Building Equity from the Ground Up with Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson

Episode Summary: In this incredible conversation, Bethaney interviews Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson, the Founder and CEO of Disruptive Equity Education Project, or DEEP. Bethaney and Darnisa talk about contextualizing our racial identities, the journey from diversity to equity, how leaders adequately build towards a more equitable future, and about the challenges and opportunities of creating a truly equitable social enterprise. 

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson is an educational and racial equity strategist that is deeply committed to the study of culture; innovation; and adult development. Since earning her master’s degree in Anthropology from Brandeis University, and her doctorate from Harvard’s Educational Leadership Doctorate (Ed.L.D.), Dr. Amante-Jackson has honed her knowledge of culture and adult development to transform organizational and school cultures on issues of equity; change management and re-design. Dr. Amante-Jackson currently serves as the CEO of The Disruptive Equity Education Project (DEEP) and as system level leadership lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

Episode Notes: Learn more about DEEP: www.digdeepforequity.org

Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, equity, community, diversity, leaders, belonging, deep, inclusion, grandfather, conversation, organization, feel, learning, world, milestones, question, contextualize, leadership, folks, created

SPEAKERS

Bethaney Wilkinson, Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson

Bethaney Wilkinson  00:00

Timing is everything. There are some thoughts you can share in one season and they fall completely flat. It's almost as if no one was listening. But then you can share that same thought, and the right cultural moment. And it sets the world on a different trajectory altogether. For the diversity gap project, many of the ideas we're sharing today and right now are the same ones we've been sharing since the beginning of this project. Thoughts like diversity is about dignity. It's not about metrics and marketing and money. It's about real people, real stories, real lives. And this cultural moment, as the world is shifting, priorities are changing, and leaders are waking up to the need for new ways to do almost everything. The message of this podcast is the same good intentions are not good enough. Good impact is what we're after. My hope for each of you as you're listening, is that you aren't only responding in this crisis moment, even though that's what it is. My hope is that you allow this moment to catalyze you into a new way of being a new way of thinking, a new way of building community, a new way of leading may our communities, organizations and teams actually look and feel and move differently in the months and years to come. May diversity no longer be a cute side project, but maybe learn how to leverage our differences as a vehicle for racial justice, may we operate differently, may we become new kinds of leaders. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and for being a member of this growing community. As always, you are welcome here. And we look forward to learning and changing into reimagining the world with you. Thanks. Welcome to The Diversity Gap podcast where we are exploring the gap between good intentions and good impact as it relates to diversity, equity and inclusion. My name is Bethaney Wilkinson and I am your host. Hey there podcast listeners. Welcome friends, all the new I'm super glad you're here. So for today's conversation, you get to hear an interview I recorded last year sometime in 2019. It's a conversation between me and Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson, the founder of Disruptive Equity Education Project, also known as deep. I've been sitting on this interview for a while because it's so good. And be I really wanted to share it when the time was right. Given all that is happening in our world today, given all of the advocacy and racial justice that we are in pursuit of. I believe we desperately need leadership from visionaries who challenge us to not only do things differently, but they also hold generous space for our humanity. And that's exactly what Darnisa does. She is so wise, so thoughtful. In this conversation there, Darnisa, and I talk about a lot of different things we discuss contextualizing our racial identities, we talk about the journey from diversity to equity and the building blocks to get to equity. And we talk about the challenges and opportunities found in creating a truly equitable social enterprise because that's what Darnisa did. She's created her own company from the ground up and so she has so much wisdom and so much experience. Also, did I mention that she went to Harvard? I think that's pretty rad. So yes, this conversation make space in your heart and mind to receive literally, you have to carve out some room and make space for the wisdom that Darnisa has to share. She gives us so much in this conversation. And so without further ado, here's my interview with Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson. Well, my first question I start all of my conversations for this podcast is when did you first become aware of your race and ethnic identity?

