Equity Update: June

NP’s Equity Team

This month, we’re sharing our progress on our equity goals. Last November, at our annual RE:Conference, Neighborhood Partnerships presented an equity statement, after months of work internally to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. In sharing our equity statement, we explicitly said: “We ask that you hold us accountable. In that spirit, we will share our goals, our outcome measures, and our progress on our web site and in our monthly email newsletters. This is still a work in progress, and we value your feedback.”

Accountability is a key part of our equity plan. If our equity statement and plan simply sit on a shelf, they do not advance our goals. Advancing the plan, doing the hard, day-to-day work, experiencing success and failures, and learning, is critical to truly advance equity both internally to Neighborhood Partnerships, and externally, with you, our partners.

We also want to repeat that we recognize that we are both late and new to this work. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the leaders, individuals, and communities of color who have been doing this work and who have helped show us the way forward.

We’ll be using our blog and newsletter to highlight pieces of our equity work. We’ll be sharing our successes and our failures, and what we see as the day-to-day work of operationalizing equity inside our organization, and how we relate to our partners. We’ll be sharing our progress as we strive to hold ourselves accountable as we work towards being a more equitable and inclusive organization.

Later this month, we will share our Equity Plan. This is a document we’ve been working on for several months, internally, and it includes specific and measurable equity goals, objectives, and timelines for our internal and external work. We’ll be asking our Board of Directors to give their final stamp of approval to this equity plan.

The equity plan was developed by staff and board, and refined over several months. Each area of our work has explicit equity goals and a timeline during which to achieve the goals, and every month, our internal Equity Team checks in with different teams about their progress towards their goals.

We believe this will give us the structure needed in order to advance equity strategically and deliberately, and truly create a plan that doesn’t sit on a shelf, but grows and lives with the organization and its staff and board. Thank you for being part of our journey.  

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