We chat with Xavier Ramey, chief executive officer of Justice Informed, a social impact consulting firm. He is an award-winning social strategist, noted public speaker, and conflict mediator. Xavier discusses with us the importance of language, ideas, narrative — and then how to create new, more impactful strategies.
We chat with Xavier Ramey, chief executive officer of Justice Informed, a social impact consulting firm. He is an award-winning social strategist, noted public speaker, and conflict mediator. Xavier discusses with us the importance of language, ideas, narrative — and then how to create new, more impactful strategies.
Here’s where you can learn more about the people, places, and ideas in this episode:
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This is an automated transcript. Please excuse any errors or hilarious mistakes.
Episode Teaser / Xavier Ramey (guest):
"Changing the face of expertise is the time that we're in that does not mean that just because someone is a person of color, they make, they are a better. What it means is that the brilliance of a black person being at the front of the line for driving strategy, by changing words, that shift ideas that create new narratives that allow for better strategies specifically for social impact will be different.
When a person like me is at the helm of it. Given the types of experiences I've accumulated over the course of my life, both positive and negative, and the value then of the strategies. Particularly when they reach back into communities of people that predominantly looked like myself will likely be more accurate than from someone who does not look like me.
That is the time we're in."
Intro:
One of the landmark programs here at the Center for Care Innovations is Catalyst — a training program where our participants learn and practice human-centered design to explore strategic challenges within their organizations. We often invite experts from the field to share their insights and discuss their own projects. Listen as our longtime collaborator Chris Conley interviews one of our special guests:
Chris Conley (host):
So I want to welcome everybody to this interview with Xavier Ramey. Xavier. Thank you for joining us. Super appreciate you being here.
Xavier Ramey:
Thanks Chris. Glad to be here.
Chris Conley:
And I thought maybe what we could start out with is you just saying a little bit about the man from north Lawndale in Chicago and your background [...]
Tell us, give us a little bit about your background and how you've come to do this work and found a justice informed.
Xavier Ramey:
Sure. So my name is Xavier Ramey. I'm an entrepreneur and a leading, a growing social impact consulting firm called justice informed based here in the Chicago land area. But fortunately we are blessed to be able to work nationally and increasingly internationally.
I'm from the west side of Chicago. I was just speaking with some of my friends last night about it. And it's interesting. When you think about when you constellate the west side of Chicago as an identity marker for Chicago in, and it was a room full of all African-Americans talking about, what is the.
That we're seeking to have passed from generation to generation, as it relates to equity and justice and economic enfranchisement and these sorts of things. And it was interesting how it elevated the west side is very much a afterthought. People actually often think I am not from the west side.
They assume I'm from the south side of Chicago, because usually when you meet people who are fairly successful or known or something like that, they don't come from the west side. But that's what. And I rep it very hard. I represent I am trying to keep the west side of Chicago and the map. It is what I call the the ghost town of bad public policy.
But it is a beautiful place to be from. I grew up in an area called K-Town and public school kid. Two-parent household all the things of two brilliant people who came together and decided to get married. And so I grew up in basically a library called my house just surrounded by books.
And one of the things that was really formative formative for me was that my mother entrusted me to the school system, but did not trust the school. And I'm very thankful to her for that. She surrounded me with books that they would never have taught me about my own heritage, my own culture instilling in me confidence, but also a linguistic capacity to counter what others would say was normal or a historical fact or the way things always have been.
And she was opening my eyes to just how big the world. But also just how big my people have been. And through that installation of identity I then entered the world and everything started to happen how you hear on TV and in the newspaper. I went to a really good high school.
And I got into DePaul university and studied economics. I ended up in the commodity trading world and was first just a little intern, but then worked my way up to a full commodities trader and helped co-found actually a trading firm but left that that world of finance really taught me quite a bit about the way of work, but also.
One of the challenges I had was that, I always wanted to give back. I always wanted to see north Lawndale and the west side be a place of promise. Versus as the Chicago Tribune called it, the home of the permanent underclass. But I didn't want to be broke. I didn't want to be. And that was like really baked into my mind.
Like the best thing you can do when you're growing up in what could be called the hood, so to speak That is the way out, the way to to grow is to go alone, to leave. And that was not the way my father raised me. My father was a community organizer and activist, a politician.
