Behind the Scenes on our Anti-Racism Journey (Part V)

Equity lens across our programmatic work

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, it seemed like nearly every company, brand, and organization had something to say. I watched my inbox and social media feeds fill up with strongly worded statements about Black Lives Matter, systemic racism, and racial injustice. I remember rolling my eyes hard when a deodorant brand I bought once, pressed pause on pushing its rosé-scented summer special edition to send out a lengthy email about its commitment to racial justice. The backlash against companies like Amazon and the NFL was swift and brutal, with people on Twitter pointing out the hypocrisy of companies that have well-documented histories of perpetuating business practices that set us back in the fight for racial justice calling for change and making vague commitments to do better.

The point being, there’s saying the right thing, and then there’s doing the right thing. Any organization should rightly be judged by the statements it makes, the policies and practices it employs, and by the products or services it offers. In past weeks at Uncharted, we’ve discussed where we are on our DEI journey, our organizational culture, our hiring and recruitment practices, and how we’re building new muscles around hard conversations. Uncharted runs programs, so this week we’re sharing some of our thinking around DEI and how it shows up or doesn’t in our programs, and some of the changes we’ve been making.

Landscape Overview

It’s hard to get to exact numbers (like participant demographics) for accelerator programs as an industry, but you can use data on who receives venture capital (VC) and philanthropic funding to get an approximation of where the industry currently stands. In 2020, only 2.2 percent of VC funding went to female-led start-ups and Black and Latinx founders received a mere 2.6 percent of VC funding combined. According to New Profit, during the mezzanine (late-early) stage, Black and Latinx leaders receive only about 4 percent of funding although they comprise about 10 percent of nonprofit leaders. A study released by Echoing Green and the Bridgespan Group found that among organizations focused on improving the outcomes of black boys, groups with Black leaders had 45 percent less revenue, and 91 percent less unrestricted assets than their counterparts with white leaders.

Where We Currently Stand

We mentioned in our last post that 48 percent of ventures in our portfolio had at least one female or non-binary founder and 38 pecent have at least one founder of color. In contrast to where funding is going, these statistics look exceptional, and are just shy of national demographics (women are 50.8 percent of the population, and BIPOC make up 39.9 percent of the population).

Since our founding, we’ve always tracked the gender breakdown of the participants in our programs, and within the last few years we started officially tracking racial demographics as well (though we’ve been aware of the racial makeup of our cohorts unofficially for some time). Bringing a degree of intentionality to our process has helped ensure our portfolio is more diverse than what you’ll find in our industry overall, but we have not enshrined our intentionality as organizational policy or procedure.

As a social impact organization focused on addressing economic inequality, we’re of the mind that matching national demographic trends in our cohorts is a good first step, but it’s not good enough. By design, certain groups — BIPOC, women, and nonbinary people to name a few — have been excluded from receiving resources and sitting at decision making tables, so it’s going to take conscious and deliberate effort to begin to right those wrongs and design a new system that values the expertise of the people who are closest to the issues.

We could commit to increasing the percentage representation of historically underrepresented groups we accept into our programs and call it a day, but that would mean we were just addressing the symptoms and not getting to the root causes. Changing our cohort demographics without changing anything else about our programming merely invites people who have been on the margins to participate in potentially unsupportive spaces. As an organization, we also have some work to do ourselves in looking at the programs we run and how we’re creating spaces that are inclusive or exclusive, developing programming that breaks down white supremacy norms or upholds them, and prizing certain expertise or overlooking different experiences.

What’s Worked, What Hasn’t, and What We’ve Learned

In recent years, we’ve been lucky to work on initiatives that naturally attract diverse organizations to our programs, and we’ve been grateful that when we make mistakes, our participants have called us in and given us the opportunity to address them. These moments have been the ones that have led us to think deeper and make some changes.

In one instance, we ran a program where the cohort consisted of six white, male founders, one male founder of color, and one female founder of color. While members of our team were conscious of the emerging disparity during our selection process, we didn’t make changes to the cohort composition or proactively acknowledge the racial and gender dynamics that our selection decisions had created within the cohort. What happened instead was that the lone female founder of color had to call out the racial and gender dynamics she was experiencing both during programming and in the end-of-program review: “One female founder out of eight companies doesn’t represent the breadth and range of founders… and I want to help and support your team to increase the diversity of applicants next year.” Our program manager, Joe, reflected that “DEI didn’t even cross my mind until the only woman and only person of color called it out. And she was right. We were sitting there in a room full of white men. It wasn’t diverse, it wasn’t representative, and we had to do better.”

In this particular instance, doing better meant changing our recruitment process to reach out to and attract a broader more diverse pool of applicants and looking at our program selection criteria. It also meant examining the role we played as an organization in putting a woman and person of color in an uncomfortable (and potentially unsafe) situation by avoiding talking about an issue we knew existed and placing the burden on her to either speak out or suffer in silence.

In another instance, we made a deliberate attempt to create an inclusive space and it backfired. We held a week of in-person programming in a historic mansion, and contracted with a digital artist to Photoshop our participants’ heads onto old-timey portraits to go up alongside the other original art in the mansion. Despite internal conversations about whether it was appropriate and discussions about how to do it in a way that was respectful, it didn’t go over well. Though we proactively accounted for some of the ways it could go wrong, we didn’t anticipate the ways people actually found it offensive. We considered how putting a veteran participant’s head on a military portrait might not go over well, but failed to anticipate that one of our female participants would be hurt that no women’s heads were featured on generals’ portraits, and didn’t see it coming that one of our participants was a pacifist and was offended to see his head featured on a military body. One participant shared, “I know the intentions were good, but the portraits made me a bit uncomfortable since that’s counter to the social justice work that we do.” Rather than create community and build trust, we lost it.