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  04:12

For me, the moment is actually quite clear in my life. It happened when I was six. I was on the way to Blockbuster Video. So Special shout outs to Blockbuster with my grandparents and my uncle. Now I grew up in Brooklyn, New York and a part of Brooklyn called Cypress Hills, which is also East New York. It just has a different name. And Cypress Hills was bordered by a few different communities. But one of them was a community named Canarsie. And at that time, Canarsie was a predominantly white area on its way to transitioning into a primarily black and brown community. But you had to drive through Canarsie to get to Blockbuster. I remember I was sitting in the backseat. My grandfather was Driving, my grandmother was in the front and my uncle, my uncle's only a year older than me, was right next to me. And we were driving down the street. And all of a sudden we heard this rule. And we got pulled over by the police. Now my grandfather had just bought a brand new Lincoln Town Car. So for those of you who didn't know how awesome the hype was around Lincoln's right, like that was sort of the car at the moment. And the police officer pulled up next to the window. And he asked my grandfather, whose car was this. And I remember sitting in the back seat, and I just started laughing. And I was like, Why is he asking Whose car is this? And he kept demanding that my grandfather produced the title, the registration, he wanted to know whom we had stolen the car from. And this went on for a good couple of minutes, he asked my grandfather to get out of the car, put his hands on the back of the trunk. And you know, a few minutes go by the police drive off, and my grandfather gets in the car visibly upset. And I just remember sitting there not really knowing what was happening. And my grandfather turned around and he said, You know what that was right? And I said, Yeah, he thinks you stole your car. And my grandfather said, No, he pulled us over, because we were a black family driving in a brand new car in a primarily white community. And he wanted to know what essentially we were doing here. He pulled us over because we are black. And it's the first time I had ever heard my blackness contextualized. In that sort of way. I knew I was black, because that's what I heard my family saying, like we're black, but the understanding of what it meant to be black, in context of the rest of the world happened in that moment. And my grandfather said, you know, it's just like roots. And I remember turning to my uncle when I said, What's roots. And my grandfather said, y'all have never seen roots. Mind you, my uncle was seven and a half. Instead of us going to Blockbuster to rent, Tetris or gameboy games, which is what we wanted to do. My grandfather ended up renting the entire route series. And this happened on a Friday night. And so that weekend, my grandfather asked my uncle and I to sit in our living room, and we watched the entire route series from beginning to end. And then that Sunday, we had to contextualize as best we could, how what happened on Friday, was similar to Rupes. I think that was both the moment for me, where I knew what it meant to be black and context. But it was also a racial equity awakening moment, because I had never known about the history of the black American community in that way. And so that was a huge moment for me. And I remember it very vividly, even though I wasn't that old when it happened.

Bethaney Wilkinson  08:04

Thank you for sharing that story. And I'm wondering, once you begin contextualizing your story, like what just happened with your family with the story of roots. How did that impact how you began to move through the world?

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  08:21

Well, I would say it didn't really show up as a big part of my worldly conversations until I hit high school. So I went to a primarily black and brown elementary school as well as middle school. So I was not necessarily being educated in a multiracial space, but but in an multi ethnic space. And it wasn't until I got to high school, where I was tracked into an honors program, where I went from being in a middle school, which was 99%, black and Latino, to a high school that had about a 40 to 50%, black and Latino population. But the program I was trapped into, was about 95%, white. And it was the first time that I could see tensions between how I perceived myself in the way I was viewed in classes. And so what I mean by that was, I went from a Magnet Middle School, where everyone was brilliant. There was never an assumption that I couldn't be brilliant in my identity, to a high school community. You know, no disrespect for my fellow students or my teachers. I just think it was just sort of, we had never had a critical conversation about race. It was the first time I was accused of plagiarism. People often wondered and questioned how I could produce papers in the way that I did why I was scoring the way that I did. My family was called in a couple of times, to ask them about the history of my academic prowess, and that's a direct quote and it really made me start to think about what sort of ideations have happened around black American communities, where it still felt like there was this belief gap, right? This belief that I couldn't potentially be as smart as other students, or that I might need help in a different way that I didn't need. Even though there are folks who do need differentiation, that just necessarily wasn't my case. And I started having these questions about what do people really expect me in my dark brown skin to be capable of doing? What assumptions were people making about my role in the classroom? Was I there to lead the classroom? Or did folks feel like they were helping me because of my presence there. And I remember asking my ninth and 10th Grade History teachers, when were we going to have a critical conversation about the role of slavery and how it created this sort of post traumatic slave mindset. And like the ways in which that's impacted how we think about education, how we think about supporting various communities of color, but that type of discourse and dialogue never came. I mean, I didn't necessarily expected to in high school, but I had a ton of questions around it. But I didn't have the language to talk about the four forms of oppression, I couldn't talk about ideology, versus my own internalized mindset, versus the ways in which that ideology showed up on me interpersonally versus the way policies and practices have been created to make it more difficult for me in high school to be successful. I don't think that language really came from me until college. But ninth grade is the first time that I had that routes, plus blockbuster plus schooling, recognition of all of those various things.

