Behind the Scenes on Our Anti-Racism Journey (Part I)
Uncharted is taking intentional steps to become a more antiracist organization. This work is foundational for our organization and personal for our team. We are determined to rise to the responsibility and role we have to fight systems of oppression, but we are also struggling. This work is complex, nuanced, and slow. There have been times when we haven’t known what to do. So in an effort to ask for help and transparently share our journey, we wanted to create a series of posts that show the behind-the-scenes challenges we’re facing, the progress we’re making, and the questions we’re asking.
Every other week for the next ten weeks, we’ll publish an article with a behind-the-scenes look about a different dimension of our work to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles into everything we do.
- Inclusion, hard conversations, and Uncharted culture (February 25th).
- Hiring, recruitment, and staff benefits (March 11th).
- Equity lens across our programmatic work (March 25th).
- Decision-making / strategy / governance (April 8th).
- Summary, reflections, and learnings (April 22nd).
Uncharted’s journey of becoming an antiracist organization will be a never-ending one. The work will always continue, and while we don’t expect to suddenly arrive, it does feel like we are in the messy middle right now: we’re aren’t just beginning, and we certainly aren’t experts. We’ve struggled in some areas, made progress in others, unlearned things we used to believe, and have been humbled by the responsibility to press forward.
Becoming an antiracist organization is fundamental to our future vision and strategy. We support visionaries whose work seeks to change long-broken systems that have left people behind. As an organization sitting at the nexus of big dollars and small organizations, we believe our role is to create equitable access to resources and power for social ventures so they can achieve their missions.
Examining how we are complicit in white supremacy and other systems of oppression and then taking steps to counteract those forces is critical for our organization’s long-term success.
Why We’re Doing This
Maybe it’s not advisable to write on a topic from the messy middle. Maybe it’s better to wait until we have more things figured out, but I’ve sometimes found that sharing an update from a midway point invites those who find themselves in similar terrain to reach out and offer help or express solidarity. Sometimes I’ve found their feedback and insights to be more valuable than those who have already figured it out. The messy middle might still be messy, but maybe we can make it less lonely.
Co-exploration is also one of the fastest ways to learn, and it is my hope that as we publish our challenges, goals, questions, and data about our DEI journey, we can find co-explorers to journey alongside us in this daily work. Patrick O’Shaughnessy, a podcast host, once said:
The fastest way to learn is to be slightly wrong in public.
The goal of this series of posts is for us to share where we are in the hopes of continuing our learning journey. There will likely be times when we are not slightly wrong but quite wrong, and there may be other times when we’ve figured something out that might help others who also find themselves in the messy middle. Ultimately, we see transparency both as a tool for learning and a force for advancing equity. As Audre Lorde says:
There is no liberation without community…
How This Series Will Work
The structure will be somewhat similar for each topic. We’ll start by outlining our goals and existing metrics that pertain to that topic. Then we’ll dive into what we’re currently doing by outlining the actions and steps we have taken. From there, we’ll provide some honest context about what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and what our learnings/challenges have been. Finally, we’ll conclude with some requests for help around outstanding questions or other areas at the frontier of our learning.
Throughout this process, we’ll feature different voices from our team at every level of the organization. Ibram X. Kendi talks about how deeply personal this work can be, so each post will have an author (or authors) and you’ll be able to engage directly with them. This is not faceless content written “by Uncharted.” It’s content written by people on our team who, themselves, are on their own personal journeys.
We’ve been fortunate to work with some excellent humans who have helped us in our DEI work. Erin Yoshimura from Empowerful Changes has been a thoughtful facilitator and coach for our team, as have many external members of our network and community who have shared their perspectives and feedback.
I think it will quickly become clear just how much of a work-in-progress we are as an organization, and I hope that our work-in-progress-ness will be seen as an invitation for you to engage with us and offer your advice and perspective. To that end, we’ve created a few ways to engage with this:
- We will share emails of the post’s author(s) for each post.
- Simply leave a comment on medium.
- Submit anonymous feedback, insights, and questions.
With permission, we’ll publish the feedback we receive as extensions of our original post in a resources section at the bottom.
