From Guilt to Responsibility: A white nonprofit leaders journey into equity work with Cat Lazaroff
7/15/2025
“A wonderful, now retired, consultant named Sherry Marts told me that one of
the things she shared with me -
we all have biases. We all carry biases. And biases are like armpits. We all have armpits, and we don’t notice them until they start to stink.
That metaphor reminds people it’s not your fault that you have biases. Your
responsibility is not to get rid of all your biases. Your responsibility is to notice
them and notice the ways in which they are influencing how you think about
yourself and how you think about other people and how you treat other people.”
In episode 127 of Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton speaks with Cat Lazaroff. They talk about her work around engaging white-led and majority-white organizations in meaningful culture change to more inclusive, diverse and equitable cultures.
They explore:
how nonprofit leaders, especially white leaders, can begin and sustain their own equity learning journeys.
Privilege, identity, conflict, organizational culture, and the necessity of holding multiple truths.
how culture transformation isn’t about quick fixes, but rather long-term commitments, courageous relationships, and collective learning.
Episode highlights:
[010:20] Starting with the personal
For white dominant organizations, the value of beginning DEI work with self-awareness and reflection on personal identity and privilege.
[14:50] Identity and Bias: What’s Seen, What’s Hidden
How visible and invisible identities affect personal and professional experiences.
“Biases are like armpits—we all have them, and we only notice when they start to stink.”
[19:50] Lived Experience, Assumptions, and Honoring Multiple Truths
Stories of class identity and childhood experiences show how assumptions erase nuance.
the need to acknowledge that people can carry multiple, even contradictory, truths—and all are valid.
[27:20] Managing Conflict and Holding Space
Two frameworks uses: Deep Democracy and Liberatory Design.
Both approaches center inclusion, wisdom of dissent, and designing for equity-based collaboration and learning.
[31:20] Navel Gazing or Doing the Work?
A common concern: is personal identity work too inward-facing?
Internal and external work must happen in tandem—and action can be iterative, imperfect, and still valuable.
[36:50] Nuance, Polarity, and Organizational Culture
how dominant culture traits (like urgency, perfectionism, individualism) t need to be held with awareness.
The goal is to co-create culture intentionally—balancing action with reflection.
[42:20] Community, and Expanding Belonging
Define community more broadly—beyond proximity or sameness.
[45:50] Guilt, Blame, and the Journey for White Leaders
Every white person hits the “guilt wall” at some point,—it’s part of the process.
The key is moving from guilt to responsibility and staying in the discomfort long enough to shift behavior.
[51:20] Final Advice: Don’t Do This Alone
Cat urges nonprofit leaders to seek help and partnership in their equity work.
External facilitators can create brave spaces for honesty and accountability that internal leaders often can’t.
Guest Bio:
Cat Lazaroff
Cat Lazaroff (she/they) is a white, queer consultant who supports anti-racist culture change at nonprofits and small companies. She specializes in helping other white folks center equity, inclusion, justice, and diversity in their work and their lives.
Important Links and Resources:
Deep democracy: https://deepdemocracyusa.com/
Liberatory Design: https://www.nationalequityproject.org/training/liberatory-design-for-equity
White supremacy culture characteristics: https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/
Resource Media: https://www.resource-media.org/
Natasha Aruliah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natasha-aruliah-75071420/
Tara McMullin: https://whatworks.fyi/
Related Episodes:
Episode 56: Applying an equity lens to your nonprofit work
Episode 62: Highlights of healthy organizational cultures, part 1
Episode 63: Highlights of healthy organizational cultures, part 2
Episode 85: Building equitable compensation frameworks for nonprofits
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Carol Hamilton: My guest today on nonprofit Mission Impact is Cat Lazaroff. Cat and I talk about her work around engaging white led and majority white organizations in meaningful culture change to become more inclusive, diverse, and equitable. We explore how nonprofit leaders, especially white leaders, can begin and sustain their own equity journey.
Okay. And how privilege, identity and conflict intersect with organizational culture and the necessity of holding multiple truths, how culture transformation isn't about quick fixes, but rather about long term commitments, courageous relationships, and collective learning.
I laughed when Cat shared the metaphor of stinky armpits and how they are like biases that we all hold. Now a fancy word for this is implicit bias, and the truth is we can't get through our day without them. There are mental shortcuts that our brain makes to make it possible for us to manage the amount of data that is coming through our senses all the time, based on our past experience, our learning, both explicit and implicit.
