The fight for equity: Holding space, creating cover, embodying change
Tess Cooper, Founder of Collaborative Future, reflects on the three practices that have enabled her to keep driving forward change when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion.
With the pressure building for teams to invest in diversity and inclusion you’d think our work at Collaborative Future would become easier. Instead the main challenge has shifted from ‘selling in’ our work to businesses to the challenge of not ‘selling out’. More people are willingly engaging with discussions around diversity and many organisations are racing to make speedy changes without considering the ramifications of their good intentions. People want fast answers at a low cost and in the process they are reproducing the same systemic issues just under a different guise.
A while back we moved away from conversations purely about diversity and inclusion training and instead via our collaborative work placement programmes we embarked on a journey to work with organisations who were ready to build something new and weave equity into the very fabric of who they are. Training is easy to package up but the real work we do runs deeper than that, and we try as much as possible to deliver this work in a way that connects with individuals, organisations and communities at the unique place in their journey.
We wanted to share three approaches that we use to push ourselves and others to go deeper and further in this work:
Holding space
When it comes to changing our inequitable and harmful systems we need to hold space in two contexts:
1. Facilitating / creating spaces where groups and individuals can all work to unpack our social conditioning and rewire ourselves safely.
2. Holding space so that it can be filled by underrepresented people rather than consumed and dominated by those with most power.
Both require great patience, strength and self awareness. Centering others, and empowering them to go further with their thinking and actions, doesn’t come naturally to most people in our relatively individualistic society. It is draining work and you need to have built your own resilience to maintain that space for people within a system built on extraction and control. You’ll find at so many points that you are fighting to maintain a space where others can feel fulfilled and valued, while you are simultaneously being stifled and undervalued by the system.
This is why when I was flagging in my work I decided to bring together a mutual support group for others who were facilitating spaces and change like this. We all need to fill each other back up so that we can continue to hold these spaces. We also all need to be held accountable to keep learning and changing - earning a living through diversity and inclusion means I must continuously hold myself to the same standards I expect others to strive to meet.
The second point is extremely hard to do for anyone who has felt excluded and undervalued within our system. I often see this situation go one of two ways with emerging leaders - they either finally feel like they’ve made it and no longer feel it is their duty / feel too exhausted to fight for equity for others, or they are so scared of being part of the problem that they give up their seat at the table and that space inevitably gets swallowed back up again by those in power.
I was chatting to a brilliant woman the other day who had the opportunity to take a leadership role in a male-dominated industry. She was cautious that racial diversity was still underrepresented within the team though and felt perhaps she should pass over the opportunity in case it looked bad that she was part of an all-white board. But the reality was that she was stepping into this leadership role with this awareness and with the trust to be able to challenge that company to change. If she didn’t take this opportunity she would be denying herself of the power to create change and pass that power onto others. If she didn’t step up that power would have immediately been handed to another white man.
I too have found myself stepping back from power due to guilt and fear. But the brilliant community of practitioners that surround me have helped me to feel my way through that discomfort and maintain focus on the long-term of how I make best use of that power to build a more equitable world of work. We need more coaches, facilitators and mediators who understand oppression and power and can hold us all as we embark on much needed systemic change.
Creating cover
Tall trees seen from below. (Photo by Arnaud Mesureur)
The hardest lesson I’ve learnt over the last few years is that when there’s deeply entrenched inequality in the world it’s not as simple as calling out injustice in order to spark change. I’ve spent most of my life sticking up for people that have been treated unfairly and shouting about what I believe in, and I was constantly looking around me wondering where everyone else’s voices were. Most of the time people simply didn’t recognise the injustice, other times though there were people who I knew deeply felt the injustice but who remained silent.
