By Bonnie Arthur and Véronik Campbell
Picture this: A team of racialized folks all reporting to white leaders.
We’re inviting you to picture this because it is a common power structure. We work with community members who are often excluded from leadership roles. We also work with the very institutions who have challenges in attracting, retaining, and promoting racialized staff.
This power structure has been, and continues to be RADIUS’ reality.
A bit of history
RADIUS was launched in 2013 at Simon Fraser University as a social innovation and entrepreneurship hub. We established one of Canada’s first social venture* incubators while building social innovation education and leadership programming. The work ended up supporting hundreds of social entrepreneurs and social impact ventures.
While some programs like our Refugee Livelihood Lab were intentionally designed, RADIUS’ foundational infrastructure and culture perpetuated barriers for many no matter how well-intentioned RADIUS was. The reality was that the spaces RADIUS was in were largely being led by and providing services to white people.
RADIUS knew, as an organization leading in social innovation dedicated to community-based outcomes, that we needed to change our approach. We needed to encourage greater participation in our work with more diverse audiences, including on our own team. We thought that using the models of design thinking that we were teaching in community would help us get there would be easy; we could model the way.
However, we had not yet learned an important lesson: Diversity is an outcome of an inclusive, accountable, and equitable culture, not an objective to set and figure out the details on the way.
The turning point
The real change at RADIUS came from courage. Courageous team members from equity-denied communities spoke up and challenged RADIUS’ internal infrastructure, its culture. External voices also raised concerns about the way RADIUS events and programs were designed and delivered. As the RADIUS at 10 Report reflects:
This was when RADIUS began to lean into harder questions about its role in perpetuating systemic racism, colonialism, and white supremacy as a white led organisation pursuing ‘systems change’ in predominantly white social innovation, social economy, and entrepreneurship sectors.
In 2019, RADIUS commissioned an equity audit, which resulted in a list of realistic and powerful recommendations that suggested how our programs, policies, and practices needed to be re-designed in ways that centred the voices of those who have been historically, persistently, and systemically marginalized. Change for us included:
- A new leadership model
- Auditing and redesigning human resource practices including prioritizing Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion skills and ability in hiring new staff
- Investing in support to make our practices and policies more equitable
- Reimagining program constructs and how we might support participants
- Re-designing new foundational principles for the organization
- Slowing down the furious start-up pace to create the spaciousness needed to truly process equity-based challenges
- Rethinking what genuine reciprocity between grassroots organisations and colonial institutions represent
The work to do better does not end…
That list of changes has led to a transformation in how we work together and how we are in community. Our learning journey has shaped how we embed equity into our leadership, hiring, and consulting practices. It has shaped how we’ve grappled with conflicts and challenges on our team, how our relationships unfold in our workplace.
But hear us out: that movement from commitment to inclusion to activating inclusion has been far from perfect. Case in point, tensions persist. It’s not like we’ve achieved some kind of perfect paradigm of leadership and organizational structure. How we operate as a team can be hard, but it’s important to us. We now address tensions, together as a team, through generative rather than unresolved, silent conflict.
We often hear organizations and leaders who want a silver bullet on how to be inclusive leaders, diversify their teams, and manage conflict among diverse teams after one training session.
Truthfully, inclusive leadership starts with ourselves.
This is a critical takeaway outlined in Sheryl Petty and Mark Leach’s “Systems Change and Deep Equity” model, an approach directing us to interrogate structural inequities (including white supremacy and racism) which shape systems from policies, practices, power dynamics and belief systems. Pursuing deep equity cannot be separated from sustainable, structural systems change.
Inclusive leadership to us means knowing what our positionality is within our team. It means learning how to be comfortable, confident, and competent in engaging in conflict. It means not striving for perfection, and having humility to repair harm when you make a mistake. It means being open to staying accountable. It means prioritizing the practice of reflecting, assessing, taking action, testing, and then reflecting again so we keep growing.
As a team dedicated to systems change, today we feel honoured to support organizations and leaders by sharing both our successes and lessons learned, offering humble insights to leaders navigating similar challenges.
Come hear us share more about our RADIUS story, and our journeys as leaders who are white steering equity work with communities and institutions, at our upcoming Inclusive Leadership Masterclass on October 22 and 23, 2025.
To leaders: I see you and understand your position, and you can do it.
To staff: I see you, I’ve been you, and we can do it.
Come hear us share more about our RADIUS story, and our journeys as leaders who are white steering equity work with communities and institutions, at our upcoming Inclusive Leadership Masterclass on October 22 and 23, 2025.