Acceleration with Equity

We are excited to get to facilitate the second cohort of Thrive. I so enjoyed all the teams and their mentors from the first session. It was amazing to participate in the work each group was doing and see how they were so thoughtfully engaging the work to grow the impact of their missions. After the session, we invited feedback from the teams and mentors about the process. We got lots of significant affirmative impact and constructive feedback. One piece of feedback we received was that while they loved the experience, they would have liked to hear a variety of voices from the front of the room (or Zoom call, as it were.) That is excellent feedback.

As a firm, we steadfastly believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion. That feedback helped us to rethink how we might retool a good experience to make it even better. Viewing Thrive through a DEI lens helped me (us) realize there are some things we can do to make the experience more powerful. As we prepare for the second cohort, we are taking two steps to apply what we have learned: shared leadership and diversifying our mentor base.

In shared leadership, we are working to expand the sessions' leadership to include a variety of perspectives, that better reflects the diversity of teams participating. This makes both the content and the engagement richer.

Second, we had some amazing and committed mentors for the first cohort. As a white cis-male, my network of connections (at this point in time) tends to reflect...well...me. There's not a value judgment in that statement but a statement of fact. So, we are doing intentional and more in-depth recruitment to find mentors who bring a variety of lived experiences, wisdom, and insight to the teams with whom they get to work. This is not so that we can put white people with white people and POC with POC. It's about intentionally going beyond my network, about including a diversity of capable and qualified voices, and elevating the experience for everyone involved.

All of this to say, we are working to embed equity into the whole Thrive experience. This approach will lead to a richer and more impactful experience and will help ensure we are living out our values as a team committed to equity.