Bethaney Wilkinson  11:52

As you tell these different parts of your story, and share those experiences that you had in your classrooms and with your administration and your teachers in your peers. All of that seems immediate leads pretty well to the work that you're doing now. So the organization you lead is called the disruptive equity education project, or deep for short, and I would love for you to illustrate to our listeners, and what is deep What is this disruptive equity education project? What do you do? And how did you get this particular work off the ground?

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  12:27

Mm hmm. Thanks for that question. I would say deep is an amalgamation of every story I've ever told and all the stories I never got to tell. My degrees are in Anthropology and History, and education. And I'd never have never felt more like an anthropologist than I do now. Deep started, because as an educator, I noticed that there were some real conversations that we could not have in school community, and in classrooms, as teachers, particularly about the racial experiences of our students, how those experiences were contributing to the way that I would design or implement and teach my curriculum, to the difficult conversations we had to have as grade level teams, right and creating content for our students. And for the things that I think we were afraid to say to each other. One of the common things that I noticed both in the classroom, and working with administrators and leaders outside the classroom was every single person was terrified to talk about race. Everyone thought that having a critical conversation about race could lift up that you were ignorant, or that you were racist, or just uninformed. And people were really worried about being publicly imperfect in front of each other. When I thought about the kind of organization I wanted to create, the very first thing that I said that it needed to do was to level the playing field. I think so many of us don't realize that oppression, doesn't care who you are. It comes for all of us just in different ways. I wanted people to feel comfortable being able to tell their story. I think that's so much of the learnings around equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging is based in our ability to lean into and to hear multiple perspectives. And I didn't think that there were organizations that at least that I saw that were activating storytelling as a way to build empathy, and then connecting those stories and that empathy to a shared strategic practice. And so deep lives at the intersection of both of those things. We're an organization that supports students, teachers and leaders and being able to speak and share their wisdom. It supports people and feeling deeper connections to humanity. And we pair that storytelling and protocols as support people in this transformative learning. With practice, so here's a strategy. Here's the scope, here's how this could look, here's how you measure success over time, here are the things that you need to be looking for as indicators of success. Here are milestones, here's how long it can take your community to go from, we can't even have a conversation about race to, we can have conversations at every level of our system, we have clear strategies and policies that we're changing and implementing. We're including and lifting up the voices of students and families along the way. And we're also implicating ourselves as a part of the problem. So that we can all be implicated as a part of the solution

Bethaney Wilkinson  15:42

that is so powerful, and I love the the thought around activating storytelling, because that is I mean, I feel like I've read about research that shows that stories are among the best ways to get us to shift our paradigms and change the way we think about ourselves and other people. So that's really wonderful. But then to pair that with strategies and protocols and policies, and practices that leaders can implement, because in my own research, I find that making it practical, and and having metrics and measurements that we can be held accountable can sometimes be a gap for people. And so I'm wondering for you, how do you define equity? And how might you differentiate equity from other forms of social justice advocacy?

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  16:31

I think that's a really great question. Because equity to me is almost like love. It has a different definition based off of people's experiences with it. So the way that we define equity is an intentional ability to give up privilege and power for a greater good. And I think of equity broadly. Because it's not necessarily just race, right? Equity is asking, who are the communities that have been historically marginalized communities that have had to face institutional and structural barriers that prevent them from getting what they need and what they deserve? And equity is about redefining what we even mean. Something is, so if you think about equity in the sense of education, equity isn't just about asking us to give historically marginalized communities more because they need and deserve it. Equity is also about asking, should we even redefine what education is, since it often was not defined with the voices of the marginalized communities and peoples that we're trying to support the most? I really think about equity, like it's modern day reparations. And so I don't mean land by that. I mean, there were only two periods in the history of our country, where we said that people were equal. One of them was during reconstruction, and the other one was during the Civil Rights Movement. And we had real policy change, right, we had the Civil Rights Act, we have Brown versus Board of Education, we had Civil Rights Act of 1964 of 1865. So I think there were some intention to see things change. But what didn't happen is we never reallocated resources. We never address the fact that there were communities who never had access to who didn't have agency to who might not have been supported and a mindset of you can do anything you can achieve anything. And we assumed just by saying that you were equal without removing some of those structures, and without reallocating resources was just going to help everybody get there. And that's just not how this country has worked. There are folks who have never had anything who were being asked to achieve the same thing, as people who have generationally had everything. And I always like to qualify this. I'm not saying that different communities have not had to work hard, right? That myth of meritocracy sometimes can be tension to a definition of equity. Because meritocracy suggests that if you just work really, really hard that you can achieve anything that you want. The reason that meritocracy is a myth, is because there are institutional barriers and structures that make it so that there are people who don't have boots, who don't have feet, who don't have laces who don't have straps. So that belief that anybody can pull themselves up by the bootstraps doesn't work in that way for every cultural group in this country. And so for me, equity is about that redefining, it's about asking about historically marginalized populations and I I think it requires defining more. This is not zero sum, it doesn't mean that if somebody gets more, that someone gets less, I think for equity to truly be possible, we really have to societally define what's our greater good. And I don't think that we'll be able to achieve any definition of equity, until we can name that you do have to give things up in order for people to get what they need. But even in giving something up, it doesn't mean you have to give up everything. And it doesn't disregard the work that your family or your community might have done to be successful. It just asked us to sit in multiple truths. At the same time, someone could have worked really, really hard, they may have also benefited from policies and practices that may be invisible to them. And at the same time that I'm working really, really hard. There are the same invisible policies and practices that do not benefit me, at least in my dark brown skin.

