What Kind of DEI Community Care Do You Need in the Year Ahead?

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. – Audre Lorde

During the 3rd Annual Belonging At Work Summit, thousands of DEI professionals joined us in a massive learning community from all over the world! People from different identities, backgrounds, experiences, and professions gathered together to connect, reflect, learn, and commit to taking actions that will build more safety, trust, and belonging at work.

Many Summit participants made the commitment to join the Belonging Membership Community, a space where DEI professionals and leaders can learn more about the importance of this work, gather together to lift each other up, workshop challenges, celebrate successes, and receive real-time coaching from our team to help them advance their organization’s DEI goals.

The Belonging Membership Community is an intentional space where our members are co-creating a culture that centers community care. While there’s a buzz around the phrase community care, are you fully familiar with what this means? Do you know the difference between self-care and community-care?

Community organizer and researcher, Nakita Valerio, describes community care as the act of individuals in a community “leveraging their privilege to be there for one another in various ways.” Community care differs from self-care in that self-care is an individual practice of maintaining a healthy relationship with yourself.

Both self-care and community care are compassion practices. While self-care practices require that you - and you alone - do all the labor to care for yourself, community care is a compassion practice that is done in a group with other people both giving and receiving compassionate care for one another.  

To be in a community care movement is to be with people who know that, while they are showing up to support another community member in the moment, they will receive the care they need when it’s required in the future.

Why Do DEI Professionals Need Community-Care?

During our Dismantling White Supremacy Culture Anchored Within workshop, one of our co-facilitators, Riikka Salonen, shared that the DEI field is composed of many, many professionals that take different approaches to this work. As we work to uproot the internalized white supremacy culture anchored within ourselves and our approaches, this work requires that we abandon the idea of “one right way” to effect transformative changes to our organization’s culture. Many of us come from different approaches that may falsely compel us to believe that our training and our approach is the one, true, and best approach.

When we are at our best as a collective of professionals, we recognize these different approaches help us generate new and innovative ideas and strategies that help advance our organization’s DEI goals. Tragically, when we are at our worst, these differences create toxic competition (another trait of white supremacy culture). Toxic competition drives unnecessary divides within a community of professionals that need to build up our collective knowledge, skills, and confidence. This support system is vital as we work to uproot systemic oppression, which is extraordinarily hard work that can deplete our energy and passion.

I once heard a mentor say, “we need faucets, not drains on our team.” Community care for DEI professionals is a space where we can attract the faucets – the professionals who can help us embrace our different approaches and ideas to pump us up and inspire us to do our best work. These include people that are ready to enhance the knowledge, skills, and confidence of our colleagues in this field. These faucets are our mentors, sponsors, advocates, allies, co-conspirators, and visionaries who remember why it’s important for our community of professionals to collaborate and generate the solutions our workplaces demand.

Many of us know all too well what we are up against, which makes it extra important that we have dedicated spaced to build the community-care networks we need and want. So, what exactly does community care look like in action? According to Nakita Valerio, it can include something “as simple as reaching out to somebody over text when you just need someone to talk to.” It can also be an action that helps alleviate or lift the burden off of another colleague who might be experience grief from a personal tragedy or a current event.

In our Belonging Membership Community, we offer community care through bearing witness and deeply relating to the challenges and struggles that our colleagues are enduring - things we can relate to because we’ve been there ourselves. It’s about lifting up and celebrating those big and small victories and the “aha” moments that our colleagues have as we guide this work in our organizations. It’s about sharing ideas as we troubleshoot the inevitable challenges that arise in our work, while also steering our organizations toward more equitable practices.

Dr. Patricia Omidian, one of the 2021 Belonging at Work Summit’s featured speakers, is the founding director of Focusing International, a nonprofit organization that provides community wellness around the world. Dr. Omidian’s organization is centered around community care compassion practices. In our interview, Dr. Omidian expressed how critical community care is for historically excluded groups of people pushed to the margins. She shared that for any of us to be well, our communities need to be well too.

Your Imagination Work

As you consider your DEI practice, what does community care mean for you? Why might joining a community-care movement of DEI professionals benefit your own health and wellness? How might your contributions and expertise strengthen the collective wins we gain as we transform our organizations into ones that are more equitable and inclusive?

For those of us committed to building spaces that foster community-care, we know all too well that hurts and harms will inevitably arise, because as Kai Chang Thom reminds us from this year’s Belonging at Work Summit, as humans we are wired to harm. So it’s not if we cause harm, it’s about when we cause harm.  And when we do, we need to be prepared to use the skills we have honed to make the space required to learn about the harms we have unintentionally caused. Once we have acknowledged the harm we caused, we can commit to doing better, and then do better. Community care requires that we commit to keep trying in these spaces, especially when it gets hard, and we feel like abandoning it.

The Belonging at Work Community is one that we – all of our members – are co-creating together. We’ve committed to being engaged in this community over the past 18 months. When we started, many of us didn’t know what to expect. We gathered because of the pandemic, and we worked together to navigate the uncertainty that arose in those early months of quarantine. We did know that this space was needed to disrupt the feelings of isolation that arise even as we radically imagine a world that has yet to exist in dominant workplace cultures.

Imagine an expansive DEI community-care space that gave each member what they needed to feel supported. What resources, conversations, and activities would you dream of having access to in this space? How would your physical, psychological, emotional, and social needs be met in this space? How would it feel to co-create this space with like-minded people?

Why not continue this radical imagination of building a DEI community-care movement by joining the Belonging Membership Community? This Community is your space to connect with like-minded people, share your successes, workshop challenges, all while you are empowered to grow and support your colleagues.

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Thanks for growing the #BelongingMovement!