What does "community" mean to you? We chat with Anna Radoff, a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) lead strategist at Justice Informed, a social impact consulting firm. Anna helps us unpack what it means to engage stakeholders, invest in relationships, share power, create intergenerational change, and more!
What does "community" mean to you? We chat with Anna Radoff, a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) lead strategist at Justice Informed, a social impact consulting firm. Anna helps us unpack what it means to engage stakeholders, invest in relationships, share power, create intergenerational change, and more!
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Episode Teaser // Anna Radoff, Justice Informed (guest):
Part of being a convener is saying “who do I know in my network who might know someone?” Or, “how do I bring together–?” I'm not a policy expert on mental health. I couldn't tell you anything about it, but what I can do is bring in someone who can and facilitate that for young people. And rather than saying, “that's not my job,” or “I don't have time for that,” or “that's not within the scope of our project,” right? How do I build that in?
Health Pilots podcast intro:
Welcome to the Health Pilots podcast presented by the Center for Care Innovations. This podcast is about strengthening the health and wellbeing of historically underinvested communities. Every episode offers new ideas and practical advice that you can apply today!
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): Welcome everybody. I'm Chris Conley and I'm here today with Anna Radoff. I'm really excited to have this conversation because Anna is a consummate professional in the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) space. She's a senior strategist at Justice Informed, a DEI consultancy here in Chicago led by Xavier Ramey in her role.
There, she advises clients on DEI, assessments and audits and personalize and does personalized consulting - but she's grounded in data and analysis, and I want to hear more about that. And she has helped non-profits and companies understand how DEI principles can further their vision and strategy. And I think this is the core of how she comes to the work, which is – it’s an advancement of what your organization is doing. It's not something in addition you have to do to all the other things you're doing. It actually furthers the organization's mission - and I love that. Anna has managed national programs focused on the leadership and development of community and civic leaders.
She received her bachelor's degree from Northwestern University and earned her master’s of public policy from the University of California, Berkeley as well as a master's in early childhood education from Dominican University.
So welcome, Anna. Thank you so much for taking time today.
Anna Radoff (guest): Thank you, Chris.
Chris Conley: Why don't we get started with you helping us understand your journey and how you came to do the work you're doing today.
Anna Radoff: Yeah, absolutely. So, I started out my career, like a lot of individuals who think about direct service, in the classroom, teaching preschool actually here in Chicago on the far south side, down in Roseland, and like many people, I left college thinking I was really smart.
You've listed to a lot of degrees in my bio. I'm a chronic academic attendee and thinking that I could learn a lot about the way we should teach if I just learned enough and if I just studied hard enough, that I would be a good teacher. And I got to the preschool classroom, and nothing I had read prepared me for everything that was happening inside and outside the classroom. I was teaching at a Head Start, which really values the whole student, the whole family - how do we build communities around schools and how do we build schools around communities? And everything I saw in my classroom from the fact that my toilets were designed for someone who was a lot taller than three- and four-year-olds, and to the fact that the extreme violence that was happening outside my classroom was impacting my students in the classroom, and the room physically (but also emotionally) hadn't been designed with that in mind.
And I had an incident in my second year of teaching in which, unfortunately, I had a student have an incident, ended up with me getting hurt. And my principal was trying to expel the student from my classroom. And instead of spending time thinking about “how do I care for my body and get back to being in the classroom with my students,” I was spending time advocating for not expelling a three-year-old in preschool for what was an accident.
And at the end of the day, I realized that this incident wasn't– I wasn't alone in experiencing this. There's a huge pipeline of suspension of particularly black students from preschool and across the school-to-prison pipeline. And it drove me to really realize that we were not thinking about and designing our cities in schools and communities in conjunction with one another.
And that's how I ended up getting my master’s in public policy. Thinking about how do we build cities together. And from there, I've always just thought about how do we keep people at the heart of our center of design thinking – and design thinking about culture, and design thinking about the way we build our systems. And it's the reason I love talking about community engagement. Cause you can't do it without people.