Also an entrepreneur started a social impact consulting firm called sustainable communities and associates. Way before it was possible to have the title of success that we have at justice informed. But it did teach me quite a bit because I was always in those meetings. I was always down at city hall.
I was learning about how government works from the age of four. He took me to work almost every other day. I was with my grandma who worked for the county and she was always taking me to work. And I was learning about how meetings are conducted. Robert's rules of. Taking notes during board meetings and proofreading drafts of grants that he was submitting for funding.
So I kinda just got raised in the world of community and economic development in my house that I grew up in. And so when I got that little economics degree and then I came back to north Lawndale with it to work, I was a little I w I was very frustrated because everything that I had learned in college it didn't really teach me about how to develop.
A community like north Lawndale, it taught me how to pirate off of it. How to profit from it. And I don't think that my finance teachers would necessarily call it that. But as someone who was the economic externality and a lot of those data sets that we were talking about in class I felt deeply the lack of rigor in the financial calculations and in the inclusiveness.
Of the economic model, something that is literally defined as the allocation of this study of the allocation of scarce resources. And when an entire community does not have scarcity, it has poverty, entrenched generational poverty that is not temporary. It is generational. You need a different economic calculus.
And so then I started pushing back against all things like hyper capitalism and started reading more books on socialism and started looking at other economic models and thought about starting a community bank and all that man. I was going, I was I had a lot of ideas. And the linchpin for me that I realized when I hit my thirties was that My anger up in my identity up until that point had been shaped by what I was angry about what I grown up in.
And now if you ask me, what is the, what is justice informs model and how has that shaped? I'll say it's all about invitation. We try to compel people and I try to compel people out of the way that I see my own identity and what I think is humane and love to the world to be the model of whatever you're preaching and talking about and invite others in and hold.
Hold no responsibility for people who decline your offer. So when I make the offer to invite someone into an anti-racist way of living, they declined that's okay. We're going to keep building over here. This party's rocket. When we make the offer for someone to consider them, Approximate way of living.
And so maybe, don't shout so loud that your company should be focused on diversity equity inclusion. And then you take those wages and go to some likely all white neighborhood that you self-segregated yourself in with those wages. Maybe you want to think about that personal commitment and embodiment at home versus just what you demand at work.
But if they don't take us up on the offer, that's okay. And the most important thing that my background has given me was the desire to move my work and the world at the pace of the urgency of my identity. But now I've enjoined that with the idea that.
Love quite honestly, is the basis of invitation and it is the power to move things forward. But in that you also have to love yourself and you have to let go of what made you angry of the experiences you had that traumatized you? The things that some people would say were tragic that were actually city planning.
It's not tragedy that's strategy, right? And you have to reformulate that into a powerful invitation in the world and believe moving forward that the people who want to accept it are the ones you should be building with.
Chris Conley:
Yeah, I think it was one of the places you were speaking. You mentioned, this exact notion, this is not about, oh, it's tragic.
That this is happening. It's tragic. It's societies are designed and we're in constant state of designing societies. And if they can be designed for injustice, they can be designed for justice. That's right. I think that's a really important way to think about it.
Xavier Ramey:
You heard one of the podcasts.
Chris Conley:
I heard it three
Xavier Ramey:
times.
It's very good. I remember that. I remember saying that. Yeah.
Chris Conley:
Yeah. So let's hit justice because it's in your name. It's the first word in the name of your company? It may be the only company in the U S with justice in its name, because as you say, it makes people uncomfortable. Tell us about the name and what justice actually is
Xavier Ramey:
and why.
I named it justice informed because I've worked with a lot of consultants. If you look at any of the big consulting firms, what are their names they're named after the people who started it, they're named after owners, they're named after people who accumulated the most in terms of identity and the returns to it in terms of financial power and the returns to, to, to entrepreneurship.
I didn't want to go that route, man. I didn't. I was, I remember sitting at my desk. I was working at the university of Chicago at the time. I was leading this new strategy. They brought me in there to define called social innovation and philanthropy. And I had this kind of just this idea in my chest of.
The things that people are constantly afraid of. I'm not really afraid of those things. I'm not afraid to say the word justice. I'm not afraid to say social justice. I'm not afraid to say when a person is white. I don't need to whisper when someone is queer or gay, I don't need to, I'm not tiptoeing around identity and I'm not tiptoeing around the urgency and the power of accurate word.
