Comments on Social Justice Racial Equity

 

informal notes on readings ...

  • "Leading Social Transformations" (Bryson et al, 2021)
  • "Logic Model Development Guide" (Kellogg Foundation, 2004)
  • "Constructing a Racial Equity Theory of Change" (Aspen Institute, 2009)

Leading Social Transformations

paper "Leading Social Transformations: Creating Public Value and Advancing the Common Good" by John M. Bryson, Bill Barberg, Barbara C. Crosby & Michael Quinn Patton (Journal of Change Management, 21:2, 180-202 - [1])

Abstract

This essay explores what is involved in leading a social transformation to create public value and advance the common good. The contrast here is with strategic leadership of organizations, collaborations, and social movements. Leading a social transformation is much bigger. The required changes are multi-issue, multi-level, multi-organizational, and cross-sectoral, and can cross national frontiers. Deep and broad changes, often involving radical innovations, are needed. Deep and abiding changes in relationships – and power relationships – among people and groups are required. Leadership of organizations, collaborations, and social movements is still important for transformation, but not enough. Instead, advancing social transformation requires leadership that is deeply relational, visionary, political, adaptive, and comfortable with complexity.

Collective impact

  • common agenda
  • shared measurement system
  • mutually reinforcing activities
  • frequent and structured communications
  • "backbone organization"

Community organizing, coalition building, and advocacy

  • Explicitly address issues of social and economic injustice and structural racism
  • Employ a community development approach in which local residents have equal power in determining the coalition’s or collaborative’s agenda and resource allocations
  • Employ ‘grass roots’ community organizing as an intentional strategy and as part of the process; work to build local leadership and power; and change the power structure when necessary
  • Focus on policy, systems, and structural change (‘Policy offers the most direct route to measurable progress, but all too often CI practice stops at the programmatic level’, p. 46)
  • Build on the extensive community-engaged scholarship over the last four decades that shows what works, that acknowledges the complexities, and that evaluates appropriately (e.g. Christens & Inzeo, 2015)
  • Construct core functions for the collaborative based on equity and justice, including providing basic facilitating structures and building member ownership and leadership As Wolff et al., 2016, p. 49) note, ‘The key role for the collaborative needs to be building the community leadership as opposed to being the leadership (italics in original)’.

Tools and structures

  • interactive strategy mapping with ‘zoomable’ strategy maps
  • From-To diagrams
  • leadership skills enhanced with:

  • Collaboration skills * Organizing and mobilizing ability * Shared visualization, strategy mapping, and visually assisted strategy management * Lots of skilled facilitation * Storytelling about humans embedded in complex adaptive systems * Broadly based coalition building and advocacy
    • * core capabilities that ‘system leaders’ need in order to foster collective leadership (Senge 2015 [2])

  • the ability to see the larger system * fostering reflection and generative conversations * the ability to shift the collective focus from reactive problem solving to co-creating the future

    • Logic Model Development Guide

    from [3]: "Logic Model Development Guide" (Using Logic Models to Bring Together Planning, Evaluation, and Action) - W. K. Kellogg Foundation, 1998, updated 2004

    "The program logic model is defined as a picture of how your organization does its work – the theory and assumptions underlying the program. A program logic model links outcomes (both short- and long-term) with program activities/processes and the theoretical assumptions/principles of the program."

    Logic Model components

    Resources/Inputs → Activities → Outputs → Outcomes → Impact

    • Resources/Inputs & Activities are "your planned work"
    • Outputs, Outcomes, & Impact are "your intended results"

    Resources/Inputs Activities Outputs Outcomes Impact
    Certain resources are needed to operate your program If you have access to them, then you can use them to accomplish your planned activities If you accomplish your planned activities, then you will hopefully deliver the amount of product and/or service that you intended If you accomplish your planned activities to the extent you intended, then your participants will benefit in certain ways If these benefits to participants are achieved, then certain changes in organizations, communities, or systems might be expected to occur

    Basic Program Components

    • Factors are resources and/or barriers, which potentially enable or limit program effectiveness. Enabling protective factors or resources may include funding, existing organizations, potential collaborating partners, existing organizational or interpersonal networks, staff and volunteers, time, facilities, equipment, and supplies. Limiting risk factors or barriers might include such things as attitudes, lack of resources, policies, laws, regulations, and geography.
    • Activities are the processes, techniques, tools, events, technology, and actions of the planned program. These may include products – promotional materials and educational curricula; services – education and training, counseling, or health screening; and infrastructure – structure, relationships, and capacity used to bring about the desired results.
    • Outputs are the direct results of program activities. They are usually described in terms of the size and/or scope of the services and products delivered or produced by the program. They indicate if a program was delivered to the intended audiences at the intended “dose.” A program output, for example, might be the number of classes taught, meetings held, or materials produced and distributed; program participation rates and demography; or hours of each type of service provided.
    • Outcomes are specific changes in attitudes, behaviors, knowledge, skills, status, or level of functioning expected to result from program activities and which are most often expressed at an individual level.
    • Impacts are organizational, community, and/or system level changes expected to result from program activities, which might include improved conditions, increased capacity, and/or changes in the policy arena.

