The Equity Mindset

4An Equity Lens: Seeing the Right Problem

If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.

— Albert Einstein

• How can we get more male teachers of color in the classroom?
• How do we connect more Black families to whole‐person healthcare, including quality mental health support?
• Are we able to make rest more accessible to women and femme folk, regardless of where they work?
• Will talented creatives without privileged social networks be able to access careers in industries that pride themselves on exclusivity, including fashion and entertainment?

These are questions I’ve been asked to solve in my practice as an equity designer and practitioner. Each of these—while speaking to different problems on both a macro and micro level—is connected to the same root causes: they all stem from a white‐dominant society with deeply embedded ideologies, beliefs, and practices that dictate who deserves to have a full quality of life. And by “full quality of life,” I am referring to a standard baseline of good health, comfort, and joy. In my opinion, access to a full quality of life is the beginning of real human existence and the groundwork of liberation; to be denied access to these basics is to not live in freedom, but in the constant pursuit of what humans should already exist. And when one’s day‐to‐day is preoccupied with achieving the necessary—with no guarantee of actually obtaining it—liberation becomes the ...