And I wasn't seeing that in my peers. I certainly was not seeing that in the ways in which my employer at the time was moving. And I remember thinking to myself, I say it a lot to myself now. Most of possibility exists between the limits those boundary lines of the ambitions and fears of the person who is.
And what that person fears, they will ask you to fear and what that person is ambitious about. They will ask you to do with them. And so that's a limit on your own life. And that's part of the reason why I wanted to jump out onto the skinny branches of entrepreneurship as one of my business advisors and good friends.
Thomas Kara Stovall always says the skinny branches of entrepreneurship. I wanted to take on the the consequences of my. And those consequences thus far been revenues. They've been clients, they've been staff, they've been partners. They've been headaches, hard feedback moments. But the joy that I get is that it's not Ramy strategies, right?
McKinsey, Deloitte Ernst, and young, you keep naming them named Bain. It's all, some. It's all about this one person. And I was not out to build anything about one person. I wanted to build an umbrella for people who wanted to do work like this. Our mantra is changing the face of expertise. I knew that having worked with those large consulting firms on tons of projects when I was at the United way, working as a program, officer running multi-million dollar portfolios over to being senior system director over at the university of Chicago, to some of the pro bono projects.
And, I have mayoral appointments for civic committees and all this stuff, and you're always around these consultants. You're always around consultants and they're all under the banner, not the. Of their company and I wanted to build this umbrella. And I wanted it to also in the name, let people know that we don't care if they don't accept our invitation.
So if justice is too hard of a line of a word for you to say, you're probably not our client. You're probably not our client. We don't even want to have an exploratory conversation with you when you get to the point where you can say something that has urgency, then maybe you can do something that requires it because the work of justice requires urgency.
And so it was also a dividing line in the world that I wanted to draw. Finally I named it justice informed because I wanted to transform what could be expected of a. Many people in the first two years when we existed, they'd come up to me and say, man, I heard about this great, this nonprofit you started.
I remember I did this event. I was actually hosting for Chicago ideas and it was myself, Devon, Franklin. He's an author and a minister Charlemagne the God from the breakfast club. And pastor Charles Jenkins from fellowship Baptist church. And I remember they, they call us up on stage.
I'm actually the MC for the night and they're introduced me. He was like, we've got Xavier Ramsey of informed justice, a nonprofit from the south side of Chicago. Oh my
Chris Conley:
God, how's your
Xavier Ramey:
butchered. Every one of them Wichard every single, like that's not my name's not Z. It's not Ramsay. It's not informed justice.
It's not from the south side sauce, not a prophet, but isn't that the point? Yeah, but isn't that the point
Chris Conley:
say more? I will
Xavier Ramey:
nearly unrecognizable. I want it to be nearly unrecognizable. I want our team. I want our mission. I want our. To be the face of it. And in the diversity of who we hire creates more accurate strategies for the future. Part of the way that I think about the ways that we work in a consultative way and how this actually seeks to prioritize justice is we work with the power of words.
Words are very important words, create ideas in the mind. And those ideas allow for narratives that you either believe or don't, but those narratives then allow for strategies and that's what consultants create. And so if in the minds of a person, they hear the words, black male Knight, and the idea that comes to their mind is standard.
Criminality then the narrative that they'll have is a lack of safety. And so the strategy will be policing, but if they hear those words and if we are good at our job and we are changing the face of expertise, if we're good at our job, and you hear those words, black and male and night, and the idea that comes to your mind, A collective society with an individual person having an individual experience, then the narrative that might come to your mind is neighbor.
Regardless of trappings regardless of time of day. And so the strategy may actually be care, are you to engage to care? These sorts of things. We are trying to change narratives and we're doing that by being very specific about the words that many people have ideas about. And we do. By creating the strategies for our clients.
Justice fundamentally, my belief is that justice is the work of looking historically presently and futuristically at the realities of human relationship. And how power is organized, not just in a moment, but it is organized over time and it is exerted and accumulated throughout time. The notion of the word, normal to have the power of safety underneath the word normal when something is normal.