We all have mental models for how things work in the world, and all of this is to help us predict what might come next and be prepared for it. Our incredible brains do this in a nanosecond. Unfortunately, it means we've picked up just like we might've picked up a virus or other bug, all sorts of unhelpful biases and mental models from the culture around us.
One mental model in many society is who sits at the top of social hierarchies and all the various identities that create the gradation of these, and each culture will have unique ones. In the US context, if you're white, male, heterosexual, Christian, young, cisgendered, upper middle class, educated, all of those identities put you at the top of the social hierarchy.
Now we're in the midst of a concerted effort to reinforce that hierarchy, and this backlash is not subtle or implicit. It is in your face. But I still believe in working towards a world where all living things and beings thrive, that there really is plenty to go round and none of the misery that our current systems create is inevitable.
Other countries have proven this and people in those countries would likely say they still have work to do, but they're ahead of us. But so often what it takes to make change is to identify these biases, these assumptions, and then question them and think of alternatives. As I recently learned in Tara McMullen's summer seminar on system thinking, changing the paradigm is a powerful leverage point in changing systems, yet paradigms can be hard to get at because they can be quite hidden.
Yet, like smelling armpits. When biases and mental models are both recognized and recognized as unhelpful, you can question them and remind yourself too. As Maya Angelou said, when you know better, do better, it certainly takes time and attention, but I definitely think the effort is worth it.
Well, welcome Cat. Welcome to Nonprofit Mission Impact.
Cat Lazaroff: Carol, it's so great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Carol: So I'd like to start each conversation with a question around what drew you to the work that you do? What motivates you? What would you describe as your why? I
Cat: Hmm. Well, so my why kind of goes back to my origin story in this work. I went to work for an organization, a nonprofit communications and strategy group back in 2011, and when I joined them, they were almost a hundred percent. White folks, mostly folks who had come out of the environmental community or some political strategists, things like that.
And we realized we wanted to do more work around justice and equity. We wanted to do not just climate change, but climate justice, not in not just environmental work, but environmental justice. And we realized we were completely. Ill-equipped to do that. And so we said, let's hire somebody who can help us figure this out.
And we hired our very first DEI consultant, diversity, equity and Inclusion consultant back in 2011. And we had that first meeting with that amazing woman. Natasha Elia is her name, and she lives in Canada and. We realized this was not going to be short term work and this was not gonna be a half day session, and you know, one and done.
And nine years later, when I volunteered to get laid off from that organization, we were still working with Natasha and we had added another consultant, we'd added a white consultant, and it changed everything. It just changed everything. It changed how I thought about myself, how I recognized my own identities.
It changed how I saw other people. It changed how I saw my place in the world. And it changed the organization. It changed our culture. It changed who worked at this organization. It changed and I should say the organization is Resource Media. Wonderful, wonderful consulting firm. Check them out if you're looking for communications or strategy consulting.
And you know, we went from a mostly white organization with honestly a pretty toxic culture back in 2011 to one that is inclusive and diverse and works to center equity in everything. From the, the way we have hold meetings and the way we do hiring and all of that stuff, and I'm saying we, because they're still close to my heart, but I, I left in, in 2020 because for a couple of years I'd been thinking, okay, I am this white privileged manager holding a lot of power, making a good amount of money, and.
This is an organization that is shifting in lots of different ways, and I am still not as well equipped as some to do some of the work that we wanna do. Now I'm standing in the way, where do I go from here? And then we got the news that one of our biggest grants had been cut, and this was right before the pandemic shut everything down in 2020.
And I said, well, if I ever needed a sign, this was it. And I raised my hand and I said, this is my time. And then I used that nine years of experience in shifting an individual's understanding of identity and diversity and inclusion and equity, and shifting an organization's culture and how this can happen.
And I talked to a lot of people about whether this was appropriate work for me to do. And I started, so I have been working on my own as a diversity, equity, inclusion and justice consultant. Focused on working with other white folks, mostly white led majority white organizations. Mostly since 2020 I've been doing that.
And when I work with organizations that are. A little further into their journeys. Then I work with some wonderful consultants of the global majority so that we can make sure that we are serving all of them, all of the people in the client organizations. So that's my reason.
Carol: Yeah, I appreciate that. And you, you already kind of went to the next place where I, I wanted to go, which is that, that very specific kind of niche that you work with. Although it probably represents, you know, in the environmental field many, many organizations that are white dominated or, or, you know, majority white.
