I was proud last week to welcome Chapin Hall’s first cohort of Equity First Summer Associates: https://lnkd.in/eRCRwWWR . This program affords PhD candidates who are interested in real-world research careers and have experienced education, career, and life barriers due to racial discrimination an opportunity to develop a personal action plan for applying racial equity to their research and aspirations of change making.
The program stems from my own evolution as a leader. First and foremost, as a Black man, I had always seen race as a personal issue— something I had to manage and navigate. As my life progressed, I understood race from a policy and professional perspective. In my role as Executive Director of Chapin Hall, I saw an organizational opportunity to align personal, policy, and professional goals related to race and put those to work toward creating an inclusive environment for our staff.
When we first moved into this space, you could see that almost everyone understood the implications of race in our policy research work, but we needed to pause long enough to establish a shared expectation that people reconcile their personal identity and the role of race in not only our work, but also in our workplace. And so, as an organization, we contemplated, discussed, and developed our Racial Equity Principles: https://lnkd.in/gUHwMUV4
From there, we focused on thinking more systematically about the role that race played inside Chapin Hall. One of our realizations was that we wanted to help the field build and support a workforce that is more racially concordant with the families who are overrepresented in public systems – so the evidence upon which policies are built and the actions we take include perspectives on race.
Our Equity First Summer Associates program, developed over the last two years with leaders on our staff and our Equity First Fellows, is a component of that focus. It’s meant to support people who want to be in this space – whether at Chapin Hall or as a contributor to the broader ecosystem of those seeking change. It’s a first for us and while we’re excited, we know we still have a lot to learn. Please stay tuned as we move forward on the journey. Happy #Juneteenth.