Bethaney Wilkinson  21:12

It's, it sounds like in some ways, as you're talking about equity, and I love this, because it really pushes me and I think it pushes my community to think about our quote unquote, diversity work way more comprehensively. It's, it's like you are inviting us to really consider but to fundamentally re reorganize and reorient ourselves. And its again, and transform the way we think about communities or businesses or teams. What do you think? And I both from your personal perspective, and then also, as you're leading your organization, what are some of the vehicles that you use to facilitate that transformation, because it's a big leap for people.

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  22:00

That's right. And so one of the things that we did was deep created a spectrum, because equity is our long term goal. But equity is buildable, if that makes sense. If you thought about equity, like a set of Legos, the first Lego to get to the equity bridge is diversity. The next series of Legos are belonging, the next set is inclusion. And then the culmination of diversity, belonging and inclusion is equity. So let me define that because I know that we all think about those things differently. Diversity is really about representation. Diversity is asking a school community, let's say, or an organization, to consider who exists within its space. So in diversity, you want to lift up everyone you want everyone to feel equally represented. You want everyone to feel like they are valued in this place, whether it'd be a school or an organization. You will notice though, all I mentioned was representation. Even though diversity feels hard. It actually is the start point. Because it supports people and being able to see and appreciate differences. The reason that people love diversity so much is because diversity feels like equality. Everyone feels equally seen, it's very tantalizing to stay there. Because you don't have to have difficult conversations all the time to do diverse work. The conversation might just be how can we access our data to understand which populations are here? And then how do we make people feel seen, so we could feel uncomfortable, but it's not the same level of difficult as who needs more? Right? Belonging is that next layer, where belonging is about the manifestation of relationships. You see the difference between diversity and belonging? Diversity is a potluck. Everybody bring a dish? Belonging is why does that dish matter so much to you and your culture? And how can I be in relationship and understand your dish in comparison to mine? You know, belonging is really about asking some hard questions first, who doesn't feel welcome? Who doesn't feel like they belong? The next set of Legos is inclusion. And a lot of time we think of inclusive practice as differentiating for cognitive learning differences, right? We think IEPs. That's not in what inclusion is in the deep sphere. We define inclusion as naming that leadership has to change so that we're not redesigning a system to perpetuate the same index. believes that that makes sense. So inclusion is not about a racial replacement. Inclusion starts by asking which groups have historically not have access to institutional change? Which groups have whose voices have never been at the table? And how can we get folks who've never been in places of institutional change into those places? And a lot of times, we think, diversification, don't we hear that? Let's diversify the workforce. And then we think racial diversity, racial diversity is important. And there are other ways that we can be inclusive, that include race, but don't necessarily, like have it stand out as the only thing. So let me give an example. I am a cisgendered, heterosexual black woman, right there multiple pieces of my identity. And in my multiple pieces, the black piece of me, the piece that you can visibly see, is the way that I feel like I experienced the most marginalization, I experienced a lot of racial profiling, right. So that's a piece of my identity that is dis privileged. However, as a cisgendered, heterosexual woman, I have privilege, right, the way that I look is the way that I identify, and then being heterosexual right, I don't have the same fear, I don't have a fear of talking about my husband, or bringing that into a workplace. And we generally tend to have cisgendered, heterosexual voices at leadership tables. So an example of inclusion. Like even though I am black, right, having me at a table matters, it equally matters that there is a non cisgendered non gender binary person at a table as well. An example of inclusion might be me saying, If you always hear cisgendered heterosexual voices at the table, should I either held in leadership in a different way, so that we can make space at this table for a voice that never gets to be here. Just that spectrum that we created, I think is one of our most powerful tools. Because I think that a lot of folks think that D AI, is all the same thing. And we often don't include the be that belonging is a sweet spot. Because belonging when done well, at least at the school level, is cultural relevance, cultural proficiency, social emotional learning, universal design for learning, and implicit bias, all of those skills fall into belonging. So that's one way that we do it. But I wanted to explain that way. The other ways that we do that is deep has really become, I think, most expert in creating the transformational spaces for people to have the difficult conversation. Our entire team is made up of educators of social workers. So we work in trauma informed care of anthropologists, of storytellers, and of folks who specialize in adult learning and student development. So our protocols really are agitating with love. It's getting people to feel as comfortable as possible, having a conversation that you've never been able to have with the language to have the conversation. So we're the norm of language, we create the space for you to use that language in an applicable way. We create spaces for there to be tension and discourse, right? Not argument. But I do believe that discomfort breeds transformation. If you are too comfortable, you can't do diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion work well, it shouldn't ever feel comfortable. Because it's work that lives at the intersection of multiple oppressions, and when has oppression ever felt comfortable? Right. And I think also our practice of storytelling. It really has folks feeling that they have the agency to do the work. People have to feel empowered, to be able to go forth and do an absence of organizations like deep. And I think one of our greatest skills is people leaving feeling transformed through conversation, grounded in language and assured in a technique to move forward.