And, you know, often. Haven't done a lot of work around this. Haven't done, haven't given it a lot of thought. I know. I, when I was working with a colleague of the global majority, we had a conversation about when was the first time we'd ever realized our race. And, you know, for him, he couldn't remember when he didn't. And for me it was, you know, I guess first grade and it was in conjunction with a, a black kid coming into our class. And so then, you know, seeing the difference and, and thinking about that in a way that I hadn't before. So, you know, and, and, and we talked about also was it talked about in your family and it was like, no, not at all.
In my family and in his always. So those contrasts, you know, are with us from a very, very early age. And so I'm curious, when you're working with those organizations very early in their journey, majority White. What are some of the things that you feel like they need to know to kind of get started or be aware of?
Cat: Yeah. Sure. Well, and I should also say before I move there, I did in fact start in 2020 by working with environmental groups, but the joy of this, and that's because so much of my career had been in the environmental movement. The joy of it now is that. Very few of my clients are environmental groups.
I've worked with food pantries, I've worked with international organizations. I've worked with groups that are there to serve young children and their families. I'm now working with an organization that. That aims to bring more diverse stories into filmmaking. So it's, it's, it's wonderful the diversity that I've that I've found in the folks who are looking for this sort of help too.
And so what I tell people, you know, where do you start? I actually had the great honor of speaking last month at a summit called Justice For All. A conference called Justice for Justice for All by Mary Winter's nonprofit, or, I'm sorry, her consultancy runs this summit every year. And I, and I was talking about exactly this topic.
Where do you start? And for me, I think you start by learning about yourself. You start by recognizing all of the identities that you carry that you don't necessarily always think about. So I didn't think a lot about being white until I started doing this work. I, you know, it's just there. Right. And we have this enormous privilege of not having to think about it.
'cause it's, it's all around us. For those of us who identify as white, society identifies us as white and gives us all of the privileges that come with that, all of the opportunities to walk into a room and be welcomed, be recognized as, oh, you're, you're one of my own. And so that's one of the places that I think we need to start thinking about.
Who am I and how do others see me because of those identities? And how do I see other people because of their identities? Which of these identities are giving us privileges, are giving us advantages that we don't even have to think about and which ones are disadvantageous to us? Which ones might make it harder for us in some spaces or many spaces?
So, you know, I think about it. I'm, I'm white. I'm a woman. I'm in my fifties. I'm married. I now live in New York State. I moved to upstate New York last fall and what's interesting to me is that while I think of it. My age is being somewhat marginalizing. We know that for older folks there aren't as many things that are designed just for us that are it, it's easier for people to let their eyes slide by us.
Being a woman, I know that it has been harder for me during some periods of my career working in fields that were perhaps not as welcoming to women. But here I find that being a white woman of a certain age means I can walk into any place I wanna go and be welcomed. And there are also assumptions made about me because of that, because I'm white.
Folks in my, now very conservative county that I live in, in upstate New York, folks assume that I'm conservative, that my values are conservative and they're not. Folks assume because I'm a woman, that I have children or grandchildren and I don't make assumptions about other people all the time.
I mean, it's natural, right? It's natural. A, a wonderful, now retired consultant named Sherry. Marks told me that one of her, one of the things she shared with me that I now share with a lot of clients is, look, we all have biases. We all carry biases. And biases are like armpits. We all have armpits, and we don't notice them until they start to stink.
Carol: start to stink. Yep.
Cat: Yeah, so I, I love that. I love that metaphor because it reminds people like it's not your fault that you have biases. Your responsibility is not to get rid of all your biases. Your responsibility is to notice them and notice the ways in which they are influencing how you think about yourself and how you think about other people and how you treat other people.
So, that's where I start. You gotta learn about yourself first, I think.
Carol: Yeah, it was interesting for me. I guess it was during my graduate work we were doing a particular program where we were talking about identities, and I realized for me the things that were most salient were, or the ones that I identified with the most were not things that were, were all invisible. You know, the fact that I'd grown up overseas and was what somebody later told me was a global nomad. the fact that or my, my, you know, people will definitely laugh at this one, but my Myers-Briggs type, right? So I was very identified with it and, and you know, these are not things that people see right away.
And so and then noticing for all the people of color in the, in the, in the, in the cohort. The things at the beginning of the list were always, you know, W woman, black woman, Hispanic woman, whatever it was. And you know, for me it was like, of course that's what people actually see first. know, they see that I'm a person of size, that I am a white woman, that I am a certain age, you know, all those
Cat: Mm-hmm.