Chris Conley: That's right. That's right. Yeah. So that sounds like a fairly pivotal moment or realization and in some ways it's so easy, right? It's - how do we do the things we're doing with community in mind?
I'm not sure why…well, I do know why the whole business corporate culture is all about “go, go, go” and “grow, grow, grow” - and “go big or go home,” and we often don't talk about people within that so much.
Anna Radoff: I also think something that - when people say “community” it's often grounded in this idea of like, “it's people beyond me.” So, it was like that - I'm a teacher and my community is the environment in which I teach, or it's my family, or it's my students; it's the surrounding neighborhood, versus community as – this is something I am a part of. And it's something we build together. And when you reframe it that way, it's easy to see why community matters. It matters to you and it matters to where you are investing those relationships.
Chris Conley: Nice. So why don't you help us understand more about how you think about community engagement or how you do community engagement? What are the kinds of things you do, and/or how do you help organizations start doing that?
Anna Radoff: Yeah, I think, ultimately at the end of the day, my philosophy is that a lot of this work just has to do with being with people rather than for people. And that framing, as you think about things like direct service industry, direct service providers, or even just generally – who are the stakeholders that you were in community with? And approaching it from that relationship standpoint that, from the beginning, this is about investing in our relationship as our ultimate goal - so that we are doing this work together. That can be really hard for people who are used to relationships in which they are the ones who hold the power and are informing individuals or informing the community of what they think is best. Even when it comes from a place of, “I know the research on this, I do know what’s best. I'm very knowledgeable.” It can come from a good place, but if it's not done with people, it's always going to have a negative effect because even the best research doesn't know your community.
Chris Conley: I feel like that's such a powerful thought of taking time to realize - what is your relationship with community? How are you- how do you think about that? How do you frame it? And how much are you thinking you're the expert and going to have all the answers? We've just gone through a session, both a lesson and a work session with the Catalysts, about assessing power, looking at the different types of power that are within the team, within the organization, and community. And starting to, yeah, just being more reflective about it, you can see how it changes everything. And one person said, “once you start thinking about power, you see it everywhere – the asymmetries, or who has it, and how it plays out when you're working together.
Anna Radoff: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's such a good insight and something that as you move towards thinking about community engagement or stakeholder engagement: power is at the heart of a lot of these relationships. And it's not just who has power in your community and how are you pulling in strategically people with power, but also how are you giving away that power? How am I acknowledging the power I have, and willing to share that in a real way, because without that shared power, you're just going to have window dressing of community engagement.
Chris Conley: What's a good example of sharing power?
Anna Radoff: I think about this in terms of…oh, let's see, like the difference between what does it mean to have a public comment on a policy?
So I could have a– and I did, when I was working in city government, we would have city comment periods in which someone would come in and comment on the policy that we were thinking about implementing in their neighborhood at your neighborhood meetings. And it's intended– it comes from a good place of government wanting to get public insight.
But in reality, we know who shows up to those meetings is not representative of the entire community. And they are responding to something that city government is presenting - versus having committees and participatory decision-making set up from the beginning, so that even - not just the policy being proposed - but the problem identified is coming from people in relationship with you.
Chris Conley: Yeah, a hundred percent. I just read an article from a civil engineer, who's head of an organization called Stronger Towns, I believe it’s called. And I read his two pages about how typical public involvement with civic matters is more performative and totally not about incorporating people's views. It's trying to placate the community so they can go do what they want - build new roads or new buildings, et cetera. And he was just talking about flipping that, just like you just talked about, on its head - and bringing them in from the beginning: What do we need to build here? What is your experience like? If it's transportation - how do you get to work? What are the transportation issues you're facing?
Anna Radoff: I think, the other thing, is just that a lot of, particularly civic engagement, is always going to target certain groups, like certain people are going to be able to attend those meetings from a place of privilege. And it often misses, what I think is super important in community engagement, which is that intergenerational change really matters. We often skip over either the elderly or youth in bringing about conversations of community engagement because we consider them to have less power or less stay when it comes to an issue.
