Board / Community Meeting: Racial Equity | September 2020

Creating the Future’s
Board / Community Meeting:
Monday, September 14th, from 10am – 12pm Pacific time
Topic:
Walking the Talk of Racial Equity 

Watch the meeting LIVE at this post.
Just scroll to the very bottom of the page.
Details about how to participate are below.

Note: if the meeting does not start on time please be patient as we may be running a few minutes late.

Background:
At our August meeting, Creating the Future’s board and community members continued one of the most important conversations we can have: What will Creating the Future do to ensure we are walking the talk of our values when it comes to racial justice and equity?

As our board takes on its new role of monitoring and ensuring our integrity, what will that role look like regarding the issue of racial equity and justice?

Using Catalytic Thinking to guide us, we began by considering the outcomes we want from engaging around this issue. “What do we want our own education to make possible – and especially, possible for whom?” 

The outcomes we articulated all had one thing in common: our mission of systems change, so that the systems we all encounter every day are bringing out the best in us. So many of the issues around equity are about systems – systemic injustice, systemic racism and otherism, systemic marginalizing of a whole variety of populations. As several board members clearly stated, “Impact trumps intent.” In the end, the systems-change impact of our work will be the measure of our commitment to racial equity. 

Given the next phase of Creating the Future’s programming, this recommitment to our mission as a statement of and step towards racial justice is significant, as we begin re-focusing the systems found within the social change arena itself – systems that currently fail to reflect the equitable, healthy, peaceful, joyful world those of us working for social change are all seeking to create. (You can read more about that here.)

The result was our coming back to that mandate for systems change, rooted in the stories of what is already working to create change – in marginalized communities, in communities of color, in all situations where people have been successful in shifting norms and systems. Further, our work will be to apply Catalytic Thinking to advance systems rooted in equity and justice.

Next Steps:
Given our board’s new role in ensuring all Creating the Future’s work is walking the talk of our values with deep integrity, our discussion led to the following next steps.

1. Reaffirm our values as it relates to issues of equity and justice (You’ll find our values statement at this link)
2. Determine what the board’s work will be in ensuring we are walking the talk of those values.

Those are the questions we will tackle at our September meeting. We feel there is no more important issue we can be discussing – not just for our organization, but every organization. And we want YOU to be part of that discussion.*

How to Prepare

First, please let us know if you plan to attend by sending a note at this link. Per the “How to participate” section below, please let us know which of the 3 ways you would like to participate. 

This PDF graphic of the Catalytic Thinking Framework will give you an understanding of the flow of the conversation. We recommend printing it out or having it otherwise available during the meeting, to spark your thinking during the discussion. You can also follow along with the questions that guide Catalytic Thinking at this link. 

How to participate

If you have never been part of Creating the Future’s work, all our strategy and board meetings are open and participatory, for anyone who wants to be part of the discussion. You can see more about that at this link.

Where we meet:

The board meeting will take place right here at this post. If the video does not appear precisely on time, please be patient – we are probably just running a few minutes late.

There are 3 ways you can participate in our meetings.

• If your familiarity with and commitment to Creating the Future’s work – or your own experience with re-imagining organizational systems – is calling you to be actively involved in the meeting discussion side-by-side at our online “meeting table,” let us know, and we will send you an invitation to join us online.

• If you want to participate but are unable to be in the meeting itself (perhaps you’re at work, or maybe at home with kids running around, etc.), watch the live-stream in real time and tweet your questions and ideas to us via the hashtag #CreatingTheFuture. We read those tweets aloud during the meeting, just as if you were there. This is a great first step for those who are not as familiar with our work, but want to get more involved.

(Please note: We will only see your tweets if you use the #CreatingTheFuture hashtag. In addition, during the meeting, we will not look at blog comments here at this post. While we will check those comments later, during the meeting we will only be following the #CreatingTheFuture hashtag in the Twitter stream.)

• Lastly, if you want to simply watch, or you want to think about what you’re hearing and respond later – or if you will be watching the recording after the meeting happens – please add your thoughts into the comments here at this post. We will include that thinking into the mix of things.

We look forward to your being part of our discussion on Monday, September 14th!

* All Creating the Future’s board meetings are open for anyone to participate, or to watch afterwards. To learn more about the thinking behind this openness – and our experiences with being open – click here. 

Logistics: The meeting will happen right here at this post. Details are below.

Watch the meeting HERE on Monday
Note: if the meeting does not start on time please be patient as we may be running a few minutes late.

or, After the meeting – LISTEN TO THE MEETING HERE

or Download the MP3
(To download to your hard drive, right-click {or click and hold on a Mac} on the link above and select “Save Target As”.. or “Save Link as”… depending on your browser)