Organizational Overview
We will dive into specifics, questions, and challenges in two weeks, but I wanted to first share some quantitative data about our organization so you have a sense of some of our demographic numbers, along with survey results that speak to inclusion.
Portfolio Demographics
- 48% of the ventures in our portfolio are led by women or non-binary founders.
- 38% of the ventures in our portfolio are led by people of color.
Current Team Demographics
Internal Inclusion Assessment
Our team completed an internal-facing inclusion assessment called the Spectra Diversity Inclusion Assessment. This assessment aimed to capture insights from our team on the current state of our DEI work. Here are the results (our full-time team (not board), was surveyed here):
Management
Management shows that diversity is important through their actions.
- Strongly agree: 31%
- Agree: 54%
- Neutral: 15%
Management has created a culture of diversity and inclusion at our organization.
- Strongly agree: 8%
- Agree: 38%
- Neutral: 38%
- Disagree: 16%
Management holds all employees equally accountable for their actions and behaviors.
- Strongly agree: 30%
- Agree: 62%
- Neutral: 8%
Culture
Employees of different backgrounds interact well in our organization.
- Strongly agree: 22%
- Agree: 69%
- Neutral: 9%
When diversity and inclusion issues arise in this organization, they are dealt with in a positive and constructive manner.
- Strongly agree: 15%
- Agree: 46%
- Neutral: 39%
Effort is made to solicit ideas of all employees in this organization.
- Strongly agree: 69%
- Agree: 31%
Personal characteristics such as race, gender, age, etc. influence decisions in this organization.
- Frequently: 9%
- Sometimes: 31%
- Rarely: 39%
- Almost never: 20%
Hiring and Promotion
This organization has done a good job hiring people of diverse backgrounds.
- Neutral: 31%
- Disagree: 54%
- Strongly disagree: 15%
This organization is effective at promoting people of diverse backgrounds (across gender, race, age, etc.).
- Agree: 47%
- Neutral: 38%
- Disagree: 15%
Personal characteristics such as race, age, gender, etc. hinder an individual’s career progression in this organization
- Frequently: 9%
- Sometimes: 32%
- Rarely: 39%
- Almost never: 20%
Policies
The HR policies, practices and procedures in this organization support diversity and inclusion.
- Strongly agree: 8%
- Agree: 69%
- Neutral: 15%
- Disagree: 8%
You can read the full report here.
Reflections and Commentary on Demographics
Portfolio Demographics
The gender gap in early-stage entrepreneurship is well-documented, with women and non-binary founders being underrepresented in accelerators and with funding, and so we’re pleased this number is as high as it is, but we’re in the process of reimagining our recruitment pipeline and selection process to source higher numbers of underrepresented founders (including women, non-binary founders, and people of color). We believe that a higher percentage of underrepresented founders in our pipeline will translate into a higher number of women and founders of color in our portfolio. As for founders of color, we’re aiming to double this percentage, and we’ll go into more detail in subsequent posts about our equity approach to recruitment and selection, along with the challenges and struggles we’re facing.
Team Demographics
We have work to do to become a more fully representative organization of the communities facing the issues we take on or the entrepreneurs we directly serve in our portfolio. Right now we are not there. There is a lot to discuss here, and we’ll go into greater detail about our challenges, our approach, and remaining questions that we have.
Internal Inclusion
There weren’t major surprises in the Spectra Inclusion results for us. Ultimately, the aggregate scores matter less than the experiences that underpin the lowest scores, and simply looking at averages is, itself, not an approach rooted in equity. In two weeks, we’ll highlight some of our biggest cultural challenges, explore the work we’ve done to facilitate inclusion, and what’s next for us given these results.
We Want to Hear From You
As we kick off this series, we’re excited to engage with people and organizations that find themselves on a similar journey. If you consider yourself in this group, here are a few questions we have for you:
- What is something you would be interested to hear more about?
- Where is your organization most challenged in your DEI journey? We’d love to hear from you…odds are we are challenged there too.
Stay tuned for the next post in two weeks on Inclusion, hard conversations, and Uncharted culture.
Banks
CEO, Uncharted
banks@uncharted.org