    Constructing a Racial Equity Theory of Change

    "Constructing a Racial Equity Theory of Change: Practical Guide for Designing Strategies to Close Chronic Racial Outcome Gaps" (2009, by the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change - [4])

    "Structural racism is a shorthand term for the many systemic factors that produce and sustain racial inequities in America."

    • Public Policies
    • Social and Institutional Practices
    • Cultural Representations

    "Racial equity is the substantive alternative to structural racism. It is a social outcomes “picture” in which race is not consistently associated with privilege and disadvantage. The goal of racial equity is to produce fairness and social justice — race would no longer be a factor in the assessment of merit, or in the distribution of opportunity."

    "... a Racial Equity Theory of Change (RETOC) ... is a five-step primer for tackling community problems that are marked by chronic racial inequities."

    Steps

    • What You Want: Defining Your Desired Racial Equity Outcome (REO)

  • Is there a specific area of racial disparity you’d like to eliminate? * At what scale will you seek change? Institutions or organizations? Community? County? State? Region? * What will “racial equity” look like in your outcome area? Are your racial goals measurable? * When do you expect to see results? What is the timeframe? Two years? Ten years?
    • * Setting Your Priorities: Identifying the “Building Blocks” of Your Racial Equity Outcome

    • What Supports or Impedes Your Building Blocks?: Identifying Public Policies, Institutional Practices and Cultural Representations (PPRs)
    • What You Must Know: Mapping the Local Change Landscape

  • Who are the key “players” in your local context * How the governance process works at the level you want to engage * Possible sources of retrenchment: who and what are likely to undermine or undo progress toward creating your building blocks
    • * What You Must Do: Assessing Your Capacity, Planning, & Gearing Up for Action

    Conclusion

    Aadd value:

    • By suggesting goals and directions for action that may not come out of planning approaches that are less meticulous about interrogating planners’ assumptions at every level and less disciplined by a structural race analysis.
    • By encouraging “systems” rather than “siloed” thinking: That is, exploration of the webs of mutually reinforcing policies and practices across multiple institutions that are behind all chronic racial disparities.
    • By challenging change leaders to give equal attention to cognitive sources of racial disparities — to pervasive racially biased images, stereotypes, frames and policy knowledge that are shaped and legitimized by history, tradition and political power.
    • By reminding planners to take the likelihood of sociopolitical resistance and retrenchment into account whenever they design and implement racial equity action strategies.

    Random Questions

    • deck of "Social Justice" cards?
    • Q: how to encourage persistent progress when change is slow?
    • "Racial Equity" graphic novel or game or activity?

    – z 2021-10-25 14:40 UTC

    • think about METRICS and INDICATORS

    – z 2021-10-25 18:34 UTC

    John Sterman "All Models Are Wrong" lecture (2002):

    Human creativity is great: once we recognize the importance of a concept,
    we can almost always find ways to measure it. Within living memory there
    were no national income accounts, no survey methodologies to assess political
    sentiments, no psychological inventories for depression or subjective well-
    being, no protocols for semi-structured interviews or coding criteria for
    ethnographic data. Today, many apparently soft variables such as customer
    perceptions of quality, employee morale, investor optimism, and political
    values are routinely quantified with tools such as content analysis, surveys,
    and conjoint analysis. Of course, all measurements are imperfect. Metrics for
    so-called soft variables continue to be refined, just as metrics for so-called hard
    variables are. Quantification often yields important insights into the structure
    and dynamics of a problem. Often the greatest benefit of a modeling project is
    to help the client see the importance of and begin to measure and account for
    soft variables and concepts previously ignored.

    – z 2021-10-25 18:48 UTC

    Indicators

    • geospatial distributions
    • connected to government Agencies responsible for each
    • for people (e.g., income, wealth, etc.)
    • for infrastructure (e.g., parks, libraries, bus service, etc.)

    – z 2021-10-26 14:23 UTC</div>