Bethaney Wilkinson  29:45

I really love everything you just said because it was incredibly helpful and informative and expanding or it causes my thoughts to expand. Um, but I'm curious about even that Last piece specifically, because something that I'm finding in my research and just in talking with people, I find that when folks start to think about diversity work, especially executive level leaders, they're like, Okay, let's bring in someone to train our team or to lead a workshop or something like that. And sometimes those experiences can be great and powerful, and in the moment feel really helpful. But then what I see happen is that it kind of gets checked off of our diversity box for the year, and, and it checks off of our like, Okay, we put our diversity budget towards that one workshop, we had that one time. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on how leaders can who if that's their impulse, like, let's bring someone in who can facilitate a process for us? It's like, okay, yeah, that's great. But how do we push leaders, or invite them, I should say, to think about, again, their work more comprehensively, so that it's not just this thing we're checking off, but it's something that's actually that has the chance to shift our culture? Mm hmm.

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  31:01

So really great question, I think I would start because most of my work, is I'm supporting an entire organization or school community. But most of my executive coaching deep offers executive coaching as well, is to leaders and administrators. Because I do think if the work is not communicated or planned well, from the top, there is no work. So let me just start here. Any work that a leader assumes their organization or school community will engage in should not assume that that community should do that work in absence of leadership doing it? The biggest error I have seen is when leadership sort of delegates work to the building to teachers without having to do with themselves. And the reason for that is your leader should be able to have a felt experience of the transformation you're hoping the community will go through. And so the way that that starts, is if you think back to that spectrum, I named diversity, belonging, inclusion and equity. The first things first is equity is our long term goal. Leaders should be helping an organization reach your long term goal. But I do think there has to be a reckoning at the leadership level of how far you actually want to go. There are organizations out here, who would be amazing, just in advancing belonging, like if all they did was advanced belonging in the manifestation of relationships, we'd see the achievement gap close. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't be equitable. But based on the school's budget, how much time can be spent to do an initiative? I think the leadership has to first have a conversation of how far can we go with our timeline with our resources with capacity that we currently have, and then capacity that we can bring in through vendors. The second one is the leadership has to have a long term plan. That long term plan should include milestones. So for example, if you've done an assessment, deep has a series of rubrics to help leaders identify where they are on that spectrum. Let's say I just did an assessment I discovered my school is deeply embedded within diversity. But our goal is to get to inclusion in the next five to six years. The first thing you'd have to say is what milestones do we need to hit to get there, when you are taking people through work, that literally challenges everything about how they see the world, and has implications on the change they have to make in their practice. People need milestones to go through that level of tumult. In this work, people do not fear change, they fear loss. Leaders have to be able to communicate the loss to a community. So for example, when you do implicit bias training, you are going to have a different perspective of yourself. That's an example of loss. Or when I asked you to do this training, and then I asked you to change your practice, you will feel a loss of the way that you always used to do things. People don't have a problem, feeling loss, if a leader can communicate what's on the other side of that loss, the biggest failure of leadership that I have seen and this is no disrespect to our leaders who are listening. It's the inability to communicate the greater good. There's got to be something on the other side of my discomfort. There has to be something on the other side of this difficult conversation. There has to be something on the other side of you asking me to interrogate myself, other than just those things. And the milestones are the things that help motivate people to keep going. So it's being able to say six months from now, we will all speak a common language. And then when we get there, it's communicating. Congratulations, we're speaking a common language. And I know that sounds counterintuitive. And I know it might sound a little hokey, but we often are not doing that type of naming, hitting the milestone, communicating the milestone when doing things like an after action review. If we don't get there, why didn't we get there. And those are the things that I've seen be really helpful, especially in the planning for the very beginning of the