Whoever is attached to that word has safety for the moment. If white skin is considered normal, then that's what you'll see on the cereal boxes. And in all the commercials, that's the person that you'll want to represent your company. It's like when I remember. Even applying for a job. I was in the future business leaders of America club in high school.
And someone from PricewaterhouseCoopers came to our high school and was trying to recruit us for their college track programs. And, we'll get you a job come back every summer, $50,000. And these are the things. And I was like, oh, this sounds great. And that was top of my accounting class at the time.
And I was African-American guy and he came in, he walked around the class and he's just just so y'all know, y'all gonna have to you're going to cut these braids. Oh, my God. I'm like, what? Like, where did this come from? Like I thought we were talking about a county. You got to cut those braids off.
I'm just letting y'all know a a black person. You got to cut those braids off. This is a global company. We have clients when they see something like that, it looks like, it felt like you want to get a job. You got to cut that hair. I was 29 years old before I grew my hair this long after that.
I was 29 years old. It took about 12 years for me to get the professional confidence, to feel safe, not looking like what I knew the professional world considered to be. No. Yeah, normal is very safe. And our job at justice informed is to make sure that the people who are changing the face of expertise, because no one expects a consultant at a large farm or a growing farm or of any repute for the most part to mostly look like people of color, to mostly be represented as women to mostly be indigenous or LGBTQ. They expect for the most part, Chris, somebody, it looks like you. That's what I'm trying to change, man. That's awesome.
Chris Conley:
Can you speak a little bit about this notion of what time we're in? So the center for care innovations and trying to build capacity, understand how to create new systems that dismantle old injustices I wouldn't say we've been urgent about it.
We've cared and tried to move the ball forward, but I think you have a particular perspective on what time we're in. Yeah. And this notion of a first time. Can you say something? Can you share that idea with the,
Xavier Ramey:
yeah. This dovetails a little bit with what I was just saying that I realize if I don't clear up people may look between the lines and find something that shouldn't even be there.
Xavier Ramey:
Changing the face of expertise is the time that we're in that does not mean that just because someone is a person of color, they make, they are a better. What it means is that the brilliance of a black person being at the front of the line for driving strategy, by changing words, that shift ideas that create new narratives that allow for better strategies specifically for social impact will be different.
When a person like me is at the helm of it. Given the types of experiences I've accumulated over the course of my life, both positive and negative, and the value then of the strategy. Particularly when they reach back into communities of people that predominantly looked like myself will likely be more accurate than from someone who does not look like me.
That is the time we're in. My father tried to start a social impact consulting, farm, sustainable communities and associates. As I said, it was not before his time. It was before America's time. He had a very
Chris Conley:
high seventies, sixties. Oh nineties. Oh,
Xavier Ramey:
geez. Nineties and early two thousands. Oh, got it. Yeah, he was trying to do diversity work inclusion work way, way too soon for white America.
As it existed. The challenge we often have, and I feel this deeply in America is the moment that we start hitting the minimum bar for social equity. People start patting themselves on the back and expect like everyone should just be like, we're all good now. And also there's a confusion that statutes that legal statutes change culture when they don't legal statutes, like the civil rights act.
For instance, in that time, the civil rights act was highly. It was very much fought again. The equal pay act of 1979, w why do we have to pay women? If they can work hard? They'll get paid. They'll get paid the same. If they can do the work. There's always been that dude somewhere saying that kind of stuff, Tommy something I need to, yeah, there's always that dude, man, he's every, he just everywhere and he keeps getting born and given the mic every like I'm serious, man.
It's a. His time is up. Yeah. It's time is up. I'm going back to this notion of fear. Oftentimes the pace of change is moving at the pace of the fear of people in power, not the pace of need of people who are unsafe. Rather the pace that is allowed through the fragilities of people who are simply uncomfortable, and that is completely improper.
And it can. It cannot remain this way. And by the continual reprep representing of brilliance that I intend to do, and our team does, I think skillfully justice informed throughout now, fortune 500 clients all the way down to small startups, nonprofits, community foundations, corporate foundations, people are going to realize that you didn't have to move at the pace of fear.
The time for fear to be against. Is over. But that requires that we embrace the radicality of love. That requires that we look more macroscopically at the power of relationship. It requires that we surrender our assumption, that individualism is actually normal and realize that it is not normal. It is in cultured that there are many societies throughout time and throughout the current one.
