Learn,&nbsp Improve, &nbspRepeat

This is The Opt-In. I’m Aurora Archer.

In this season of the podcast we’re taking a deep dive, and looking at a multi-year DE&I partnership between The Opt-In and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. We’re taking you along the ride of our victories … and what we have learned along the way.

This season makes a lot more sense in sequential order, so if you’re starting here, I encourage you to go back to our feed and start from Episode 37 – Why DE&I?.

In the last episode, you met more of our team at The Opt-In and learned about the nuts and bolts behind our process. Today, we’re talking about what it will take for you to begin your personal and your company’s cultural competency journey. We’ll get into some of the challenges of this work and how you can overcome them.

One more thing – we know not everyone listens through to the very end of the credits, so let’s do this up front. If you, like us, are inspired by what you hear from the remarkable humans at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia then please make a donation to the CHOP Foundation. Just go to https://chop.edu/giving.

There are a few things that we’ve already covered in this season about what it takes to pull off an effective cultural competency program.

Firstly … we know that Executives must recognize the importance of cultural competency.

And secondly … we know that once we have buy-in from the C-Suite, we need more than lip service. We need to invest in cultural competency, with time, money, and continuous commitment.

The CHOP Foundation had all of these fronts covered when they embarked on their cultural competency journey with The Opt-In.

Irena Politzer: We have an executive who is a black female, you know, and I don’t say that for the pat answer of, oh, only, you know, only a black executive would be interested in diversity. But rather that this is, you know, she knows on probably a cellular level. uh, the importance of this work and prioritizes it in a way that for a lot of other people, it would be easy to, you know, give lip service to, but not know.

That’s Irena Politzer again.

Irena Politzer: And so that basically means that I oversee all of the back office partners to our frontline fundraisers. And that includes our wonderful foundation culture team, which is the group under which our work with the Optin took place and is continuing to take place.

Like Irena said, Monica Taylor Lotty – the executive vice president at the CHOP Foundation – had a fire in her belly. She was ready to define a new model of working that centered cultural competency skills across the entire organization.

Plus she was willing to put money where her mouth was. Irena puts it like this: cultural competency should ….

Irena Politzer: … really be thought about as much as an investment in the future as thinking about what kind of new, you know, what’s the new plant you need or what’s the new technology that you need in order to stay successful and you know, we don’t want to rest on our laurels. Well, this is the same kind of thing, but for our workforce and for our people.

But this kind of program, the kind that talks about race honestly, needs more than just buy-in to work. It needs the ongoing commitment from everyone. Which means that leaders within the organization must lead their teams by example. They need to model the work. … and this is especially critical for white leaders.

Aurora Archer: So, Irena, in doing this work, we have spent some time talking about leadership and the importance that leadership plays in modeling the evolution of culture, the value of inclusion, the value of diversity. … Can you talk about what that means to you and specifically as it means to you as a leader and a white female leader?

Irena Politzer: I think one of the one of the toughest aspects for a lot of white people coming into this work is, uh, you know, a tremendous amount of like fear of being afraid of saying the wrong thing, of being afraid to admit to where we have learned and grown, you know? And just of being perceived as inauthentic because of the nature of, you know, because of the fact that we’re white. … And I think it gets back in a lot of ways to, again, naming that duality, naming that tension and, you know, and calling it out, both for yourself and for the people that you’re working with of like, I acknowledge this and I’m going to try to take these steps to mitigate that, but I’m also not going to let that be my reason for not participating or even trying.

One thing about The Opt-In’s learning program is that having a bigger office doesn’t excuse you from being a learning participant. Everybody is a LEARNER. Executives, managers and individual contributors alike delve into the material together.

Which is why it is so important for senior team members to model the work.

Irena Politzer: In thinking back on some of the things that we learned through our pod learning program, you know, through the journey together, you know, towards the end, we started talking a lot more about white dominant culture. And you know, the aspect how that’s permeated professionalism and notions of professionalism throughout, let’s just say the US … how that’s really gotten locked into our own perceptions in many cases of how we’re expected to show up and how we’re supposed to act. I kind of start thinking that this expectation that our leaders will come in and instantly know everything and be omnipotent and be very hierarchical and be very, you know, top down domineering that kind of stuff. That that’s, those are all I think elements of that white dominant culture and that kind of expectation. And so, you know, being willing to buck that trend and say, hey, I’m walking into this and I’m learning right alongside with you. You know, we’re all learning together. The only difference is, you know, that I’m the one who’s approving the purchase order, I guess, you know, but like other than that, we’re all learning together on this journey, and I’m not afraid to show the spots that I don’t, you know, that you likely may be far more expert than I am.

