If you ask three different people in the Sierra Club community, “What does equity mean to you?” - you’ll get three different answers.
In fact, if you ask three people “How is Sierra Club working to promote equity, inclusion and justice?” you’d probably get three different answers to that too. And we know that in order to make progress, we all need to be rowing in the same direction, with a shared understanding of what our goals are and how we intend to achieve them.
Sierra Club has been investing in internal trainings and workshops on systemic oppression for over a decade, but we are an organization with over 600 staff members, thousands of volunteer leaders and nearly three millions members and supporters. Every individual training is different, with vastly different curricula and points of emphasis.
So this year, we have decided to double down on our internal education program with a two-day workshop, guided by a single set of objectives, to create a shared understanding of systemic oppression across a major segment of the Sierra Club community. The workshop is titled Growing for Change; every Sierra Club staff person will participate, and over 150 volunteers, at distributed locations across the nation.
This is an unprecedented investment in skill development for Sierra Club. We think it’s important - in fact, necessary - in part because in 2017 our challenges around systemic oppression are more pressing and visible than ever. To resist the white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia and hate inherent in the Trump agenda, we must understand these forces and how they show up in our own lives and in our organization.
We’re calling the workshop Growing for Change because we’ve learned from our work so far that changing an organizational culture requires personal growth and individual commitments to being advocates for justice and equity. At the workshop we’ll invite folks to lean into the discomfort of talking openly about systemic oppression and how it shows up in our lives and work, as well as develop concrete, actionable plans to put our shared commitment to equity, inclusion and justice into practice in our everyday work.
Growing for Change won’t be the end of our journey - just a step along the way. But I believe that after this workshop, we will be better positioned than ever to bring a lens of equity to every decision made at Sierra Club.