June 11, 2020: Strategies to Lead During the Current Dual Crises: Racial and Social Upheavals and Covid-19

Summary: Led by an experienced facilitator, this session provided us with a chance to reflect, discuss and consider together how we can act time in a way that supports our staff, our mission and our organization, as we manage the current trauma and opportunities of dual crises: racial and social upheavals and Covid-19.

Speaker/facilitator:
Dr. Sarah Faude is the Director of Research and Evaluation at YWCA Boston. She has nearly a decade of research, writing, and teaching experience at the intersection of public urban contexts and racial inequality, particularly in education. Sarah received her Ph.D. in sociology from Northeastern University in 2019. Her dissertation research, entitled “The Road to Registration: Bureaucracy, Inequalities, and the Paradox of Compulsory Choice,” examined the role of institutional actors, practices, and processes in the reproduction of raced, classed, gendered, and linguistic inequalities in Boston Public Schools’ intra-district choice process. Her research has been published in the journals Educational Policy and Sociology of Education. Sarah was part of the founding class of inter-group dialogue facilitators, where she co-led a white racial identity dialogue with a cohort of her peers. She also holds an M.S.Ed from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and had the honor of teaching middle and high school English in two schools in North Philadelphia.

Here is a link to a podcast which is directly related to what we are talking about: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-journal/id1469394914?i=1000476730865

Link to some other YWCA resources on the subject: https://www.ywboston.org/2020/06/how-to-take-action-against-racism-right-now

Because information has been changing so rapidly, no summary of the actual discussion is posted. The conversation, however, covered significant ground & questions from the participants. Some resources presented during the meeting are also noted below.

Summary:   In this is a difficult, chaotic and stressful time for so many people, organizations are grappling with how to navigate this with their employees and their other constituents. Led by Dr. Sarah Faude, an experienced facilitator and Director of Research and Evaluation at YWCA Boston, this session provided us with a chance to reflect, discuss and consider together how we could act time in a way that supports our staff, our mission and our organization, as we manage the current trauma and opportunities of dual crises: racial and social upheavals and Covid-19.

Executive directors/CEO or other members of the senior team in our organizations were also invited to participate.

Many of us filled in this quick survey (below) before the meeting. In addition to giving the presenters (and all of us with the compiled information) a little bit of a sense of what is currently going on at some of our organizations, the tool was useful as a first “thinking” step:

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=gBNdy1hHfUiY3MCYmTn4obkPUTauF3 5KtP3aRFEaQipUQTE4UUVQR0oySzlBTVJGV1JPWkhFTVVaNi4u