Amplifying the Personal and the Conditional in Evaluating Racial Equity Change at the Organizational Level

A collaboration between UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) and Justice Outside, Working Toward Racial Equity (WTRE) is a multi-year, NSF- funded training series that supports environmental and outdoor science organizations to build capacity to foster equitable, inclusive, and culturally relevant work environments and organizations. Like many train-the-trainer models, WTRE engages a small group of staff members to participate in a cohort through intensive workshops, ongoing activities, and capacity support. Participating organizations are represented by multiple staff through an organizational systems change team (OSC) of leaders—not limited to positional leaders—who focus on creating and implementing equity action plans. By going through the model together—listening to their colleagues’ and peers’ experiences and perspectives—participating teams have been able to contextualize the theoretical frameworks upon which WTRE is built. Some participants, however, have found it challenging to apply the learnings and growth they experienced during WTRE to their particular organization and broader team outside of those participating in WTRE. In part, this is because equity approaches rely on personal transformation and integration of learnings and reflexive practices into one’s everyday actions. Translating this personal transformation for other team members who did not participate in WTRE can be challenging. Organizational context and conditions will also influence how the wider staff and organization can integrate mindsets, knowledge, tools, and equitable practices into their structures and routines. In this roundtable session, we will share what we have learned about understanding, documenting, and measuring transformation and translation in the WTRE model. We encourage session attendees to share their experiences evaluating related models that ask people to draw on deeply personal experiences and understandings to effect change with others at the organizational or collaborative levels. We will focus on internal processes, such as how people integrate concepts into their understanding of the self and relationships, conditional features like decision-making and change management processes, and cultural-political environments. We will highlight how engaging and amplifying diverse voices across the organization shapes our understanding of the transformational power of models such as WTRE, and how “translational” aspects of the model can extend or limit access to these voices. We hope that session attendees will leave with resources, ideas, and connections that can help extend how we engage voices beyond program participants to understand how individual transformations and experiences contribute to and reflect organizational changes that must arise simultaneously across personal, interpersonal, and structural levels.