The Powerbitches community is outraged and in deep mourning over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and the countless other Black lives that have been stolen because of state violence and police brutality. We say their names out loud, we honor their lives, and we raise our voices against their unjust deaths.
At this pivotal moment in history, we stand with Black Lives Matter. We stand with thousands of protesters across the United States who are speaking out against white supremacy and systemic racism. We stand with our Black friends, family members, peers, community leaders, and fellow humans as we protest together to guarantee they are able to live, create, love, parent, build, dissent, and walk through the word without fear of hate and violence.
This moment is an opportunity to call for deeper, more profound action on racial justice for all of us, but especially for White people and non-Black people of color.
The inexcusable violence that is currently being protested is built on the back of slavery and colonialism. But it’s also built on countless more subtle violences, inequities, and power dynamics.
It’s built into our friendships and families, the intimate networks that go on to shape who we work with, collaborate with, and trust. It’s built in our media and popular culture, whose stories shape who we perceive as heroes and villains, who gets to occupy the center of the narrative, and who sits on the sidelines. It’s built into the everyday microaggressions, slights, insults, and indignities that bolster and empower the “Amy Coopers” of, as Alicia Sanchez Gill and Shante Bacon put it on Twitter, our non-profits, corporate offices, financial institutions, universities, medical facilities, government offices, board rooms, "team" meetings, mommy groups, and classrooms.
It’s in the makeup of your leadership team, the first hire you make at your start-up, and how much you pay them. It’s about who has access to grant and investment funding, and who feels comfortable in a room.
We must march if we can. We must make donations if we are able.
And for those of us who lead or are creating businesses, nonprofit organizations, and movements, we must look as well to our own backyards: at how we (unwittingly or otherwise) perpetuate these systems, and what we can do to dismantle them.
Powerbitches has strived to build diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism into our programming from our inception, in policies and commitments we haven’t shared explicitly until now, but which have nonetheless shaped the way we operate. Among these:
Share the voices of womxn of color founders, creators, and thought-leaders.
In 2019, we set a target that a minimum of 50% of our Salon speakers would be women of color, and surpassed it. Five out of eight of our Salon speakers last year were women of color, and three out of eight were Black womxn.
Pro-actively host conversations about diversity and inclusion, that get to the root of why people of color are too often marginalized even in progressive organizations.
We were grateful to partner with Michelle Wonsley-Ford on her workshop “Your Business Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit” last October
This month, Powerbitches Leadership Council member, power coach, and trust facilitator Korin Mills led us in a members-only conversation about friendships between white women and people of color.
Prioritize diversity in leadership. When we created our first Leadership Council last year, diversity was a key factor of consideration. The resulting leadership group was 50% womxn of color and 50% LGBTQ womxn.
We are proud that the rooms at our public events are diverse (and this is a function of deliberate outreach and organizing – as any organizer knows, no room fills itself by accident). But we also know that our membership is disproportionately white. We know that as an organization founded by a white woman (that would be me, Rachel), we must be vigilant against creating spaces that center whiteness as a default identity or experience.
As a Leadership Council, we are using this moment to reflect on how we can better serve the people of color in both our membership and our broader community, and on how we can build a community that reflects the true diversity of womxn working on the issues we care about. We commit to take action to build an organization that resists and dismantles white supremacy at every level.
To that end, we commit to:
Continue to actively experiment with new ways of sharing work and power in organizations, as we transition our business model and leadership structure ahead of our reopening later in 2020. Our leadership team is already diverse: we want that to be reflected in who you see facilitating our events, who you hear from in our emails, and who sets the agenda for the conversations that we program. (See Tuesday Ryan-Hart’s “Shared Work” model, Dori Tunstall on #respectfuldesign, Samantha Slade’s book Going Horizontal, CV Harquail’s work on feminist business models, and the Interaction Institute for Social Change for guidance on principles you can bring to your own organization.)
Create self-organizing affinity groups for our womxn of color and LGBTQ members to connect with and support each other.
Affirm our existing commitment that a minimum of 50% of our speakers will be womxn of color, formalize an additional commitment that one third of our speakers will be Black womxn, and commit to programming at least one trans speaker in the first 6 months after our live events reopen.
Conduct an internal review with our POC members and community on how Powerbitches is currently practicing what we say to be our values, and how we can do better.
Run programming covering anti-racism, diversity, and/or equity and inclusion work at minimum once a quarter, including an Equity Audit to help our community evaluate the current status and areas for growth within their own businesses, organizations, and communities
This work isn’t new. It has been happening for generations, led by Black movement leaders and other thinkers and activists of color. Nor is it easy: if it were, systemic racism would not be so intractable.
But if we want to build organizations, communities, and a society that is truly equitable and inclusive, it is work we must all be committed to.
We hope you will join us. Write back, and share with us what you're doing to integrate anti-racist principles into your organization, and what you'd like to see us doing at Powerbitches.
Yours in solidarity, now and always,
Rachel Hills, Vandana Arcot, Jillian Foster, Sam Grone, Meenakshi Menon, Korin Mills, and Lex Schroeder
Powerbitches Leadership Council