The present day that do not live as viciously as we live in our major cities, as we fight against one another, as we teach our children to share and then blame them when they don't grow up and compete. This type of a psychosis of community is what creates often the racialized, genderized, and other types of marginalized person.
It creates these divisions later on it's this base question. If you don't have something, do I lose something by helping you? And do I owe you anything just by virtue of the breadth you share on this planet with me at the same time, do I owe you anything? I would say that we all know each other quite a bit.
And I know some folks would say that sounds like a socialist, but then on the weekends, when they go to give back, they'll say it's charitable. And then when they go back to work so they can take. They'll say it's back to the competition time. This is why I say psychosis. The ways in which we've developed as a community, particularly in the U S is wholly unsustainable for the cultivation of a sustainable humane human experience.
It is a wonderful strategy. If you want to accelerate the pace of technological change. It is a wonderful strategy. If you want to be able to create a society where there's the possibility of massive wealth accumulation is possible, it is fully possible. But doesn't that go back to the whole question of what do you need in life?
What do you actually need? Do you need everything you're afraid of not getting are some of the things that you're fighting, just because you're afraid someone else might get them and you. This is like going back to two year olds fighting about what's fair. He got three pieces. She got two and I got one we're all eaten.
And none of y'all pay for this food. It's a community pot like, like adults in America. Our culture is like, what happens before you learn to share before you learn the power of. And I think part of that is because the ways in which we constructed the world of work, the ways in which we look at government policy and the way that we think about our opportunities and obligations to.
Are stripped of any type of relational fabric when Dr. King talks about that, like inescapable mutuality, that we are all caught in this inescapable network of mutuality. I think a lot of people would say that man is completely wrong. He is off his rocker. I am not related to some person across town. The west side of Chicago is the west side of Chicago.
I live in Lincoln park. I don't know those people over there. Those animals want to shoot each other, let them shoot each other. People say stuff like that, about people in there. Like this sort of a rhetoric, and then they send their kids to school. I like, then they're like volunteering in north Lawndale on a Saturday.
These sorts of things like this is this is a right. We have to be informed by justice because people are being informed by something right now. And it ain't justice.
Chris Conley:
I never thought about it as the psychosis of it and the extreme. Dichotomy between saying, doing beliefs and all of it, getting around relationship,
Xavier Ramey:
all of that.
He goes, Chris, it goes deeper than that. It goes even think about the nature. So I talk a lot about. Chris. How many times have you, throughout the, we've known each other for, what, since, when I started working at young men's educational network back in Lawndale, that was probably man, it was, I think it was like 2009 or 10 that we met.
It was probably 11, 12 years. We've known each other. Got it. At that time, I was I was the head of fundraising. I was in my mid twenties. I was learning at that time, the types of stories that are required. To convince a person to separate themselves from their money to help another person live.
That's what fundraising and non-profits are. That's what we do. We convince people that life can actually be helped with money, but we don't need to fix the root cause right now. That's what I often felt in fundraising. But the types of stories that people hear, the question of whether that changes their daily lives is.
What does it mean when you have to hear the same story of pain and pillage over and over and over and over again? When you go from 1992, Rodney king, it was 92. And then you go to Amadou Diallo in 1999, and then you go to, to, to Mike Brown in Ferguson in 2014. And then you go to Eric Garner in New York city in 2015.
Then you go to, to Laquan McDonald in Chicago in 2016. And then you go to a George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2020. And you have been around people who've been around that entire time. They're like in their forties now, or they're in their fifties or the sixties, or they're seven. They've been around that entire time.
And they are still having a, Tiffany is about racial inequity in America. They've gone that in they had a front row seat to, this is just the truth and they are still like, I feel like we need more data. That is why I think a lot of about this actually at the masochism, it is the question of the invitation to pain without changing anything that creates it.
And I just want to hear the story again. I just want, I want to go to another Gail. I want to hear it. I want to hear it one more time. Just tell me how bad that was. Tell me I and but I'm not going to change the way I literally live my life so that the pain decreases my cost of learning requires me to see this every single time.
Yeah. Yeah. It's masochistic to me, but I invite those. That was folks into a more accountable form of relating. That is what equity is a more accountable form of relating
Chris Conley:
to one another. Talk about that. What do you mean by an accountable related?