Carol: The things that I hold dear are not, are things that I have to share if I want to. So it was an
Cat: Yeah.
Carol: you know, kind of eye opening, if you will to just think about that,
Cat: Yeah. Yeah. And, and thank you for saying that I have, that I share if I want to. I do an activity, and I shared this with the folks at the conference last month. I do an activity called an identity walk. I didn't invent this. It seems to have come from a lot of different places. The version that I do when I'm doing it online is I use an online platform that is anonymous that allows people to put in the way that they identify on, I think I'm up to like 18 different categories now.
And then to think which of those identities, give them privilege and marginalization. And then to think which of these identities are private, personal to you? Which of them are public? People will see them, whether you wanna share them or not, and which of them are societal? Like you have been assigned a certain kind of identity because of the expectations that come with that identity.
And one of the things that clients say to me pretty early on is. Wait, can't I put something in more than one category? Yes. Bingo. You got it on the nose. Many of these identities live in more than one category, depending on who we're talking to. Depending on the space that we find ourselves in. So I may or may not have to share my age.
I mean, the gray in my hair gives certain things away, but you know, I don't have to tell people exactly how old I am. I don't have to tell people where I grew up. I don't have to tell people things about myself that they can't see and whether I choose to. Will be in part whether I think that it'll give me some benefits, some privileges, like, oh, people will think I'm one of them if I share this, or people will, people will be more likely to talk to me if I share this or whether I think that they're going to, I.
Make me more marginalized. They're going to make me feel othered in that moment. You know? Oh, well, I'm talking to a group of 30-year-old women who are having their first kids or something. Maybe they don't. Maybe I won't come right out and say, oh, well I'm 58. I could, I could be your mom, you know?
Carol: Yeah. Yeah. And also kind of what's, what's visible and what's invisible. It's been interesting. My older brother is developmentally disabled, but when he was younger, he looked like he didn't look that way. He didn't, didn't look like you know. He looked very typical until he's, until he started running around flapping his arms and doing different behaviors. But at first glance, you know, he seemed very typical. And then as he's aged, it's become much more apparent. You know, people would look and see, oh, he's. Probably got a developmental disability. And it's just interesting to kind of track how, how that's made a difference whether people can see the thing or not. And even on, on you know. Group chats with siblings. There's a there. I remember there being a long discussion about what it is, what's better to have a sibling that has a visible disability or not visible, visible disability. Neither is better, but neither is worse or better, whatever.
But it was an interesting conversation because people had lots of thoughts
Cat: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. And, and I, I think those sorts of stories are what can help people really connect to these concepts so that they're not just, you know. Up in your head concepts, but there's something you can actually feel because you could see that shift. You experienced that shift when it was no longer something that was largely hidden, but something that couldn't be hidden.
And then, you know, we're both white women. We, that kind of experience can give us the tiniest little understanding of how. It must feel to wear on your skin or, or if you are, if you have a disability, if you're a person with a disability that is visible to wear elsewhere on your body, something that is immediately apparent and that immediately shapes how people think about you.
And, you know, I sometimes share this story. I. On that very first day in 2011, we actually, we did Myers-Briggs and we did our first meeting with A DEI consultant. It was so interesting to have those things happening side by side. And in the morning with the Myers-Briggs consultant we were asked to do a little exercise.
Where we got in groups with colleagues and talked about hey, discover within your group, what do you have in common and what do you not have in common? And one of my colleagues said, you know, we'd gone through, well, we're all white and you know, blah, blah, blah. And one of my colleagues said, and we're all probably middle class, upper middle class.
And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I absolutely am now, but that's not how I grew up. I grew up poor and, and I told a little bit of my story and, and who my parents are and the choices that they had made. That meant that we never had a lot of money, but they had a lot of time for me. Right. I had a lot of love.
It was a great, great upbringing, but we didn't have the money for things like fixing my teeth. So I have a, I have a gap, I have a missing tooth that had to be pulled and we could, we could not afford braces. And I remember my colleague. I bless her heart, my colleague saying, oh, well that doesn't really count because your parents chose to, to do, to, to be poor rather than, you know, pursuing careers that made more money.
And it stuck with me so much because it was a negation of a part of my lived experience that shaped how I saw the world. And I say that with all the love in my heart for that colleague. But just to note that we make assumptions. We make assumptions about other people. People will look at me now and yes, I am middle class, upper middle class now.
Absolutely. And they don't know that Part of my story is a personal experience of what it is like to need food stamps too. Do all of our shopping at thrift stores, things like that, to to, to live at a different level of our society than I, than I do now, and how important it is to honor those lived experiences that people have.
