Lisa McGill, LM Consulting [Starting at 04:25]: Thanks so much. Good morning, everyone. I am going to try to speak and get my slides organized at the same time.

I am really happy to be here, and of course, excited to see a lot of faces that I know. All right, so give me a second. There we go. Here I am. So I’m excited to be here. I’m going to walk you through the flow. So, we’re going to welcome you. We’re going to do a quick take and the take will be a poll. We will leverage the expertise in the room and later on, I’ll tell you what that means, because that means that you are the expert around your giving circles, and we’re going to leverage that. And then we’ll spend some time talking about the process.

You’ll notice that the title was a little tongue-in-cheek, like, it’s just not that hard. And the reason I say that is because when I am with a client, sometimes they have analysis paralysis and so I, forgive me, I have an 18-year-old son, but sometimes he’s like a dude or bro, even when he’s talking to women. And that’s how I feel like – it’s just not that hard. You gotta like, just try. You gotta not have fear.

You can do it. We haven’t solved racism yet. And so that means that people have to actively try to aspire around racial equity and you’ll make mistakes. So from there, we’ll talk about the promises that we can keep to each other. You have an amazing network here. I have been on the community practice site and that provides us an opportunity to share the promises. And then we’ll have some final reflections.

So I am going to have you do a favor for me. Tell me a bit about yourself. You can either give me a land acknowledgment, you can tell me what your ethnic background is, where you held from, or what you prefer for your pronouns. Just give me a little flavor, who you are.

I’m based right outside of Chicago. I call myself an “around the way girl,” if anyone remembers LL Cool J. I actually cut my teeth at a community foundation. I was a program officer for community initiatives and we were trying to make that community foundation a foundation for everyone. And part of that was donor engagement, especially in communities of color.

So pop in the chat who you are and then we will get started. Okay. I am a little fearful of language because I am not the language police, and so I find myself, when I’m in certain circles, people are like, oh, well you didn’t say we should do this, or you didn’t say we should call it this, or whatever.

And I say that on purpose because language has evolved. I know that a couple of years ago we were using a racial equity lens and a racial justice lens, which you’ll see in a little bit. And now people don’t say lens. Before COVID, most folks were saying POC, people of color. Now they’re saying BIPOC. But I do want to anchor us in some language because I’m going to talk about racial equity, not as, not, you know, in opposition to racial justice or racial liberation, but I know that this is the community practice for racial equity.

And I just want to be clear, folks are familiar with GARE. This is a lift from GARE. Now mind you, I have not paid attention to GARE during COVID. So who knows, they may have changed their definition. So racial equity means closing the gap so that race does not predict one’s success, while also improving outcomes for all. To do so, you have to target strategies to close that gap, move beyond services, and then focus on changing policies, institutions, and structures.

You will remember earlier that I mentioned lens. This publication, Grantmaking with a Racial Justice Lens, is something that I worked on for free, which is the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity. I want to say it came out in 2016. So this is an exercise that kind of shows you how things are different. People don’t say lens now because you know, you worry that you can put a lens on or take it off.

But I think it is instructive because it talks about some of the differences between racial equity and racial justice. So I’m going to just put a little pin mark through the lens here. Racial equity separates symptoms from causes, but racial justice brings into view the confrontation of power, the redistribution of resources, and the systemic transformation necessary for real change.

So my understanding is that you guys have a powerhouse, as it relates to racial equity and then racial justice in terms of upcoming programming for the community of practice. And so you’ll hear more about racial justice in the future, but I just want to anchor us and what the conversation is for today. I’m going to pause here because I’m about to put you to work.

Lisa took a moment to answer some clarifying questions about whether or not to use the word “lens” in our approaches to racial equity work. 

Lisa McGill: As it relates to racial equity and racial justice, each giving circle is in a different place when it comes to racial equity practices. The important thing is to make time to discuss and take action in moving toward racial equity.

You know, this goes to the point of it’s hard, but it’s not that hard. You gotta start somewhere. So we are about to do a poll. And, I hope you all will indulge us with the poll. We’re doing it based on some practice areas actually for Philanthropy Together. So, internal cultures and systems, which should feel familiar, with giving, and then community impact.

And you have one question for each. So internal cultures and systems have our giving circle or the giving circle that I am supporting created clear goals to embed racial equity in our culture, practice, and giving? Don’t worry, the poll is coming up. Do we collect information that allows us to understand our current giving as relates to racial equity? And then, community impact: does our giving circle partner with community activists, leaders, and others to ensure our giving is meeting community needs and building community power?