This kind of vulnerability – as a leader within an organization – means that mistakes are expected, reflected upon, and learned from. It’s something Katie Muller knows well.

Katie: I am going to opt in to being a visible and vocal and thoughtful model for this work, including curiosity, openness, self-reflection, and humility.

We’ve heard from Katie in the podcast before. She’s the executive director of business operations at the CHOP Foundation. She found out … through trial and error … the importance of modeling cultural competency.

Katie: When I was a learning participant myself in the program, I had recently been promoted and hadn’t fully settled into what it meant to have my new title and my new team quite yet. and was going through this program with a member of our senior team who was another white woman. And she made a comment in a session that didn’t sit right with me, uncomfortable, and I made a mental note to myself of I’m gonna follow up with her after this and talk about it. And then later that day or later that week, I got a call from somebody else who was in that session, who was a more junior staff person, a BIPOC staff person who said, I was really disappointed in you for not saying anything in that moment. And you’re a leader at this level in the organization now, and I need you to, I need to see you modeling the behavior that we’re working towards. And I remember sitting with that and receiving it and saying on the one hand, yes, this person is absolutely right. and also sort of exploring the fact that my leadership style until that point, I would have very much characterized as sort of quiet and behind the scenes. I’m a person who like quietly gets things done and people might not always know what I’m up to. And it was a wake up call for me of like, oh, I’m one of these leaders who I keep asking to step into the space and model and. the expectations of how I do that are changing and people are noticing. And so we had been having conversations at the sort of senior leadership level above me about, hey, as white leaders, we’re expecting you to go through the program first, we’re expecting you to engage with it, ask questions, be vulnerable. And I will say for myself that I had this wake-up moment of, oh, that’s me too, I need to do that too.

Is it uncomfortable to mess up? Absolutely yes.

Is it also valuable? Without a doubt yes!

Making mistakes is part of the process to achieve something that’s much bigger.

Katie: I think about how we have medical breakthroughs and innovation on the clinical side of CHOP. And I think that the foundation brings just as much imagination and innovation and commitment to the work that we do here. And so I wanna meet the level of innovation that our clinicians have. I wanna meet the level of innovation that the fundraisers have in the work that we’re doing around culture. … But for me, it’s life can have more joy and connection and justice. And this is one way of making that reality just a little bit closer to being the truth.

Okay so to recap, what we need from leaders to pull off a real cultural competency program is executive buy-in, financial resources, and leadership modeling.

But there is something else we need from leaders to make this work.

Peter Andrew Danzig: When you hire a consultant, you are still going to have to do some administrative work. My name is Peter Andrew Danzig. I use they/them pronouns, and I identify as a gender queer, Latinx person living with an invisible disability. I am a trauma survivor, proudly, and here at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, I serve in the role as the director of Foundation Culture here for our philanthropic unit at the hospital.

Peter has been a crucial player in the cultural competency journey at CHOP. They bring their background in trauma therapy and the arts into their work. And as a senior staffer in CHOP’s cultural competency journey, they understand the everyday work it takes to carry out a program of this caliber.

Peter Andrew Danzig: I have a staff of 200 and I am not beyond pinging them individually and saying, am I accommodating your learning style? Is this invitation on your calendar? If you want it to be, what do you need from me? What doesn’t work? Because guess what? If you’re asking your consultant to spend all of the time on just the IT portion and you don’t want to deal with it, which guess what? I don’t either. I don’t like it. I have the highest regard for people in IT and IS. You have all of my respect. I could never do it. But if you think that you’re not going to do it, then you’re never getting to action.

Spreadsheets … emails … reminder phone calls – they are all a part of the job. But don’t get me wrong. Peter isn’t some cog in the machine. They do these everyday tasks because they know that’s what needs to happen to help foster real change and transformation within an organization.

Peter Andrew Danzig: And I think that my purpose as a leader, my true purpose is directly linked to the ways that I see the world in that I want a more equitable, I want an acknowledgement of diversity, I want engagement with socialization of difficult conversations. And so for me, the big why in this work is truly what it means when we talk about the symbolic table. I look at it as my life’s work.