It wasn’t until I read “Why I no longer talk to white people about race” by Reni Eddo-Lodge that I finally made me acknowledge how shouting about issues to people that refuse to hear you can often do more harm to you than it does to them. It broadened my understanding of how people choose to fight against all kinds of inequality - for instance it made me realise why so many feminist women I respected would speak to me about the woes of the world but not to the men in positions of power. Since then I’ve wasted so much less energy on people who will never change and it feels good.
But importantly it also helped me to understand how my energy could be channelled specifically in terms of creating justice in aspects of my life where I held some privilege / power - such as race. I’ve often wrestled with the idea of me being the ‘leader’ of Collaborative Future. Last year, due to the fact our programmes attract a high percentage of black and minority ethnic people, we started being asked to support predominantly white teams on their journey around Diversity and Inclusion. I tried to bow out of these conversations initially and quickly handed enquiries over to fellow D&I practitioners for fear of being a white woman profiting in any way off of work around anti-racism. But one of my black colleagues confronted me and said “we need you to use your position. There are conversations you can have with white people, that I can’t”.
From that point onwards I’ve seen one of my jobs in the space to be to ‘create cover’. I build relationships and rapport in places (and with people) that might not, for instance, give my black colleagues and friends the same time and trust due to defensiveness, fear or simply ignorance. Once those relationships/rapport are secured in some way I show them “here are all the people that I trust too” and get out of the way so that relationships can flourish without me in the middle.
This approach goes beyond work around race. Systemic change is frightening to a lot of people in power and one of the biggest barriers to change is fear. I used to talk about disrupting the status quo with our work, but now I simply focus on creating cover to protect our community from fear and defensiveness as much as possible so that a new system can flourish and thrive. Sonia, our community advocate, remarked at the end of 2020 that she noticed how we were the only brand on instagram not repeatedly posting about the impact of covid and how we might ‘build back better’. There is so much joy and energy among our team and our community, and I believe that will carry us further and faster on a long journey towards equity.
Embodying change
The hardest but most rewarding part of working in the diversity, equity and inclusion space is that you have to embody the change you talk about with your clients and community. This is not the same as when a digital agency has to make sure their website is up to scratch to show off their skills. Creating an equitable world isn’t just a skill or practice that has to be demonstrated outside of ourselves - it has to move us deeply as practitioners.
Backlit person with arms wide open standing in front of foggy mountain background (Photo by Zac Durant)
When I became Director of People at FutureLearn I wasn’t ready for that deeply personal journey I had to embark upon in order to stop perpetuating the systems I had been conditioned and raised by. Sure I’d been raised a feminist, in a highly multi-cultural area, with a huge respect and love for all people, but the rhetoric I spouted to others was still somewhat surface level because I hadn’t deeply confronted my hang-ups and learned to hold myself with compassion.
It wasn’t until I went on a community dialogue retreat led by Yasmeen Akhtar (who has taught me so much about challenging power and creating new systems) that I finally, truly embarked on this journey of embodying change. Her work forced me to look at myself deeply, to acknowledge how others perceived me and how I perceived myself. Since then I’ve worked tirelessly with Janice Gittens (a brilliant coach who now supports the young people and businesses on our work placement programmes) to unpack my experiences and explore the truth about my sexuality, my race, my class, my spirituality. I unlocked the pain I have experienced or caused and raised my awareness of how this affects the way I behave today. Every single day I connect deeply with others and those experiences continuously reshape my view of myself and the world.
I share all this because time and again I am asked by people for the quick fixes or the trade secrets when it comes to building diverse and equitable communities or companies. But the resilience, compassion and consciousness that our community builds for each other every day is what powers us to move closer towards an equitable world. That can’t suddenly be created in an organisation or a person overnight. But you can, and should, keep strengthening the muscles that enable you to do this same work with more ease and joy. In her book, Emergent Strategies, Adrienne Maree Brown says “To really transform our society we will need to make justice one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have”
We want to support more people to find joy and strength in the fight for equity within our workplaces. This is hard work but it is one of the most rewarding things in the world to know that we are building a future of work in which everyone is valued and empowered.