish line, nor accomplishing a single goal and declaring success. It’s about continuity and replication. In order to create lasting change teams must remember how they got to this stage. After thorough review, feedback and revision process, the Change Plan is finalized and with this, organizations gain access to a whole library of customized tools to support them in acting on the changes they say they want to make. For example, if one deliverable in their Change Plan is to diversify their board and add two new board members from their community of interest, we release a tool to the organization that teaches them how to do that.
Stage 5 encourages our members to reflect on the 4 P’s once more - protocols, practice/praxis, process, and pedagogy. What were the protocols that were developed in order to be in an honorable relationship with one another? How did they turn knowledge and competencies into action? What were the necessary steps they took in order to build, sustain, grow and evolve their community relationships? Lastly, how can these steps be communicated externally so that the work can be replicated, further embodied by others and translated beyond their organizational walls in the future? If there is a single goal in stage 5, it is to recognize that the work should live on and continue to grow beautifully. We also continue to remind organizations that when it comes to change management and relationships generally, none of this is a linear process.
Our curriculum is set up in stages to offer some structure to our members, but we always invite members to continue to be adaptive and responsive to whatever shows up throughout the process. This might require organizations to go back and revisit Stage 3 and do more listening and learning. Or, organizations might find in Stage 3 that the community of interest they selected was not specific enough, and so they may need to go back to some activities in Stage 2 and refine their community of interest even more. Ultimately, the goal is to not be formulaic or rigid, but to flow, adapt, and be led by the relationships. In fact, we encourage organizations to measure their progress and success not by the number of stages they complete, but by the strength of the relationship they’ve built with their community of interest. Some organizations do not complete Stage 5, or even make it to Stage 5, by the end of their 12 month membership. But if by the end of the process they’ve developed a trusting relationship with a community that did not exist prior, that is a win and a huge step forward in becoming more equitable and inclusive. Additionally, we provide organizations the option to renew their membership for a second year to continue building that relationship and completing the goals in their Change Plan with our support. In fact, 30% of Change Network members decide to renew their membership for a second or third year.