Carol: Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because you know, I grew up. Very comfortable parents. Middle class, upper middle class. But I, my daughter , grew up, you know. Poor or working class because I, well, one, I did make that choice to work in the nonprofit sector, but I was also a single mom, so it was kind of a double whammy. And you know, there were definitely many, many, many conversations about, no, sorry, I can't afford X, Y, z. And she tells the
Cat: Interesting.
Carol: of, so guess I don't remember this, but she does very vividly of me sitting down, you know, she wanted something and we, I was like, okay. Just come and help me figure out how we're gonna do this.
And I basically walked her through like my paycheck and all of our bills and what was left. And she was like, oh, okay, nevermind. But I, you know, I, I came to this realization from doing, I was doing a program a couple years ago where it was focused on, on white women and, and anti-racism. And one of them.
They had us in different groups based on different identities, and one of them was around class. So after that I talked to her and asked her, which one would you have chosen? and, now, she told me that, and it took me a minute. Even though I knew that's what our experience was, but the, but for me, because I think I was an adult, it had such a different impact on me than her as a child just not, you know.
So even during that period, I knew culture was upper middle class, even though at that moment I didn't have as much money. And for her, that just wasn't her experience. So it was very. That was very eye open, you know, interesting as well.
Cat: Yeah, that is fascinating. And again, something we have to honor because one of my, one of my core truths is that there are multiple truths that no one has a monopoly on the truth, you know, that, that we need to be able to hold multiple truths at once and give them equal weight and recognize that my having.
A different personal experience of an event than you do does not negate your experience or mine. And that has become, that has actually led me to a lot of the practices that I use in my work now. I've done a lot of training now in a practice called Deep Democracy, which is a set of facilitation techniques that came out of South Africa in the wake of apartheid, and it aims at.
Hearing all of the wisdom in the room, including the wisdom of the no, the wisdom of the people who are saying, Nope, I am not okay with this. I don't wanna move forward. I don't wanna compromise. I'm not looking for common ground. Well, there's wisdom too. To learn from hearing that perspective as well.
And then the other technique that I use is liberatory design, which is equity based. It comes out of the National Equity Project and it is equity based. Method of collaborative work in designing meetings, projects in addressing disagreements, in recognizing where there are tensions. And, and both of those techniques lead me more and more to be able to, to hold space for conflict.
Not, not about resolving conflict, but about managing conflict and creating the space to have those conversations. And so, you know, I think that that's at the root of my anti-racist work is recognizing that it's, it's not about, it's not just about, you know, solving a bunch of problems or, or. Hiring people with a different colored skin or something like that.
It's really about making the space for deeper collaboration and relationships and shifting an organization's culture to help hold that space.
Carol: Well, right. 'cause one of the aspects of the you know, dominant white culture that, you know, was definitely my inheritance was, you know, an, an aversion to conflict or an avoidance of it. And
Cat: Yeah.
Carol: able to, to be in it. And it's very uncomfortable for folks who've grown up that way and, and had that, you know, that, that. Conflict is bad. I even, I was talking to somebody else, we were talking about community and my experience, I've been in a particular community for now, now, over close to 30 years. And we've had significant conflicts over the years and lost a lot of people and it's a majority white group. And we've lost people, I think because they think that there isn't community when there is conflict
That's that. The conflict negates the community. The community is
And belonging. You know, feeling belonging and feeling safe, and feeling all those things. And you know, there are gonna be times when that may not be true, can
Cat: yeah.
Carol: it with people? I
Cat: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Real community. I would, I would say, be willing to sit with that discomfort. The, the, the, how they say that about marriage, right? You know, it's not about how you are together when everything is hunky dory, when you're on vacation or you're just having a grand old time.
What do you do when you're mad at each other? What do you do when you disagree and you just can't seem to see the other person's point of view? And do you stay in a relationship? And you know, that's another thing I love about deep democracy is, you know, one of the foundational questions when you're facilitating a conversation around conflict is, do you commit to staying in a relationship?
Because if you're here just to yell at the other person just to get your viewpoint out. And not listen. If you're, if you know you're walking away, if you know you're leaving the organization or the relationship and you just want a chance to vent, then I'm not holding that space for you.
Carol: Mm-hmm.
Cat: But if you genuinely want to stay in a relationship with your colleague or your friend, or whoever it might be, then there is a path forward.