Xavier Ramey:
It's a question of who gets to evaluate impact accountability is all about who gets evaluate impact.
The so for instance, let's go to the nonprofit sector again, right? When you have a a program that you create for social good, or for Cortland good corporations, right? When they create their corporate social responsibility strategies if you look at the UN SDGs, you're talking about environmental climate change and these sorts of things, and you look at this through the lens of.
Impact the big question that has to be there is not just what your strategy is, who gets to evaluate impact, who gets to say this was meaningful. And if it's the people who authored the strategy who live across town, that's that's.
No, it can't work like that, but it has been working like that. Yeah. Accountability requires that you surrender the power of evaluation of a strategy that is supposed to impact people that you may either incidentally or deliberately not live or be proximate to and surrender to them. The ability to authorize the validity of that strategy, as well as evaluate the outcome of that strategy, because it was supposed to impact them.
That is an accountable relationship. They have to, there has to be the ability to say, Hey, this didn't work and I'm saying it didn't work. Not your grant officers, not your CEO, not the president of the foundation, not the CSR officer, not your marketing team for your communication strategy for social good or corporate outreach.
It's the people that it was supposed to engage, but in order to do that, the very way in which these strategies were created would have to actually involve those people throughout the entire lifecycle of the process of the strategy from cultivation of ideas, to, to testing of ideas, to actually demonstration and execution of the strategy over to the evaluation portion.
And that is not often what happens. Yeah. Accountability requires that someone else be able to see. This didn't hit the mark, like any relationship, fi if I'm dating someone from married to somebody and I'm cooking them dinner and they don't have the right to say, this wasn't that tasty and I'm sitting there wasn't it good?
Wasn't it tasty? Was tasty. Yeah. Yeah, it was very tasty person that pays the rent or something like that. That's not a relationship. That's not accountability. Yeah. I have. Too though I did it. Might've done all this work to be open to someone saying it was not necessarily for not, but it was not for all.
Chris Conley:
Yeah. Nice. I want to be conscious of your time. But I think that the, what you just said about accountable and we use different words in our program, but. Engaging with even, the type of work we did started out way back saying user centered research, right? We're going to go and do interviews, which have the aim of empathy and understanding, but it never went so far as inviting them into the problem definition, the solution creation and the evaluation of the solution.
And I think that point you're making exactly now is where the future. Needs to go. It's where I've come. And it's where we hope the teams the catalyst teams that are working with the center for care. Innovation realized that's the issue here is you're accountable to the people you're designing with.
And for you have to invite them into that. And there's so many things in organizations that make that challenging, even beyond the. Structural racism and it's the people want to be efficient and have the right answer. And they believe in expertise is the person with the highest rank and all, that's all existing in every organization.
And so as our teams move forward I, this is a very unfair question to ask you, in terms of. What would, what advice would you give them? What would you say beyond what you've already said that they should take to heart about incorporating, starting to incorporate and being aware of the justice element in their work.
Totally unfair
Xavier Ramey:
question. No. That's a totally fair question, man. Just the justice works requires, justice requires that you ask of yourself what needs to be repaired, what needs to be acknowledged in order for relationships to be mended so that we can move forward together. It requires, that's what I said.
It's a historical look about what is the opportunity in the. So that we can look futuristically together. One of the things that I always invite any organization into, cause Chris you're absolutely right. Organizations are dynamic. People are constantly moving in and out of them. One of the longterm challenges of any strategy for equity is the natural churn of people coming in and out.
Equity work is very burdensome. It is very mentally, emotionally, and psychologically taxing. It is also something that is not typically taught in school. Side-by-side with any type of vocational. So you have to go to social work school, usually to learn about how to do this. And you have to get a degree in sociology to learn about what's even to be done and why it's happening.
But though that's like I was in economics. I never learned any of that. So I never learned anything about. Getting my economics degree, except for a couple of electives, I will give them that I took a class on the economics of gender that was an elective. And I learned a lot about systemic injustice as it relates to specifically women.