Chris Conley: What's so nice about what you're sharing with us today is that it still all comes down to being in relationship with people. And when you're in relationship with them, you're sensitive to those issues, those needs - you're open to hearing why it feels extractive at some point. If you're doing it right, you're navigating the inevitable challenges or displays of power, or use of structural power that's already there. You're recognizing– “Oh wait, maybe we shouldn't do it that way.” And it's a shaping process especially for organizations for whom this is a new type of work. It's, “how will we do that with community? And to what degree will they help shape what it is?”
Anna Radoff:Yeah. So I will say that we just rolled off a project with an amazing group, actually in California, they're called AATA - they're the African American Technical Association and they actually support predominantly black healthcare workers in thinking about different, both technical skill sets, but also skill sets related to DEI in healthcare, and how are we building equitable healthcare services? And one of the things we were just talking about yesterday was the incredible high rates of young black male suicide in Oakland. So, thinking about that as a problem, and knowing that they have identified it as a problem with the community, but also for themselves as healthcare providers, that we have seen almost twice the number of suicides in Oakland from young black males in the last several years and it continues to really increase.They started to have meetings. And then the meetings morphed from, “we're trying to figure out what's going on” to really deliberate listening sessions. Sessions in which they brought in healthcare providers, service providers, as well as young black men, and just listened about their experience and took those learnings. And from those learnings, they invited people who've been a part of those listening sessions to then continue that relationship and create advisory boards and committees in which the young people are now creating, not just what they want in mental health provisions, but what they want in peer training of other black men to provide mental health services in Oakland; how they want to start to advocate for policy change as it relates to this, and AATA has taken a step back from convening those meetings to now they're really just creating those spaces to empower the youth to like, “all right, what do you want? How do you want us to give you skills to advocate for this policy change?”
And they're like, “we need to meet with this type of policy advisor,” and they're like, “Great. We'll get that type of person. We'll bring it into your next meeting.” And it's really changed the way they're thinking about tackling the issue of black suicide in Oakland.
Chris Conley:I love that example. That is so powerful. I'm getting the chills. And I don't know why, but it makes so much sense. It's one of the reasons I love training in Catalyst is empowering others to better work on the challenges people face or the opportunities they want to pursue. It's just so the right way to do things. When you have power, space, or knowledge, that can be beneficial to others. Why not share, why not open it – and imagine the leaders that are being created in that program for the community!
Anna Radoff:Absolutely. And I will say that – I think it stems from people like you saying, and people as a part of Catalyst saying, “I don't need to be the person with that skill. Part of being a convener is saying “who do I know in my network who might know someone?” Or, “how do I bring together–?” I'm not a policy expert on mental health. I couldn't tell you anything about it, but what I can do is bring in someone who can and facilitate that for young people. And rather than saying, “that's not my job,” or “I don't have time for that,” or “that's not within the scope of our project,” right? How do I build that in?
Chris Conley: Yeah. A hundred percent. Maybe think about these teams, in the next couple of weeks they'll start recruiting community members to learn about certain experiences that relate to the project that they're working on. What advice do you have for them for taking good action?
Anna Radoff:I think that before you bring in anyone to talk about the type of actions, one thing to be very honest about is who may have had a negative experience before with organizations doing this. As much as we love to think we're the first people to make community engagement, it's existed for a long time and people haven't always done it well. And asking people explicitly, “have you engaged in community engagement before? Have you been a part of this advisory committee before? Have you been involved with this organization before?” And what went well, what didn't go well. And not shying away from the conversation because you might learn something so important about how people want to be in relationship with you. It's just dating. It's like, “What are the deal breakers for these people? Where is their hard line?” And that's just as important as knowing “I really want to be with someone who loves to be outside. I also don't want to be with someone who can't handle my big loud family.”
Chris Conley:I love it. Yeah. That's excellent. We know from prior projects that as people begin to engage and they ask that exact question and I'm glad you brought it up and they actually listened. At the end of those interviews, the people say, “nobody from your organization ever asked me questions like that.” It's all been surveys. It's all been arm’s length, and just sitting and listening is so powerful and meaningful to people. And then, relationship begins, it starts to grow. It starts – something new can start happening. Yeah, fantastic advice. Do you have another one?