And that path forward requires sitting and listening to each other and really. Really hearing each other.
Carol: So you talked about where people start in terms of kind of working on the individual level. I. This is probably an unfair question to ask, but I'm gonna go ahead and ask it anyway. How, how long often are, are groups kind of at that level? 'Cause I feel like people sometimes end up feeling a little impatient about the that of like, oh, we're not
Cat: Oh.
Carol: doing the work if we're, you know, if we're just navel gazing.
Cat: Yeah, that is one of the biggest challenges, I think, is that it is another of the classic signs of white supremacy culture, and I keep air quoting these things because, you know, I'm using a particular set of tools and one of those is. Signs of white supremacy culture in organizations. And it doesn't work for everybody.
And it, and it's not the only tool, right? So I'm air quoting just to say, you know, here's where I'm coming from. But one of the signs is, is this impatience, is this rush to action and the. The idea that that work only looks a certain way they work. Work can only be things that are measurable.
You know, we, what are our metrics? What are our metrics for this work? And it's really frustrating for a lot of folks. And so there's no easy answer to the question, like, how long are organizations in this space? A better question might be, how long is an individual in this space? Because organizations are groups of individuals and they're all going to be in different places on their personal journeys, and the journeys themselves are not linear.
I've, I wish I had Natasha or Elia shared with us this, this tool that you could measure. You know, where are you on this particular aspect of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. And where are you today? And measure again next week and notice, have you moved forward? Have you moved backwards?
Because you do, you know, it, it's a little of this, it's a little of that. Something happens to you and it, it disrupts your equilibrium and it makes you question things. And suddenly you're like, oh my God, I'm all the way back here. And. And I think the tool was helpful to show people that you're still doing the work.
If you're moving around on that list, regardless of what direction, if you are challenging yourself enough to move around, then you are doing some of the work. And the work will always include personal work, and it will always include this. External work. This work of shifting the culture, changing your hiring practices, changing who you're working with, changing how you're holding meetings.
Everything, all of the things, and they can happen and should happen at the same time. I say start with learning about yourselves, but also is there a little external thing you can do? Can you look at how you hold meetings? Do you have meeting agreements yet that are something that you, a list of things that you agree to about how you're gonna treat each other.
You know, create, create your own. Set of rules for how you will treat each other in, in conversations. That's an external thing that you can do and you can measure it. Yay, you did a thing. One of the wonderful things about liberatory design is one of the mindsets that it encourages. And I'm, I'm just gonna paraphrase 'cause I can never remember the exact quote, but I'll do things to learn from them.
Don't wait. Don't let that perfectionism keep you from taking action. You can take action and you can learn from it. So you can, you don't have to wait until you have the perfect DEI plan to start acting. You can try things and tell everybody, I'm, we're trying this, we're being really transparent and open about this, and we're trying this, and we're gonna offer opportunities for feedback, and if it's not working, we're gonna change it.
That's, that's also doing the work. And I am borrowing this quote a little bit from liberatory design and a little bit from a client to ask yourself is this good enough for now and safe enough to try? Is it good enough for now? And safe enough to try? And if you can, say yes to those things, just do it.
Don't stop planning. Just do it. Learn from it. Reassess it. Change it if you need to.
Carol: Yeah. And going back to the white supremacy culture characteristics when I read those, one thing that struck me was that, you know, there are some that are probably particular to white dominant culture and there are probably a subset of them, maybe half that show up in any. Dominant where, where any group is dominant, because you know, if you're cross cultures, you that the dominant group may not be white. But there are some of those characteristics like power hoarding and
Cat: Yeah.
Carol: Some others, I'm not remembering them all, but that would show up regardless of what, what culture it is. And, and, but that supremacy being, being implemented. And then with the, the other thing that was interesting from what you were saying is that there's this kind of polarity in the characteristics of. Action orientation, right? We gotta hurry up, and move to action. And this sense of urgency, but then also this sense of, but we have to do it perfectly, which can keep people very stuck in, you know, reading more books, learning, you know, listening to more podcasts. Doing more self-assessments and not necessarily moving to like, well, what is one thing that we could change, you know, in how we do things in our culture that would make it more inclusive. So kind of balancing those two energies or shifting
Cat: Yeah.
Carol: one of them.
Cat: Yeah, well, and, and, and holding some recognition that they're happening. You know, you're not gonna get rid of these things overnight. And, and nor should you necessarily, I, I appreciate what you said about, is this just white dominant? I. Culture or is it other things? One of the ones that they have changed the name of is perfectionism because there was this idea that it was just white people who were trying to be perfect and clearly people of the joke, global majority, they're smarter than that.
