By Miranda Eng, Associate Director of Consulting and Training Services
We are in a critical moment for equity, decolonization, diversity, and inclusion (EDDI) work—one that demands strategic thinking alongside compassion, care, and courage.
Our team has been stepping up to build capacity for inclusive leadership at all levels and across sectors. As the year wraps up, I’ve been feeling really proud of our team – Raphael, Alia, Ilhan, Sude – and how they have been showing up to meet this moment.
What has this moment been looking like for us?
- Equity-centered work has taken a big hit with anti-EDDI rhetoric and resistance amidst an economic recession. Some organizations have backpedaled on these commitments, while others have stepped up to act on their commitments despite fewer resources. Consulting is becoming increasingly challenging, with often more complex scopes on smaller budgets. It’s more competitive, with more consultants and contractors from the US, local job cuts, and disillusioned staff leaving their jobs. Many of our clients who work in higher education and government institutions face shifting priorities and values in their work space.
- The climate for conversations around equity is more divided with misconceptions around what equity work is and isn’t (i.e., diversity quotas, a zero sum game). With guardedness and defensiveness. With fear of being perceived or being called a bad person. With fear of saying something wrong and being frozen in pursuit of perfectionism. With conflict because we are doing more talking than listening and understanding.
- Juggling personal wellbeing with our team of racialized, multihyphenate humans who are finding joy while managing grief, navigating the systems that weren’t built for us, and holding and using the power, privilege, and positions we have to advance change. And still, like many community members, we balance our time and energy with the roles and responsibilities as caregivers, parents, siblings, community leaders outside of work.
This moment is hard, and remains hard over the horizon.
And despite this, how is our team showing up?
We have been heads down, busy as heck. Some highlights include:
- Doing an equity audit and engagement for the Planning Institute of BC (PIBC), partnering with Live Educate Transform Society (LETS)
- Redesigning a decision-making tool for facility portfolio planning and investing for the City of Calgary
- Developing an inclusive learning and teaching curriculum for staff, faculty, and students in SFU Beedie’s Digital Innovation and Leadership (DIAL) program
- Hosting a two-day Inclusive Leadership RADIUS masterclass for nonprofit and public sector leaders
- Designing and fundraising for new programming for Black, migrant, and equity-deserving entrepreneurs as part of advancing our Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub and emerging partnership with Hastings Crossing Business Improvement Association (HxBIA) and Vancouver Community College
- Facilitating seven training sessions across leadership and managerial levels at the City of Burnaby
- Delivering HR training sessions for the United Way of BC with our partners at Sacred Workplaces
- Expanding our own analysis and learning with community partners with a Trauma of Money workshop delivered by Chantel Chapman and a disability justice workshop delivered by Heather McCain from Live Educate Transform Society
- Consulting on visioning and building out a social enterprise for providing mental health community services
- Launched inclusive leadership coaching and supports for leaders and facilitators
We have been hosting and having the brave conversations needed. Too often, EDDI training is associated with judgment or right/wrong thinking, which can lead to mistrust, inaction, shutting down, fragility, and spaces where people feel unsafe learning and/or expressing themselves. Our approach is different.
We lean into storytelling and relationality, which helps build the trust and connection necessary for meaningful learning and dialogue. We lean into exploring the tensions, misconceptions, and grey areas, including some of the consequences of blunt application of EDDI in workplaces and decision-making.
We lean into conflict and listen to opposing views, bringing in the learnings from our Deep Democracy training with SFU’s Centre for Dialogue and the Waterline Co-op.
We create brave learning spaces that do not aim for perfection, but for progress, accountability, and reflection, and an ongoing process of learning and unlearning.
Nothing exemplified this more clearly than our skilled facilitators Raphael and Ilhan, where with the City’s support, they delivered two half-day training sessions for Burnaby’s RCMP and Community Safety teams. Recognizing the profound historical and present-day power dynamics between policing institutions and Black and Indigenous communities, RADIUS approached this work with intentional care. Before getting into discussions, RADIUS made sure they had an ally, safety and support person, co-created community agreements and safety principles, and clear expectations with City leadership and participants to ensure that deep learning, reflection, and respect were centred throughout the session.
The goal was not to ignore the realities of policing in Canada, but to create a structured environment in which transformative dialogue could occur without reproducing harm.
We have been cheering each other on. Burnout is real, and collective care is necessary to sustain this deep, personal work. Throughout this season we have cheered each other on as our team members have gotten their PR and visited their family back home, have filmed their first full length film in their 5-9 life, have gotten married, have sent their kids to kindergarten, have been getting their MBA and PhD and Continuing Studies certificate. And honestly, just somehow still functioning as humans.
We have been hustling. It is a long road to our financial sustainability, like many other organizations right now. Because we are truly valuing our expertise and our safety doing this emotional laborious work, the traditional consulting model doesn’t and isn’t working for us; a model and system that has always undervalued racialized labour. So we continue to seek new consulting and training clients and contracts so we can continue operating, and continue making an impact. As migrants, children of migrants, and refugees, we have lived with the necessity of being resourceful, scrappy, and creative, and this lived experience is our strength here.
This fall alone, we have:
- Facilitated 20 sessions over 70 hours with over 490 participants, across over 50 public sector, private, higher education, and nonprofit organizations on building their inclusive leadership lens and toolkits.
- Redesigned and reiterated six versions of a municipality’s quantitative decision-making tool, critically analyzing and recommending criteria that embed equity and community impacts into facility investments like libraries and parks that communities need.
- Engaged nearly 175 people across BC and the Yukon on identifying barriers and opportunities for a more representative planning profession for our communities and mobility
- Provided business consulting for 20 social entrepreneurs
With this, in the face of growing resistance and political backlash, we know it is more important than ever to move beyond checkbox compliance or rigid, prescriptive models, and towards meaningful conversation and integrated, sustainable change.
Our Consulting and Training Services team is fighting to continue doing this work with leaders, decision-makers, and changemakers in organizations across public, higher education, nonprofit, and private sectors.
If you’re interested in training, consulting, and coaching, please reach out! We’d love to hear from you.