work. And the last one I would say for leaders is being able to establish some sort of accountability. In absence of accountability, there is no work. If people don't know what you expect them to do on the other side of their learning, they cannot do it. Most of us have been indoctrinated to believe that perfectionism is a real construct. There's no such thing. But most adults never get to be in perfect. We very rarely get to be learners, we always feel like we have to show up to the table most expert. So people are often afraid to try new things. Because so many of us have been hurt on the other side of not being perfect with new things right away. And that's why accountability matters. So when you tell me Darney, so we're going to do a training. And now you're going to do implicit bias. But don't tell me how you expect that to show up in my classroom practice, or my partnering with the rest of my grade level leaders or other colleagues in the building, what you did was you asked me to have a powerful transformation. But what you didn't do was asked me how that was going to have an implication on my practice. So I don't do it. If you don't follow up with leaders, if you don't follow up with teachers, we don't have the time, we don't have the time to figure it out. And it's not that I'm saying that we have to spoon feed communities. What I am saying is a leader saying this year, we're going to do a work around implicit bias. Our expectation is that everyone will know what implicit bias is, you can name one to two of your own personal biases. I would like to hear at our next staff meeting, how you think those one to two biases are showing up in your classroom practice. And by the end of the year, we want to see one lesson plan from every teacher that takes that bias into account and redirects it. You see, that's accountability. And as leaders, sometimes we struggle to do that, because they're just so many folks in the building are in the organization. So a very long answer to that question. But I wanted to be explicit. And I'll name and summarize them again. Right. So that's creating a community of accountability, not evaluation. You cannot evaluate people, when they are learning new things right away, it creates terror. And people can't move forward, if they feel like they have to be perfect with you. People need to be allowed to be perfectly imperfect. But they need some guide rails so that they can actually be in integrity with what you're hoping they'll do. Right? The second one is communication, communicate to me how long we're going to be in this process? What's our long term goal? How far are we willing to go? What are the milestones for success? So I can partner with you? And the third one, right? Is that intentionality, the data? Where is your system? How do you know? What data are most helpful for you, as you look to transform this space?

Bethaney Wilkinson  39:04

Wow, gosh, so helpful. And I think Additionally, I love how you even teed that up with Okay, and one year we are going to this year, we're focusing on implicit bias, not this year, we're going to focus on diversity belonging, inclusion, implicit bias, like not this full list of things that's not really practice, like it's not likely that people can change that fast, especially given that they're leaving their classrooms or and, and my atmosphere. It's a lot of startups and businesses. Like I just love how you just made it so accessible. Like maybe this year you pick one thing, and you're putting all of your training and educational resources around this equity work and not one thing. I just think that's so good.

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  39:54

And if it's helpful, you know, we think about that spectrum I named diversity belonging, inclusion and equity, the average organization or school will take eight to 10 years to get to equitable change in totality, eight to 10 years. So it doesn't mean we can't have changes along the way that will impact our school community. But being able to say, with quantifiable and qualitative data that this school has reached equity or this organization has reached, it normally takes 10 years and our deep research, it takes about one to two years to do a diverse strategy will another one to two years on top of that, to do belonging, and then another two to three on top of that for inclusion. And I think it's helpful to manage our expectations, I am urgent for change, Bethany. But the last thing you want are really, really urgent people who have no competencies or skills to be urgent, urgent, people with no competency do harm. And when you harm people in this work, they never come back. This is collective work. And sometimes it is better to slow down not because we don't want to see change for our students or our adult leaders. But to slow down so that we know everybody knows what we're trying to do. So we can actually go together, what you don't want is to try to cram so much into a year, you will never see measurable change, it will not be sustainable, and only a few people will ever understand the whole initiative. And that's usually because they're the people who have access to the knowledge to understand the vision, not the people who are being asked to enact the vision, because they don't have access to the conversations around what the vision is,

Bethaney Wilkinson  41:47

Wow. Okay. 

