Building A Pro-Black World

A Journey from White Space to Pro‐Black Space

Isabelle Moses

How do you infuse racial and gender equity throughout organizational culture and practice? How do you make it a shared responsibility rather than one person's job?

Not unique to my job or my organization, these are questions that I wrestle with every day. For nearly five years, I have worked at Faith in Action, the nation's largest faith‐based, grassroots community‐organizing network. I previously served as a management consultant and executive coach to Faith in Action's leadership team, and came on staff to bring that expertise in‐house. My current role as chief of staff requires me to think daily about how to build an organization that ensures that Black, Indigenous, and people of color—and Black women and women of color, in particular—are set up to thrive. A large part of my responsibility is working with our leadership teams to address our internal systems and structures that have perpetuated inequities and inhibited our team from fully living into our talents and aspirations.

One might like to believe that an organization like ours—one that has a 50‐year track record of building power in low‐income communities of color across the country—might have had a head start in this area.

Not so.

The reality is that Faith in Action, like many historically white‐led organizations, has had to undergo its own internal change process so that our organizational leadership and staff teams truly reflect the communities in which ...