Anna Radoff:the question that I really think is important that most people skip over is that first equity question.
So, how does your organization adhere to ways of operating that reflect the dominant culture? How does your organization create space for different cultural ways of operating? And listen, there are things you're not going to be able to change about an organization's culture. Culture change takes a long time.
We know that it does not happen overnight, but if your way of communicating is always emails, it's always the written word, it's always survey - you're not reaching and building the community. And so that's a cultural norm you can change. But also, if you're only ever holding your meetings on Tuesday/Thursdays, but in the middle of the day, you aren't getting the participation you want. So how are you just thinking about this is a way in which we've created culture that is actually going to be very exclusionary to different people. A lot of that requires us changing the way we think about flexibility and the way we're flexible on– one thing that really blew my mind – my sister is in college. And one of her professors stopped having a deadline for essays. They now have a week in which an essay can be turned in and it was it was a culture change of it's okay if your paper comes in sometime this week. And honestly, as someone who used to be a teacher, it's so much easier, I can grade as they come in, people are going to hit different deadlines and that's okay. But also, it reflects that like this time was pretty arbitrary and it's not a hard and fast deadline for either one of us.
Chris Conley:Yeah, I love that. So much of what we do in Catalyst and as they start framing up their opportunity and start thinking about ideas, part of what we ask them to do is to look for orthodoxies or conventions that everybody just does without thinking about them.
And what you're saying here is, “No, think about how you're engaging, reflect on when you're doing it, how you're doing it…” I would love to have community engagement
Chris Conley: Any final comments, I want to be respectful of your time and just, I will be thanking you for what a great interview this was and the insights you shared with us, but any final thoughts?
Anna Radoff:I think at the end of the day, what I go back to when I think about stakeholder empowerment, community engagement, whatever framing you're giving it – when I think about the principles of it, at the end of the day, it's about relationships. At Justice Informed we say, people over everything. People over data, people over one story, people over the latter– people over everything. And what that really means is deeply investing in those relationships - individually and as an organization.
And it is not always going to be easier. I'm not going to say that some of them, if you actually go through this index and think about building those relationships, it's going to slow you down. And it's not always going to be the fastest way to an outcome, and it's going to often result in more work for you. And what that requires is just understanding that you're going to have to change your sense of urgency, and you're going to have to really think about “how am I seeing this, not as more work, but as differently fulfilling work,” or “how am I advocating to have this be a part of my work, such that it doesn't feel like just something else I'm doing in order to check something off the list.”
Chris Conley:I love that.
In the calculation of that - this might, quote, “slow you down, be more work” - that's not taking into account how many failed programs, how much time you've wasted not building relationship with community, not having the impact your organization wants to have because you haven't done this. I see it much more as: yes it's investment, but it is investment, not a resource to be depleted. It actually gets better and better as you decide to engage this way. And, I think you mentioned it as well or referred to it, it's more meaningful work when you do it this way. It may be uncomfortable at first, especially if you're a shy person or you've existed with all your power inside the organization. Now you're going out, you need to be a little bit more vulnerable and figure out how to share power. But eventually you'll be so much more fulfilled with the work you're doing when you work this way.
Anna Radoff:And I will just say that as someone who has been shy and engaged in community engagement - building relationship doesn't always have to mean out in front speaking to the committee in a leadership position that you traditionally think of. Everyone has a role to play in this. When we think about change happening - if being in front of the room isn't how you corral people, figure out what it is for you, because there are lots of ways to build this.
Chris Conley: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, your wisdom, sharing your experience with us – and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Anna Radoff:Thanks, Chris. I'll talk to you soon.
Health Pilots podcast outro:
Thanks for tuning into Health Pilots hosted by the Center for Care Innovations, with podcast production services by Wayfare Recording Company. If you like what you heard, please spread the word and be sure to subscribe where you listen to podcasts. For more information about the Center for Care Innovations or for upcoming programming, events, and funding opportunities, please visit our website - careinnovations.org - and connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter. We’ll catch you here on the next episode of Health Pilots!