But the reality is that because these things aren't required, right? Like equity is an option. Like it's totally a choice to do this stuff nowadays, the, for all of the fortune five hundreds where it literally. Agnostic at best to the work of inclusion agnostic at best. When you look at the realities of the definitions that guide the opportunities for organizations to engage in the work of equity, oftentimes the very founding documents are.
To what is required for equity. Shareholder, primacy is completely counter to the notion of equity. When you're talking about nonprofits being set up, always being set up at the behest of the for-profit world, soliciting donations and these sorts of things, while not having any type of apparatus in the for-profit world to ensure that they're not just covering financial costs, but that they're covering their social costs.
This is why we even have the SDGs because companies don't cover their social costs as they're doing their accounting for financial costs. And then nonprofits and NGOs are set up to prop up what government is not able to do as companies continue to de-value and destroy the power of government through their lobbying or government offices or whatnot.
This is the, this vicious cycle that is completely unchecked. And when you look at this question of what can an organization do for justice, they have to first ask themselves, is this actually happening? And do. Is it true? Is it valid when we look at harm and how do I feel? I often ask our clients it's like, how do you feel when a solution for harm has to be specific?
How do you feel when a program is set up at your company or your organization specifically to hire people? Specifically, just people of color. How do you feel when the gender payer for the audit is undergone and it's supposed to specifically go about raising the wages of people identify as women. How do you feel guys?
How do you feel? I'm not asking whether you agree, I'm asking about that physiological response of you as a two year old they got three and I got two when that's not fair. That's what I'm asking about because that's, what's going to shut down this agenda. That's what fragility is. That's what the zero sum game thing is.
You got to ask yourself as an organization, not just, what are we going to do? How do we feel about the doing of equity? How do we literally feel about it? And let's confront that before we start putting. On paper and holding people accountable, but in terms of frameworks, I always, I think if you go on our website, justice informed, you'll see the DEI spectrum of engagement.
And I encourage everyone to consider what this may mean in terms of the ways in which you architect a strategy to move forward for equity. But it really starts with where a lot of people stop growing and under. These DEI trainings and equity trainings, and, unconscious bias, trends trainings, training, strength, so many trainings, LinkedIn learning has, I think it was 14,000 online courses right now.
And like this all that's
Chris Conley:
popping up on my feed right now, echo,
Xavier Ramey:
everybody's got a course, man. Everybody's everybody's teaching how many folks are doing everybody's teaching how many folks are doing. But the first work is. Growing and understanding, I will not fight that. I will not argue against that.
You have to understand what we're facing. Then you have to see whether you actually feel okay about what it may require a view. Then you have to ask yourself, are you okay with the people who are most unsafe? If this work isn't done are more important than you, regardless of how uncomfortable you may feel doing it.
Chris Conley:
Beautiful.
Xavier Ramey:
Then you move from that understanding to grow and consensus in your organization. A lot of people don't agree with it. They'll agree with the direction. For instance, anti-racism is a far more urgent type of work. As it relates to equity than traditional diversity equity inclusion. It requires a different physiological sense of normal to even engage in it.
Confronting demilitarization, hyper capitalism and white supremacy. Head on those are the three pillars of anti-racist. Even using that language in the workplace can be polarizing the military nation. What are you talking about? Confronting white supremacy. There's no hoods and nooses here. We're great people.
I'm not saying whether you're nice. I'm asking whether you're effective at equity that's for sure. But you see where you can get towards this direction called equity and at what pace together, given who you got in there. And establish consensus there. Once you got consensus, then you can start doing the work of what we call.
R O T I N G you're rooting. You're looking at the practices and the policies. You're looking at your operating agreements. You're looking at your investment policies. You're looking at your employee manual. You're looking at your hiring and firing strategies. You're looking at your onboarding strategy.
You're looking at the things that involve people that are codified into practice and policy. And you're considering what of, what we have on paper actually speaks to the work of restoration for harm's done protect. For people who are societaly unsafe, even if they are internally having more opportunity.
And how are we then ensuring that is inculcated into the way in which we do our work writ large. So this is not an initiative. This is a lens by which we view our impact in the world, the way in which we view our operational efficiency, our financial stability, et cetera. And if you can get done, you can move powerfully into that work of rooting.
Then we can start talking about accountable. I'll say this. I, we, we've had, 30, 40 clients over the last couple of years. Maybe one or two ever stepped into the work of actual accountability and it's not a knock on our clients. It's just the reality of people decline. The invitation accountability means you look at everything you do as an organization.