And this kind of project needs people like Peter, so go find you a Peter who is committed for the long haul.

Peter Andrew Danzig: You see it in the movies all the time. The wheels, the cogwheels are going and the antagonist and the protagonist are at their last bit of the fight. And the way to win is to take a a big stick and push it into the cogwheel and hope it’ll make the machine blow up. If you read or you listen or you engage in a program and you take it from education to unlearning to actual action, and those three steps don’t happen, they don’t happen in any year, I’m letting you all know, hold on to your consultants for a good five to six. Don’t go for the one year. Don’t go for the two. Go for the five to six. Stop trying to measure the KPIs in two years. That’s not where the meat of the data is gonna give you what you need. But if you could think about throwing the stick in the cogwheel, my gosh, that’s what the Marvel movies are based on, it’s that heated moment of will I or won’t I? Will I let them win?

And today, we are not going to let the systems that prevent all people from accessing opportunity, innovation, and deeper connection win!

Okay that was a lot. We got into the real work that it will take for a company to take on a cultural competency program that works.

And it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. This work can be hard.
And there are some real challenges that come with it. So we want to share with you one of the biggest challenges we faced during the learning program at CHOP. And we also want to bring you the lessons that we learned … so that we together can do better.

It’s probably not surprising that one of the biggest challenges was talking about race in a multi-racial space. At The Opt-In we have people across racial lines in conversation with each other … because if we don’t understand each other, we cannot change ourselves.

Dominique Cornitcher: We’re all affected, even white people, were all affected by whiteness, white supremacy, and in my other world, and then capitalism, and then you can build off of all the systems, and that’s why it’s not just, oh, but I have this friend, or I was nice to this person. It’s like, that’s not the reason are doing this, it’s because people are affected in a multitude of ways.

That’s Dominique Cornitcher. She is one of the younger staff members on the CHOP foundation team and works as an assistant development officer in planned giving. And as one of the few Black women on the team, she had a particular experience participating in The Opt-In learning program.

Aurora Archer: So were there any thoughts that you had when you’re like, oh, we’re gonna have this conversation at work?

Dominique Cornitcher: I’m a black woman born, raised in the United States and I assumed it’d be pretty elementary, I guess based on my lived experience. And that doesn’t mean it’s not important and it doesn’t mean that it’s not important to learn in like a systemic way. Like there’s lived experience, but there’s also like the knowledge of reading, hearing from others. And again, just broadly learning about your place within all of those structures. So I think that’s what I initially thought. So also gave me the opportunity to learn my coworkers in a different way, in a safe space where we knew the conversations wouldn’t leave those virtual spaces. So I think that was also like a piece too, that I get to outside of what maybe my expectation is for the learning, I’m learning from other people and how they’re shaped around like the overall system too.

Aurora Archer: And so what was your experience as a black woman in a multiracial learning environment?

Dominique Cornitcher: It, I think I ended up in a cohort that wasn’t as diverse as regards race. It was interesting. I think I definitely didn’t like speak up as much because I think a lot of it was like, I know this already, like there’s, there’s no response that I really have other than like, yes, that is the truth. Um, so I don’t think it was good. I don’t think it was bad. I think it was just like, I kind of felt myself maybe taking a step back, probably.

Aurora Archer: And so let’s talk about that step back because I think that sometimes this is maybe harder for our white colleagues, our white race colleagues to understand that as black, indigenous and people of color, and certainly as a black woman, we’ve been having these conversations for a really long time.

Dominique Cornitcher: Right.

Aurora Archer: And yet we find ourselves in structures, systems, and certainly corporate America, when you look at the diversity that exists in corporate America, which is still in many cases in the single digits, depending on which level. It can be energy consuming. It can be frustrating.

Dominique Cornitcher: Yes.

Aurora Archer: And dare I say at times disappointing, right?

Dominique Cornitcher: Mm-hmm, yes. And I don’t want it to come off as if I’m saying, like, I felt silenced. It’s more of what you’re saying, where it just felt like energy was a little exhausting, probably is the word. So it’s like, and I felt like colleagues were very, specifically other white colleagues, were energetic about doing that extra lift. So it felt good that there was that give and take, it’s not that I felt like I couldn’t speak. So I thought the space felt really safe to do a step in, step out, give people a chance to speak up and want to take a step back.

