Anti-racism

“It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” – Toni Morrison

Systemic racism is deeply ingrained in every aspect of society, and therefore no organization is immune from it. In our work, we seek to confront implicit and explicit racism and respond to it skillfully.

This is not a separate commitment from the rest of our practice. It is embedded in the practice itself. Every organization we work with—nonprofit, arts, startup, enterprise—operates inside systems shaped by race: who gets hired, who gets heard, whose expertise is trusted, how resources are distributed, what “professional” means, and whose communities are served with urgency versus patience. These are not DEI questions layered on top of organizational strategy. They are organizational strategy. An organization that cannot see how race shapes its internal dynamics will struggle to change.

We do not claim expertise in DEI as a discipline, nor claim that DEI is the right or best container for these conversations: it isn’t. What we bring is the ability to see how organizational systems—governance, communications, revenue, operations—either reinforce or interrupt inequity, and to design systems that do the latter. This is organizational cognition applied to the hardest question an organization faces: whether its structures match its stated values, or quietly contradict them.

Our commitments:

• Referring specialized DEI work to experts in those areas
• Referring all issues affecting marginalized communities to qualified representatives of those communities
• Amplifying marginalized voices and worthy efforts wherever possible
• Understanding issues as best we can

On the current moment:

Since 2025, federal policy has moved aggressively to dismantle DEI infrastructure across government, education, and the nonprofit sector. Funding has been cut. Language has been policed. Organizations that built equity commitments in 2020 are now being pressured to abandon them—or to pursue them quietly, without institutional support.

We believe this makes the work more important, not less. And we believe the organizations that sustain their commitments through this period—not performatively, but structurally, in how they hire, govern, plan, and allocate resources—will emerge stronger and more trustworthy.

This collection was curated some years ago. Sadly, many voices and organizations we formerly featured here have been removed by platform owners or individuals, and history is being lost. While the resources below are neither fully complete (impossible) nor up-to-date (getting harder and harder), many remain valuable and the underlying commitments are unchanged.