They're not trying to be perfect and woo. You say that to a personal, the global majority, and they're like, are you kidding me? Like.
Carol: in this
Cat: I want my, well, yes, but also I want my work to be as good as it possibly can.
Carol: Which
Cat: Like I also,
Carol: right?
Cat: it is, it is, but there, but there can be this, there can be this misunderstanding, like none of these.
One of the challenges, I think, is that if you just give people a list of terms. They're gonna react, they're gonna go off and they're gonna react, and they're gonna get upset, and they're gonna misunderstand. And a lot of people are gonna take the exit ramp. They're gonna say, all right, this is not for me.
I am not interested in this. You're blaming me for all sorts of stuff. I'm not doing this. So that is one of the reasons that I think it's really important to be able to have deeper conversations about each aspect that people think might be showing up in their organization's culture and talking about, do we like this, do we not?
You get to choose your culture and if you're all choosing it together your work culture, not the culture we're all swimming in, unfortunately, but you know, if you're all choosing it together, if you are making decisions that actually includes everybody's input, then maybe you create something that.
Works for everybody, even if it includes an aspect of perfectionism or an aspect of urgency or something like that. And, and that helps people not get stuck on worship of the written word. That's another one that's on that list, you know, not get stuck on, well, how are we defining this? Like, if we don't have the perfect definition, how can we even move forward?
I did a workshop earlier this year with a client that said, well, we can't possibly do this 'cause we don't all have the same definition of equity. So before we do anything else, we need to define equity. And I said, okay, for three hours we're gonna talk about this and we're gonna talk about it on our feet.
We're gonna talk about it on our feet, and we're gonna move around as we each make different statements about equity. And this is a liberatory dis, or I'm sorry, a deep democracy technique. What you're going to notice is that somebody's gonna say, well, I think equity is this, or I do equity in this way.
And you're gonna say, you know what? I feel a little bit like that. I'm gonna go stand near them. And then somebody else is gonna say something very different. And you're gonna say, actually, you know, I feel a little bit like that too. I'm gonna go stand near them. And what you discover is there is no one definition.
There are lots and lots of different ways that people are doing equity and they're all the right way.
Carol: Yeah. I think that's the other thing where I, which I've noticed a lot were around the, those, those characteristics and people then seeing that as a list of bad things. you know, and sometimes you have to have urgency. Another one is like individualism, right? I mean, yeah, certainly the United States is massively over-indexed on individualism, what I've seen that interpreted is, well, we just need to be collective. And I'm like, well, there's, there's shadows. There's a shadow side to collective culture too. So can we, it's like working with polarities. Can you find the strength on each side of that and, and then be aware of when it, you know, when you've gone too far in one direction or the other? because, you know, there's lots of reasons why people moved from, well, you moved to a rural area, but move from rural areas to cities.
And part of it was they didn't have everyone in their business.
Cat: Yeah, yeah.
Carol: so none
Cat: Yeah.
Carol: things, if you take, I think the, it's, it's, and I mean it's easy, right? To fall into a kind of either or black or white thinking. You know, there's always more nuance. But, but that's one that I'm just like, okay.
No, you don't. It's not just about going to the other side. about finding, finding what works from each
Cat: Yeah. Well, and, and really listening, I. I did not intend to move to as rural a community as I have. And Carol, you and I have talked about this in other spaces. I'm so grateful for the education that I am getting now that I live in a town of fewer than 2000 people, a village, a village of fewer than 2000 people.
Despite the fact that it is a very, very conservative area, I have never met people who are so nice. Who are so giving, who take care of each other so much. And one of the things that has really struck me is that in this rural community, community is defined as the people who live here. And the responsibility for community is defined as taking care of each other.
And I've started to wonder what it would look like if it were a community. Could be defined a little more broadly if, if the people that we felt responsible for were not just here in this, in the place where I live now, but, but. Broadly throughout the us, throughout the world, can we, can we find ways to open our minds and hearts to define our community, the community that we care about and want to take care of as broadly as possible.
And instead of this us versus them polarity and this. You know, I've been, woo, I don't wanna, I don't wanna go towards politics, but I saw a story yesterday that really struck me about how very much the current regime in this country has defined itself. Who, who they are, who the, the, the, the bad people are and how as long as they stay, as long as their actions can be defined as only harming those people, they can get away with anything.
