Facing Race: A National Conference in St. Louis, MO — November 20-22, 2024

Real Talk About Building Organizational Capacity for Racial Equity: A Peer Exchange

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Friday, 11/18
10:45 am to 12:15 pm

Building organizational capacity for racial justice is a heavy lift! If you facilitate learning, strategy development, healing, teambuilding, coaching, organizational change, and more to advance racial justice, this session is for you. 

In this generative peer-exchange we’ll build community and share ideas about engaging tough issues, including:

  • Addressing power dynamics between BIPOC groups
  • Decentering whiteness
  • Building power from the bottom up to advance change within organizations
  • Dealing with harmful top-down exercises of power
  • Helping organizations embody racial justice in their operations as well as their programming

This session will be organized as a generative space, with time for community building, peer exchanges, and space for ideas to emerge. We will begin with community building and an exercise to engage with power in an embodied way. Then we will split into peer-exchange groups to explore specific issues and ways to address them. We will finish with an opportunity to hear what emerged from these conversations.

Workshop hosts are from the Deep Equity Practitioners Network, an emerging network focused on creating spaces for learning and strengthening the racial justice capacity building field. We have been building the network since Facing Race 2018, when Race Forward organized a pre-conference session for capacity builders where participants lifted up shared values and a vision of liberated organizations and communities. We are building a space to explore different approaches to building organizational capacity, ways to build power that advances racial justice in and through organizations, and ways to influence the ecosystem that supports capacity-building work.