Impact Area

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Despite progress made toward advancing equity and social justice, full equity has not been realized. Systemic inequities, especially based on race, are real and significant barriers to people, organizations, and communities working to reach their full potential. Racism and implicit bias continue to negatively impact our workforces and communities, and additional factors related to where children, adults, and families live, work, learn, and play, are seeing increasingly wide disparities.

Social Current helps leaders to improve practice, policy, and systems to ensure equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in their organizations and in their communities. Our training and consultation build leaders’ EDI muscle, aid them in growing their organization’s capacity for EDI, and challenge them to engage all voices to advance community impact through an EDI lens.

Diverse group of working professionals talking around a table.

Guiding Principles

Focusing on the social sector, Social Current’s work to advance equity is guided by the following principles:

Action is a proactive strategy, and we challenge injustice at play in society today

The social sector contributes to inequity; we strive to understand the role our system plays in perpetuating oppression and address the dynamics that support it

We value and engage all voices in these conversations and are especially committed to elevating the voice of lived experience to inform practice, policy, and systems

Our Focus: Equity in the Social Sector Workforce

The social sector should be a place where diverse populations can gain meaningful employment, feel valued in and contribute to inclusive workplace cultures, advance to leadership roles, and create programs that reflect and honor communities served.

Social Current partners with organizations around their equity goals related to workplace culture, human resources, and leadership and governance. Leaders are better able to address complex challenges when they utilize their organizations’ full strength and range of views, experiences, and capabilities.

The Social Current team will co-create solutions with you that develop champions for your organization’s mission impact and for larger systemic change.

Our Approach

Organizations will be most effective in advancing EDI when they work to embed it at multiple levels. Social Current uses an approach that encompasses the person, organization, and system. This approach builds on our decades of work with nonprofit community-based organizations. It also incorporates the latest research on what makes EDI efforts successful.

The journey starts at the personal level, with individuals committing to continuous learning, reflection, and growth. As they develop, they’ll apply what they have learned about themselves to encourage and support others. This work will influence their role, the way they go about their work, and the organization’s system. This doesn’t mean that every staff person must be committed before starting, but you do need buy-in to begin and move it forward.

Organizations grow and advance EDI over time, making this process a journey. More than just individuals changing their thoughts and behaviors, the entire organization must address its processes, strategies, and culture to fully embed EDI. As the organization deepens its competence, it will expand its focus beyond internal work into deeper systems change.

The organization’s work happens within systems, whether it’s the neighborhood, the greater community of practitioners, or the fields in which the work happens, such as education, child welfare, or health care. How the organization engages in these systems—the philosophies and approaches used with program participants, the relationships and contracts with government agencies and funders, and more—is an opportunity to practice EDI and work toward deeper change. As the number of competent and committed organizations increases, we will gain greater momentum for systems change.

Our EDI Consulting Services Include:

Individual and organizational level assessments
A custom-level consultation approach – includes an engaged review and custom report of EDI related data collected by the organization
EDI charter and committee development
The development of an EDI plan through a Results-Based Accountability lens

Team and executive-level coaching
Development of learning and resource circles
Various levels and types of training on EDI topics and a dedicated team of consultants continuously engaged with its partners every step of the way on their respective EDI journeys