All right, everyone, you all have already started. Everyone should be able to vote now and go for it. All right, we got that some have not done this. Making some progress, actively pursuing. Ooh, we’ve got a few folks standing out and leading. Nice. Okay. We’ll keep it open for maybe five more seconds.

Okay. And then we can go ahead and end the poll and you can see the results there. So, “I have not done this” is around 20% for the first question; “made some progress,” about 30%; “actively pursuing” 45%; and then “standing out and leading” for 5%. I’m looking at the second question here, and hopefully, you all can see it.

Do we collect information that allows us to understand our current giving as relates to racial equity? I have not done this. Some progress was made at 55% – good! Actively pursuing 15% and then standing out and leading at 5%. And then the last question, does our giving circle partner with community activists, leaders, and others to ensure our giving is meeting community needs and building community power?

Have not done this at 35% and then, some progress has been made at 40%. Okay.

All right. So one of the things that’s cool about the poll is that it’s taken from an assessment tool that you’ll have access to through the community of practice. And so this assessment tool pulls from work that Race Forward has done, that PRE has done. I feel like I’m missing something that GARE has done and you’ll have it as it relates to internal systems and also as it relates to community practice.

And so you’ll get access to that and I’m a big fan of not reinventing the wheel. So you’ll see that a lot in every tool that I share with you, because this becomes a way for you to sort of practice, you know, stuff that people have been doing for a while. I like to resurface materials that came out because people put a lot of thought and attention into it.

Okay. I’m always a little afraid to make folks work, especially on December 16th, because everyone’s brain is a little fraught. But I say that knowing that with racial equity you have to do the work. So I’m hoping that you all will do your best. I promise not to put you into a lot of small groups, but I am going to put you into small groups here.

For the next few minutes, Lisa broke the participants into small breakout rooms to discuss internal culture, system giving, and community impact in their giving circles, with the goal to provide two successes and two challenges apparent in each.  

Lisa McGill: Good. This is typically when I do consulting work with clients, I get you all talking to each other, right? So there’s no perfect answer, but you almost have to talk to each other to kinda figure out what’s going on, both in your giving circle, but quite frankly, kind of what’s going on that people aren’t mentioning.

I’m going to show you something that, I think, will be useful here because it’ll explain what the actual tool is. So this is the tool that you’ll receive. It is a tool that works through all of the questions that you’ve worked through. Can you guys see it? And then once we take that tool, we are going to switch it to the next thing.

So bear with me. I have way too many slides coming up and we are here. Okay, so giving in action: our goal here is to take that assessment tool and to make it into an action plan. Now, the challenge I have here is that I don’t want to put you into another breakout room. But if we were in person or if you were a client, I would put you into another breakout room.

I have this thing about making the clients do the work. Because quite frankly, you’re the experts in the room. That said, though, I am going to show you when I was before you were in your room, something that I sort of came up with. All right. So are you guys ready? Okay. So. I tried to think about the racial equity action plan to look at some of the questions that we gave you.

I generated some examples of what Lisa would do if Lisa were running the giving circle, but I wanted to find some of the things that you mentioned to show you where they would land. I need you to stay with me for one second. You’re going to be able to see the thread in a second, but it’ll take a minute.

I’m going to stop sharing and I am going to show you one more document. All right? And then I promise to work through with you. Can everyone see these seven steps? All right. Favorite old school from the Ann E. Casey Foundation? Oh my gosh. I want to say like 2007. I think I haven’t been around for that long, but I have.

But these are seven steps to racial equity. I use them all the time. This is why I tell folks you do not need to reinvent the wheel, and we’ll make sure that you have these in your packet. I am not going to go over these because you can still see my screen. Can you see my screen now? No.

There you go. You’ll notice that in the racial equity plan template that I’m giving you, it is all here. To establish an understanding of racial equity and inclusion principles. Engage effective populations and stakeholders. Gather and analyze disaggregated data, conduct systems analysis, and identify strategies and target resources. And then conduct racial equity, continuously evaluate effectiveness, and adapt strategies.

Before I go through this, I want to see what questions you have, because I’m going to try to walk you through how to take the assessment tool that you’ve worked on and then plop the answers into a racial equity plan to get started for action steps.

I’m going to pause here a little bit though. Let me look at it. Take a peek. This one focuses on giving. By the way, I can do the same thing with community impact and with internal culture. Alright, questions, concerns. “Lisa, this is way too heavy, too much.” Talk back to me.