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  41:49

We only learn one to two things at a time, in all facets of life. So if you are trying to do an implicit bias initiative, at the same time that we're trying to diversify, hiring, at the same time that we're trying to shift mindset. At the same time, we're asking for curriculum and practice change. At the same time, we're trying to manage retention. At the same time we're trying to track data, only one of those things will be done well. Period.

Bethaney Wilkinson  42:21

So you said you can only learn one to two new things at a time

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  42:27

For all things. Yeah. So if it's, for example, my first year as a teacher, my mental capacity is learning how to be in that space as a first year teacher, I can only hold one more thing.

Bethaney Wilkinson  42:40

Yep, that makes sense. Oh, gosh. Okay, I have so many more questions than I have time for in this conversation I have. I'll ask you those maybe offline. Or just saying Come follow you around for a week. But

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  42:55

We'd love to have you come on.

Bethaney Wilkinson  42:57

Okay, so my second to last question is what's so exciting to me is that you're not only an equity leader, educator facilitator, but you're also an entrepreneur. And I know there are a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, who are entrepreneurs, most of them are social impact entrepreneurs. So they're trying to do some good thing in the world who are using business and enterprise. And so I'm curious how have you applied an equity lens to the business that you're leading?

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  43:27

That's a really great question. To me, any level of entrepreneurship is about being purpose driven. And then I believe in alignment, right? I don't think there's such a thing as coherence, which is everything has to be the same everywhere. But alignment is I want to contextualize my purpose in the best way possible to this organization and the individual people who make it up. So for us, one of the things that became really important was I wanted our theory of change in our business model to match the same type of social impact we're trying to have in the world. So we had a very intentional want to hire folks from historically marginalized communities however you define that we wanted to make our onboarding process include the same type of tenants we know help to get to equity, which is storytelling. Our team spends a day every week just building community and telling each other our stories, so that we're better informed of who each other are so that we can walk in this work together. All of our facilitation, most recently is intersectional. So we have different ethnicities, origins, communities that make up how we facilitate to the world. In terms of our salaries, our salaries are all equitable. So it's not necessarily about how many years of school have you had every single person on this team contributes to the team in the same way, everyone is actually played paid the same? I know folks who are like Why, yes, yes, we all have the same salary. There is no one on this team who was any less important than anyone else. And just because someone may or may not have a doctorate doesn't mean they're any less expert than someone else. So that was one way that we did that. Also, in terms of the way that we charge for our workshops, we have a sliding scale charge, based off of the abilities of an organization, we're in our process of thinking about transitioning into a B Corps. So deep is a for profit organization, which can sometimes make equitable charging, a little a little wonky, right, because we still have to have a viable business model. And it's not equitable to charge everyone the same thing. Because not everyone can meet you in the same place because of their resources. So we've created different options for different organizations that can meet them in their financial responsibility, because you shouldn't not get powerful transformative work, just because your budget may or may not allow for that. So those are some of the ways I think, most evidently that that shows up in our model. But for me, it's also been about things like the fact that we're a virtual company. We have moms on our team, we have folks who are doing different things. And so we have a flexible schedule, we work remotely, we make room and things happen in focuses lives, the team picks up for what someone else can't do. We're very transparent about where we are in life. And not only in work, because it wouldn't make sense for us to assume that people can show up in absence of their lived experiences or identities. If sort of a team member just had a racially charged incident, like in the world, no, we don't expect you to get on this call. You take your time to process, and then we'll process together. But you can't ask people to show up in excellence when their experience and trauma. It just it just doesn't work like that. You know, we're about building deeper connections to humanity and love. And so we live a love ethos in this company with integrity. 

Bethaney Wilkinson  47:16

Oh, wow, that's so practical. And and again, I've used the word comprehensive a lot. But I think that's because you've taken the time to think through how equity touches everything, and what it means to live it out fully. And I think that is an opportunity that entrepreneurs have it is to create something from scratch that models a completely different, new and more equitable way to be in the world.