Dominique entered the learning program with an open mind, and deep desire for change. But being in a predominantly white space… talking about race … meant something very different to her than some of her white colleagues. And here’s the thing, Dominique extended so much grace towards her colleagues throughout the process … and I can speak personally as a woman of color who’s been in all white spaces talking about race, it can be DRAINING… sometimes even retraumatizing.

We all have a breaking point … and while Dominique didn’t reach hers during The Opt-In learning program, there were other participants who did. It’s a challenge Peter Danzig experienced as a leader at the CHOP Foundation.

Peter Andrew Danzig: It’s so, I look back now and I’m like, it was so glaring for me now, but not then, was that I… I couldn’t have known what our BIPOC populations would be experiencing while during the racial literacy cohort trainings. …But I had to hear our staff when they said, like, I can’t sit through this training, this part of it, this one day. There’s 12 sessions. (13:55.501) let’s say for this exercise today, black and African American identifying participants talking about a portion of historical racism. That day to get through their job, they just said, I think I need to take my miss so that I can opt in to the next session, but staying here is not going to be good for my mental health for this particular day.

Most organizations would have said you have to do all 12, and if you don’t, you failed the program. Our stumble was that we pushed a little in saying, well, let’s try to hear, see if let’s experience the unlearning together and give you the space to call people in. …Worked for some, didn’t work for others. What I’ve learned now is to think about my places of intentionality of putting everyone in the room together at the table, and then also the intentionality of unlearning spaces for both populations, for all populations, because we have our own unlearning within. As we do the intersectional work, when we get out of racial literacy, many of my staff have said to me, oh, now I’d like to say that being on the other side, I…somebody doesn’t want to be in a training with me because I have to unlearn my microaggressions towards LGBTQIA plus people or pronouns or people said to me like, I myself sometimes, I’m like, I can’t sit for an hour explaining my gender identity to you. I think we all get there. The racial literacy portion was the biggest stumble for us because that is the biggest systemic machine that has been built to keep us separate. And yet, sometimes we also needed to be separate for our mental health on certain days. So it’s like the system is meant to keep us away, but also sometimes we have to use the exact thing that is meant to do in a way to keep ourselves safe. It is such an odd dichotomy there that like you might have to step out and not be at the table that day to keep yourself protected.

It’s counterintuitive, but sometimes you need to Opt-OUT in order to Opt-IN.

Peter Andrew Danzig: And that’s my invitation, corporate America, nonprofits, or whoever might be listening, is when somebody tells you something, instead of trying to reinforce so you can check their name on the box as participation, listen, trust their story, believe in their reasoning. Create a culture where you can trust in people’s stories, listen to them, and believe in their reasoning. I beg you, that’s when you get the participation.

Can you hear us in the back?! Trust people’s stories. In The Opt-In’s cultural competency program, we meet people where they are and honor what they need. We should all push ourselves because growth comes with struggle. But that doesn’t mean we need to throw away our mental health.

THIS is why mindfulness is such an important practice at The Opt-In. It’s also why we have identity-based small group coaching and make 1:1 coaching available as well. Look, if you want to make change, there are going to be some growing pains. They are hard … but like we’ve learned in this episode … we can overcome them.

And it’s so worth it. But don’t just take my word for it.

Nicolette Epifani: The more I’ve explored the hard stuff, the more I’ve explored the, let myself felt, if I use like kind of bittersweet as the two ends of these, the spectrum of experience, when I lean into the bitter, I let myself look at it, the stuff that hurt, either I did or was done to me … I’m then able to experience greater levels of like joy and gratitude and expression. So it’s like the deeper I allow myself to go, the higher I can go in some of these other experiences.

That’s next time.
You’ve been listening to The Opt-In. I’m Aurora Archer.

If you are enjoying this season of The Opt-In, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast, and, if you can, leave us a rating or a review – it helps others to find us. And, please share with your friends, colleagues, and yes your bosses.

Music from this episode is by Jordan McCree

The Opt-In is produced by Rachel Ishikawa and Colin Lacey.

Our Theory of Change is co-created by Colleen Philbin.

Inspired by what you heard? Make a donation to the CHOP Foundation. Go to https://chop.edu/giving

Thanks so much for listening.