Until recently, we’ve mostly made reactive changes based on direct feedback from our program participants. We’re grateful to them for sharing their critiques with us in ways that invite us to be better rather than cancelling us, and our culture of learning has helped us have those hard conversations and reflect on how we can make improvements. But incremental changes yield incremental results, so we’ve been taking a more holistic approach over the past year to design new programs that take an equity approach from start to finish.

Moving Forward

Where our organization used to be issue-agnostic, we’re now centered on addressing issues of economic inequality. The way we see it, economic inequality is one of the most defining issues of our time, and for a while now it’s been trending in the wrong direction, aided and abetted by attitudes, trends, and policies that span our nation’s history to allow for the creation, growth, and perpetuation of wealth for few at the expense of the many. For us to be successful in creating the kinds of conditions for different kinds of people and ventures to interrupt the status quo, we simply can’t keep doing the same things we’ve always done in the same ways we’ve always done them. We need to be as critical (in the sense of being analytical as opposed to judgmental) of our own practices as an organization as we are in our analysis of the issue we seek to impact.

Our programs comprise a number of distinct components: recruitment, application, selection, programming curriculum, cohort experience, and introductions to external supports like mentors and funders. Like many organizations, we made some big pivots in 2020, which have given us the opportunity (and the kick in the rear) to look at every aspect of what we do as we design a new program and think about DEI at every step along the way.

As we’ve gone about designing our new program, we’ve tried to hold a balance between a mindset of exploration (marked by learning, experimentation, and risk-taking) and exploitation (marked by refinement, efficiency, and competency). This looks like bringing our decade plus of experience to the table to inform our direction, but holding nothing we think we know as sacred; instead, we are encouraging ourselves and others to ask ‘why’ at each step. Our curriculum, recruitment tactics, marketing, application, selection process, network, and even the language we use have all come under a microscope as we make decisions about our future work.

Once we started bringing that critical eye toward some of our internal processes like how we select a cohort, we started recognizing the ways in which we weren’t just perpetuating bias, but encouraging it! In our selection criteria and training we called out being aware of biases, but we also instructed application reviewers to ‘trust their guts’ as well as consider if applicants had a magic ‘x-factor’. We warned against groupthink, but we also asked the two application reviewers to meet and try to come to a consensus on their application score. We created objective grading criteria in categories like evidence of impact, a financially viable and scalable model, and a capable team, but had subjective definitions like “UNBELIEVABLE team” that we used to grade applications on. These are just a few examples of the ways in which our internal processes have encouraged bias to creep in as we’re making the most important decision we can make in our line of work: which applicants make it into our programs.

For us, a big part of our program reinvention has been about imagining what could be possible in our programs alongside people who are our potential applicants. We’ve done this by running focus groups and by regularly engaging previous and potential participants when we have questions and new material to share, whether it’s a draft of a new application, a survey about what’s most needed in the current ecosystem, or a conversation in a shared Slack channel about the language we use.

As we’ve been building out a new application and selection process, we’ve started asking ourselves questions like, “who does our application process include and who does it exclude?” “How can we encourage people to opt in instead of opting out?” “What tools and resources can we provide to help?” “Are we using language, terminology, or jargon that’s inaccessible?”

When it comes to our curriculum and the resources we’re providing in our programs, we’re starting to ask ourselves similar questions like, “do our contractors share our organizational and programmatic values?” “Do the people and resources in our network reflect similar demographics we aspire to see in our cohort composition?” “Are we perpetuating harmful white supremacy norms through the choices we make in the curriculum we offer and the resources we provide?” “How can we create an environment where we create conditions for our participants to pursue the right way for them instead of pushing only one right way?”

As a result of these conversations both internally and with external partners, the economic inequality program (we opened applications recently) is a program that looks different from what we’ve done in the past: from recruitment all the way through to graduation. Some of these changes are more visible, like in the structure and length of our applications and in the resources we’re offering during programming. Other changes are less outwardly visible, but equally impactful, like the criteria we use for grading applications and the structure and timing of our programming blocks.

Our newest program will not be perfect. We’ll have numerous opportunities to improve, both during the program and once it concludes, but this is a huge step in the right direction. Cristina, one of Uncharted’s Program Associates helping design our economic inequality initiative shared, “For [our other programs], my job was easier because we were copying and pasting from previous years. But there should be things that change. Just because something has worked before doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon.”

We’ve found ourselves at the right confluence of events (an organizational shift in focus, the development of a brand new program, and a global pandemic) to do the deep work and consider every element of our program from a baseline perspective. While we don’t anticipate doing a top-to-bottom review/reinvention ahead of every program we run or even every year, we do think there is value in regularly asking ourselves questions about what we we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and whether our processes and systems are helping us get to the outcomes we’re striving to achieve. So here are some remaining questions we have:

• What kinds of structures exist that can help ensure we regularly review aspects of our programming every year?
• Are there best practices for how often we should look at our programs in their entirety and make holistic updates?
• If you’ve gone through similar processes in your own organizations to review where bias is creeping in, what lessons have you learned? What structures and polices are the most vulnerable to bias?