Okay, so this is a template. It is in view mode now, but you can download it right now so that you have it for your giving circle. The focus is on giving, which is one of those three dimensions that we talked about, and then I tried to populate it by answering some of the questions that you had.

And then stepping back and figuring out what this would look like on the ground. So I’m going to give you an example. One of the pieces is giving, and the thought is to establish an understanding of racial equity and inclusion principles. If I were leading it, I would make sure that we had a glossary of key terms, so everyone’s circle could be on the same page.

If we hadn’t started yet, somebody’s like, nope, haven’t started it. Or in progress that it had a done-by date like this needs to be done by March 2022 and that somebody has to own it and be on it with the lead, and I just type it in. In progress. March 2022 lead. And, you know, so she’s on the hook for it.

And then also to make sure that you distribute it. So someone had mentioned around not being extractive, not holding onto information. But if folks are going to be impacted by this block of terms, grantees, and other giving circle members, make sure that you know, you own it too. So the cool thing is that before you were looking through your notes, some of you were already doing it.

So I added this here. This is a list from what you wrote, so we would need to clean it up. But it looks like one of the groups has already looked at language and comms and how that reflects our connection to racial equity, which was a success. And this worked at the very beginning. Clean that up as a racial equity action so that you’re not just looking at it, but that you’re actually deciding what it is and then establish a status, a due-by date, and then leave.

The other thing I thought was cool, and I’m looking to engage effective populations and stakeholders in, is that, you know, I might do community engagement sessions. You’ll notice what I said without being extractive – okay, folks? Don’t be a pain. Know that childcare knows people gotta work, all those different things.

But then also I love participatory grantmaking programs. Some people can’t do them. I understand how giving circles are set up, but I find them useful. What you all mentioned was collaboration, building strong relationships, and transparency by having community members be part of the decision-making.

So you know, for me that’s participatory grantmaking, but I love that some of you are already doing that. It becomes a matter of how you use that and put it within your racial equity plan. So I would clean that language up. I would say whether it’s in progress, I would put a date on it, and then I would put a lead.

And you’ll notice if you go down that we’ve done similar things for each one. Everything that’s in red here is a lift from what I’ve taken from you because you are the expert in the room and you just have to clean it up. All right.

Isis Krause, Philanthropy Together: Can I ask a clarifying question?

Lisa McGill: Absolutely.

Isis Krause: So are you saying that it’s not that giving circles in this amazing community has to do these exact perfect racial equity actions?

Lisa McGill: No!

Isis Krause: Got it! So it’s following the seven steps, looking at the assessment tool, and then brainstorming within the circle, what are the actions that make sense for us, and having an action plan against them.

Lisa McGill: Right. So what you have in front of you, I think that these steps are good ones because it helps you sort of codify and know what’s going on.

I think that the racial equity action steps have to be yours, depending on what your structure is. I often tell clients to work from their strengths and then push themselves. So like if you know that you cannot get the disaggregated data for what’s going on with African-American children in a ZIP code 60422, you don’t need to get it, but somebody in the community probably has it.

And so you can partner with the people in the community that you know that have that information and use that information to make decisions about your grant. This is a template, so literally, it’s one that we created this morning, just to give you a sense of how you can go about it. But one of the things that’s important is being deliberate, mapping down what you put down, what you measure you will do, and so I encourage you to just map out the steps.

Okay. I will make sure that before you all get the template, if you haven’t downloaded it already, I slap examples in the template and all that stuff over it. But it can be pretty useful just to make you put the information down.

There’s a question in the chat. So have you seen groups use this and tie it into their overall strategic planning efforts? Yeah. So sometimes I do strategic planning with clients, but sometimes I come in to do their equity audit and develop a plan, and it becomes really weird.

I think that in particular, attention needs to be paid to equity, and so you have to decide like, is this, does it dovetail? Can it be parallel? You know, I think it’s really good to have an equity consultant who can do strategic planning because they can kind of think about it at the same time.

But, if you have a good facilitator who can list the right questions, you’re good. It depends on, you know, what your commitment is. Okay. How would you recommend that a smallish giving circle take this on one segment at a time or all in tandem? I love the question. I am super ambitious. So what I would do is, I would have an Excel sheet for each one.

I would map out what I thought was doable. And you can often do it at the same time, right? It’s to do something, as long as you document it and then you can phase out and do the next thing. I wouldn’t keep it in silos because life doesn’t work in silos.