And you say, how is this being accountable to persons who hold minoritized and marginalized idea? How is this accountable to them? That goes back to the question of authorship of strategy, authorization for execution of a strategy inclusion on a continual basis. Financial sustainability, the ability to own the means of production by people who are minoritized and marginalized, not just those who like me founded a company, justice informed.
We have a cap on how much I can make. It's no more than five times the lowest paid. Yeah. One of the hardest things about that is that it's hard to hire people in the marketplace when I'm telling them there's a ceiling on your base salary, and it's tied to this question of what do people actually do?
Everybody's life situations are different, but it justice informed. That means that our wages are capped at a quarter million dollars. I don't know what the heck I would need in this world. You need a hundred, $250,000. I know some people feel like they couldn't wake up without stress. I'm not even halfway there to court a million dollars.
Like I, but I look at my life and I say, this is enough. This is enough. This is enough to stand in class solidarity with my team. Just as they stand in racial solidarity with me, it's enough. It's enough. That's accountability. Awesome.
Chris Conley:
Xavier. I know. I could both listen and ask you questions for the rest of the evening, but we don't have a tasty beverage in our hand.
Xavier Ramey:
I got some coffee, it's it's a little treat.
Chris Conley:
I want to thank you. Not only for doing this interview, but for the work and the. You
Xavier Ramey:
are
Chris Conley:
doing the minds, you're changing the narratives, you're changing the face of expertise that you're changing. You and I both know how necessary it is. You I feel a lot of shame when I speak with you about how little I'm doing.
And that, I think that's a good thing because it gets me it gets me back on the. I'm taking action and making sure I'm helping other people understand this living into my own life. So I just want to, again, thank you deeply for our relationship, the work you're doing and the interview of you've.
So graciously had. Oh, and I wanted to mention that you're that we'll be making a donation to the young.
Xavier Ramey:
Yeah,
Chris Conley:
young Chicago authors, sorry. Forgot the Chicago middle. On your request obviously, but it's a, it's an organization that you're, you may be a leader in or on the board,
Xavier Ramey:
but can you just them, they taught me how to speak, man.
I, I,
Chris Conley:
I hear it. I went and made, I did my research on who that organization is and I can hear their importance in helping. People tell their story. People who tell their story, encouraging others, to tell their story and by doing so learning about who they may become, who they want to become, and then becoming that.
So super, super inspiring organization in the arts for youth in Chicago.
Xavier Ramey:
I w I started in young Chicago authors when I was a kid. I was 15 years old. And they got me because they said they would give me a $2,000 college scholarship if I came every Saturday for three years. So I was like, I'm in a scholarship.
But what was transformative was They let me, they taught me how to engage me space to write a hell of a lot of bad poetry. Yeah. And notebook after notebook of bleeding, heart, teenager, poetry observational humor, poetry, prose pieces that were way too long to ever go to print rap verses that I never ever would have put on a tape.
And they encourage. Encouraged me to keep talking, keep speaking, keep thinking about who you are. Put it on paper and get up on that stage. They were the ones who put me up on a stage at an open mic and said, all right, dead load notebook, get up on that stage and go say what you feel. And in a room full of other kids, your age and they're clapping.
And then next thing you know we're doing poetry slams and we're at, citywide competitions. And then we're at national competitions and I'm meeting all these young people from around the United States. And they're all sharing their story and I'm quickly learning how big the world is and it's mostly youth of color.
And I've been on the journey with YCA since the year. I want to say 2000, 2001. And now, I've been on the board for some time now as well. We just had a big shakeup you've, it's all, it was all in the news challenges around equity these sorts of things, safe spaces and these sorts of things.
We don't hide that. But going through a really important transformation of full reorganization of the board of directors and employment policies, all this work that I was just talking about it is for me to do it. I'm not done with any of it. And YCA, I think is a great example of what giving a kid a microphone change, changing the face of expertise looks like when you give it to, a 14 year old kid from Lawndale.
So I'm glad that, whatever y'all were going to give to me, y'all give over to them. So I appreciate that. That's
Chris Conley:
awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate you
Xavier Ramey:
for sure. Thanks for.