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  47:47

And I think it's important to, for entrepreneurs on the call relinquish perfectionism, we didn't get there. In our first ideation or our first business plan, we really had to figure out what equity meant along the way. And it's okay if you don't know right at the beginning. But I do think if that is your goal, you have to have an intention to be about that goal. So deep is three and a half years old this year. And I would say it is just in this year, that we are reaching an actual alized feeling of equity, more than just it being in our mission and vision. And that came from having multiple iterations of our team. We learned a lot. Unfortunately, by having really great people not be with the organization anymore, you learn a lot when people either leave or stay. We're constantly getting feedback from our team, we assume that we are imperfect. And that imperfection allows us the grace and the privilege to ideate never, ever underestimate the power of ideation. It is okay if you don't get there to ideation 52,000. But the goal is to get there. So manage your own expectations on how fast you want to get there, because you got to be willing to live it. But you sometimes don't know what it is. You can't live something that you're still defining an equity is one of those squishy things. It's redefining everything. And you can't do that alone. It takes a team to help you redefine and then it takes the team going forth in your mission in the world for you to further contextualize Now what does that mean to us? And you have to make time in your team meetings and your personal reflections in your journaling in your one on one check ins to always be wondering and asking on that.

Bethaney Wilkinson  49:52

Okay, so my last question for you. The goal of this entire project the diversity gap is my exploration into the gap between people's good intentions for having diverse and inclusive organizations, and then the impact of those intentions. And so from your vantage point, what is the biggest diversity gap that leaders are facing today? And how can they begin to close it? I know our whole conversation has been around this. But if you were to pinpoint like, what's the biggest gap you see? And how can we begin closing that gap? What would you say?

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  50:33

Wow, I've got 50, I've got 50. That, I'll say the one that I live in the most, which is the biggest gap is that people assume that we're bad people, if we're bias, the common denominator of all of us, is that we're bias. And I think people being able to sit in the multiple truths of themselves. And the multiple truths of this world, is the biggest gap that we haven't addressed. People think you're either racist, or you're not, you're an anti racist, or you're not, you're a good person, or you're not. And that's not true, I can be a really great well intentioned person who still is bias and still does harm even in my equity warriorship. And I think being able to sit in that allows me to ideate on myself, to ask critical questions about how this dominant ideology has shown up on me, which allows me to be a different person, when I show up to the table to do this collective group work. So I would say the biggest gap is the inability of organizations and leaders sometimes to allow us to sit in the multiple perspectives of ourselves, and blaming the pieces of our identity that we actually can't control. Like, all you can do is help people be more conscious of themselves. But to blame people, for most of the things that we're uninformed about, doesn't allow people to want to show up to collectively do anything together. Who wants to show up at a blame table. It's very different when people say show up as yourself. And we'll help you unpack yourself. And we're going to help you see how these pieces of you are showing up on others. Even if you may be uninformed about that. I love you enough to call you out on your multiple cells. But I also love you enough to hold you accountable in your state of uninformed. Because really good intention, people still do harm. And then to me that that's that's where I live. That's the area where I do the most of my work and where my team does the most of our work. It's a powerful thing when you can look in a mirror and realize that you've always been a hero. And you're also the villain. And nobody's hands are clean here. There isn't a promised land, there isn't one person who's going to lead us there. The only way we're going to get there is to reckon with these multiple cells. To name that greater good.

Bethaney Wilkinson  53:29

Wow, they're nice. Thank you so much. Thank you for I feel like I'm going to have to go read listen to this even before it's edited and just do some of that self reflection because so many of the things you said, I feel I felt them like I felt their invitation. But I haven't paused enough to consider what that means. And even that last bit like we both we're all we have multiple identities hero and villain we carry all of it and and that's just a personal challenge to me. And I really thank you for that. And thank you for your work and I'm really excited to share this conversation.

Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson  54:10

Thanks so much, Bethaney. It was such a pleasure.

Bethaney Wilkinson  54:27

Thank you for listening to The Diversity Gap podcast. If you've been challenged or inspired by what you've heard, please rate and review the show. You can also subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode. If you have thoughts or questions I'd love to hear from you connect with me at thediversitygap.com or on Instagram @TheDiversityGap. The Diversity Gap podcast is recorded on Muskogee Creek land in Atlanta, Georgia. This episode was produced by Matt Owen for Soul Graffiti Productions.