One of the things that I noticed in looking at your notes is some of the stuff you had in “community impact,” you know, it could have been in “giving” or in “internal culture,” because that’s just how you know the cycle of either the giving you do or the culture you bring to a community. That’s just kind of how it works. It’s hard to do stuff in silos, although I think silos are useful because you can operationalize them. So that’s what I would create a sheet for each one.

Did I get every question? Okay. The last piece of stuff is the promises that you can keep to each other. Okay, so bear with me. You know, I’m going to tell you all this is why I cannot wait to be back in person, because I would have all of my notes passed and wouldn’t have to jump on the screen. Alright? Promises you can keep to each other.

When I’m in person, you all will not be able to see this – it’s a card that says, “Because I said I would.” Okay. It is from a guy who is in Detroit. His father died and he always said, “I’m going to do it because I said I would.” So I usually hand out these cards to people, and I have you right there, what your promise is that you can keep, to yourself or your colleagues.

Sometimes people put their email addresses on it. Sometimes people just kind of keep it and tuck it away, but you document it so when we share our goals with others and ourselves, we’re more likely to follow through on our commitment. Unfortunately, we don’t have these cards for you, but I would enjoy it if you pop it into either the chat, if you feel comfortable, or after this, go over to the community of practice and you know, find a way to share it with people there.

If you’ve had conversations with people here that you know, Ramona may want to reach out to Becky and say, “Hey Becky, I don’t know you, but I want to get it, here’s the promise – check back in with me in three or four months.”

Here are the additional resources that we’ll make sure we share with you. One will be the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s old-school document that I found useful. Another is by a fellow consultant, Frontline Solutions, where they call it the equity footprint. But it lets you go through each piece of a giving circle or an organization. We’ll make sure that you get that along with the assessment and with the template all cleaned up and in a bow, prepared for the holiday season.

Final reflection. Name it. So if you’re doing racial equity, just go ahead and name it. Do the work, and make your goals explicit. Advance equity. And that means in terms of engaging folks with lived experience and expanding opportunity for them, building power, and then making S.M.A.R.T. goals.

And Kelsey’s going to do me a solid and put what the acronym stands for in the chat, and then my favorite is, oh my gosh, don’t reinvent the wheel. So I’ve been doing this stuff for, I’m going to go ahead and just say 20 years, which means I’m feeling kinda old here. One of the things that surprises me about this new movement around racial equity is that there are all of these great tools that, you know, people before us have come up with that are just sitting there like pieces that we can take advantage of.

And then my last piece is to do stuff with urgency. You know, we are fearful, you’re worried about saying the wrong thing. You hold onto stuff forever because you think you’re going to offend someone. We do not have time for folks to not work with some urgency. And failure is not a bad thing. Failure is inevitable. Because if we were going to solve racism, it would’ve been solved. And so we have to act. And do so with some urgency.

That’s a wrap for me. I feel like I have done a whirlwind session that I usually take a day for. I hope the resources will be helpful for you.

Kelsey Barowich: Thank you so, so, so much, Lisa. We appreciate you being here. This was great. I loved it. I am someone who loves a good Excel sheet, particularly around goal setting and accountability. Love the ownership piece because it’s so easy to let things fall through the cracks. And this is something that cannot fall through the cracks.

So as we’re closing out, as I said in the chat, I’m going to be sharing in the forum the question of what promises you are keeping. But we would also love to see what promises you’re thinking of right now in the chat. Please feel free to share.

And just as folks are leaving, Lisa, one question that came up in our chat while we were closing out. Are you finding that organizations are addressing other equity issues, LGBTQ+, et cetera, or just one at a time?

Lisa McGill: Yes. Depends on the organization. You know, sometimes people say I want to take on, I’m about to say lens, but I want to take on intersectionality because I want to look at gender. Or even class, and it just sort of depends on the organization and then, if you have a facilitator come there, they may have an agenda, but Philanthropy Together has a point of view around the work.

And so, you know, they may be able to push you sort of knowing where you need to go in terms of your racial equity journey or your gender equity journey, or you know, how you’re thinking about building power. So yeah, people do work with intersectionality.

Kelsey Barowich: Amazing. Any other questions as we close out the space? Ooh, I see a promise.

Lisa McGill: Woo, yes, Becky!

Kelsey Barowich: Oh, I love that promise: “I promise to compensate the community members for their time and expertise because I said I would,” from Becky. Love it. If you have questions or promises, feel free to add them to the chat.

We closed the session with a brief Q&A with Lisa, and plenty of well wishes for the holidays.