More voices, more equity: NYC's new practice
David Nish and Cheryl Beamon of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services Workforce Institute join us today to chat about their experience of designing a work environment that brings more voices forward.
In 2017, The Workforce Institute — which trains frontline staff of New York City’s child protective services — wanted to shift its culture, focusing on the innate strengths and compassion of its people in new ways. If its advocates could connect with each other more, might they be able to take on their delicate and sacred work in a way that would bring true equity and social change?
“It has always been our intention to put the emotional wellness of our city’s families up-front by putting the wellness of our staff up-front,” explains David Nish, the Associate Commissioner of Training and Workforce Development at NYC Administration of Children’s Services. “To achieve this, we had to rethink how our staff participates in shaping how the work is done. We needed more perspective from the frontlines. We wanted to put our money where our mouth is.”
The group began by asking The Outside to facilitate putting all the dynamics at-play out on the table — vast differences in race, power, and other hierarchies that affect both their staff and the people and children they serve. It would be a good starting point, but one that only began at the green stem of change without addressing the roots.
“The Outside helped me see that open space is fine,” says Nish. “But unless we began by examining how we work together — before starting the work itself — then applying Open Space to our challenges would be like asking people to engage differently without understanding why they should engage differently.”
‘How we work together’ as a starting point meant beginning with the foundation of participatory leadership, and creating a shared language for individuals coming together for collective success.
“We knew we should model how we want our teams to work together,” says Cheryl Beamon, Executive Director of the Institute. “If we want our staff to work together across roles and organizations, we need to do the same. We have so much wisdom and experience in our midst, but we haven’t always been able to bring that forward. We wanted to examine: who are we not hearing from? What ideas and insight are we missing?”
The kick-off meeting represented the new way forward, convening a variety of vendors, stakeholders, and entities — a dynamic with an undercurrent of different mandates, jurisdictions, and takes on why things had succeeded or failed in the past. It was a wall of difference — one familiar to many collaborators in many collectives. These are the kinds of blocks we need to acknowledge in order to ultimately get beyond them.
“Our people were siloed by all the different angles we came from — organizationally, culturally, and in terms of mandates. How could any of them take full ownership of a challenge or an outcome? They couldn’t, with the old way of doing things. That meant that change couldn’t get off the ground.”
With its concept of shared ownership and in how it meshes the contributions of diverse people together, participatory leadership bridges the gaps. It sets up every conversation as a whole-project platform, moving beyond the limited frames of view — and the blocks — we all know as single individuals. For the Workforce Institute, a new intention made getting past difference a matter of urgency.
As one of the largest child welfare entities in the country, New York City Administration for Child Services (ACS) serves a disproportionate number of children of color. Rather than delivering services uncritically — focusing on the logistics of doing their job as-defined — a big part of the push for new ideas is that ACS sought to understand the disproportionality and remedy it.
“We wanted to know: what broad systemic and historic challenges have led to this imbalance? If we’re going to stand for the potential of all children, how can we support all families and each other to stay healthy and intact in making this stand?” says Beamon. “If we’re going to contribute not only to social services but to social change, we need to be able to try new things we’ve never tried before.”
As is the case with challenging, high-emotion fields, the work has an immediate impact on frontline staff as well as the people within the sphere of care. The Institute, as the hub for training, began experimenting with methods and platforms to help deepen connection between staff. With a deeper connection between more voices, more insight began to surface.
“When the organization first began exploring, we did a needs analysis and affirmed that coping with trauma is central to what we do — both for families, and among our staff,” says Beamon. “We started emphasizing the need for self-care and reflection in all our coursework, which includes an opportunity for people to think about how this work impacts their lives and how they can stay energized in it.”
Across the board, Beamon says the shift of participatory leadership has been much more than ‘good intentions around diversity and inclusion’. And it hasn’t always been comfortable to work through difference, elevate unheard voices, and address imbalances both within the work environment and the system as a whole:
“You have to be willing to be in a state of constant creation, and constant chaos — because the more open you are, the more you see complexity,” she says. “I am a systems person, and also a person who likes order, so this isn’t easy for me. But we just went forward, trusting the tools, and here we are, bushwhacking. We are making a new path.”
“Chaos exists in the midst of the work. We are learning that it’s okay to be uncertain, but to try anyway. We can excel in the trying. We have the tools, the strengths, the personnel, and the resources to manage that and be okay.”
For our organizations, the prospect of being a more fair, more equitable work environment — which shouldn’t feel like a radical shift — requires the dismantling of outdated structures. Which can feel overwhelming. We may think, Do we really need to meet differently, think differently, and incent differently in order to value the voices of everyone? Is it really such a mindset shift?
The answer is yes — but the good news is that on the other side of that wall of difference, all the good change waits for us to catch up.