But if they accidentally do something that gets some of their base saying, wait a minute, that, that, that seems like you're in bed with those people. Then suddenly they get a backlash. And it, it just, it just really struck me again that the polarity, the polarizing, the us versus them is at the core of so many of our challenges.
And I think that comes right down to the organizational level as well. The, the, the, the area that you and I work in as well.
Carol: Yeah. And I feel like they've, they've weaponized that feeling that you described when people are like, I'm feeling blamed. I'm out the door.
Cat: Yeah.
Carol: I'm, I'm wondering if you could kind of say a little bit more about peace, which I've seen many people, you know, white people go through that either I'm feeling guilty or I'm feeling blamed, or you know, this happened a long time ago.
It's not me. You it's not my fault. And kind of how you work with that.
Cat: Hmm. Yeah, I, I don't think I've ever met a white person who didn't go through that at some level, at some point in their journey. I certainly know that I did a lot of that feeling of guilt. How could I not have known, how could I not have realized, and suddenly the, the, the bad people are me. I'm, I'm part of the problem.
I am the problem. And there's, I remember one of my colleagues at Resource Media saying to me that, that he'd reached a moment where that sense of guilt had moved into a sense of. Responsibility for how I can do good work in the world that holds all of this stuff that I have learned. And, and I remember saying, gosh, I hope I get there someday.
'cause I was just wallowing in the guilt. And one day I just realized I had. And so for myself it was persistence. Keep doing it and doin it and doin it. Listening, keep learning, keep exposing yourself to other things. And I think the only thing that I didn't get in those early years of my journey was somebody saying to me, I went through this too.
So what I am able to bring, and that's why I focus so much on working with white folks. Is this, this ability to say, as my colleague said to me, it gets better if you stay with this. You come to a point where, and, and it, I have seen this now with, with many white people. You come to a point where you say, look, I'm never gonna not cause harm.
I'm. I'm gonna mess up. I'm gonna say things that are harmful. In fact, we all do, all human beings do, regardless of what our identities and lived experiences are. So, I'm gonna stop being afraid and I'm going to work on doing the best that I can. I'm going to think before I speak about what my motivations are.
If I can, certainly before I act, I'm going to think about why I am doing this and is it safe enough to try and, and I'm just gonna keep going. I'm just gonna keep moving and keep trying, and keep trying to do good work. And so there's, there's, there's the, it's get, it gets better. Message. I've been through this, and you can too, you can get through this too.
And there's also that thing like about the armpits, right? This is not your personal fault. This is not your fault. You were born with armpits, you were born with biases. You got more of them. As you grew up, you got them from your parents, your family, your friends, from the television you watched, from the books you read, you got more of them.
And guess what you're doing now? Isn't this exciting? You're learning what they are. You're learning how they might make you think and act and what they might cause you to say. And now. You might start by, say, by having things come out of your mouth. I've had this experience like it came outta my mouth and, oh, I don't know what I said that was wrong, but I know it was wrong.
I can, I can feel it, I can feel that I said something wrong or maybe I absolutely know what it was that I said, but I, but it came outta my mouth and I've gone from that happening pretty frequently to, I'm about to say something. Oh, you know what? I'm gonna pause. And I'm gonna rephrase this in my head, and I'm not gonna be afraid of looking silly for pausing in the middle of an interview or a conversation because I have learned now to trust those feelings that come up that say, ah, you know, maybe not that.
And I don't even know. I don't have to know exactly why, to know I need to pause before I open my mouth.
Carol: So as we close out here what's one, one thing that you would say to nonprofit leaders who wanna get started and white nonprofit leaders who wanna get started in this work? Or one question that you might have them ask. I
Cat: One thing I would say to them is nobody should do this work alone. Absolutely. You need help. You need help. And it doesn't have to be a consultant like me. It can come in other forms, but if you do the work alone, then the only perspective you're seeing is your own. And that is not the only perspective that is valid.
And I would also say. You need to create a brave culture where folks feel safe enough to say the hard truths and the benefit of working with a consultant with somebody from outside is that they can, they can create that safer, braver space for. Anonymity is needed for people to say what needs to be said so that everybody can hear it, and, and also not have the person who is going to be transmitting those tough things back to the organization.
Be somebody you have to go sit next to in your next meeting. So there's lots of reasons for working with somebody. I don't do this work alone. I do this work with wonderful accountability partners in a lot of different spaces, and I always will, and so should you.
Carol: All right. Well, thank you so much
Cat: Thank you, Carol. This has been a lot of fun.
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