Last winter, WOMEN’S WAY asked us to lead an equity audit of their Women’s Economic Security collective impact initiative (WESI). As we brainstormed with WOMEN’S WAY about how the project would work, we came up with what is now our “community specialist” position.
We said “if we are going to do a project to analyze equitable practices for your initiative, then we need to complete the process in an equitable way.” WOMEN’S WAY and their funder were very excited about the addition to the project, and the idea that we would utilize women with experience of economic insecurity who were a part of the initiative to help us on the project. We hired 2 individuals with as short-term, part-time employees to join our consulting team for this project. Since then we have hired other Community Specialists on 2 more projects. The program is now called the Strategy Arts Community Specialist initiative.
Though the idea was sparked from this project, the groundwork was laid through our commitmentof participating in B Lab’s Inclusion Challenge. Strategy Arts has been a part of the Inclusion Challenge for the past 3 years and the goal is for businesses to find ways each year to make our economy more inclusive. To participate in the challenge, each company sets 3 goals in the fall. The goals are based on standards from the B Assessment (that all certified B corporations take) that specifically relate to inclusion and diversity and set them as improvement goals. We track our progress and report what we accomplish at the end of the summer.
One of our goals this year was to hire a person into a full-time position who is from the communities in the Philadelphia region that many of our clients serve. In January, we realized we were not yet able to add another full-time position, and the process of setting the goal helped us think critically about the impact we wanted to have. Identifying the steps we needed to take to get to hiring one full-time person paved the way for the Community Specialist idea to emerge. What if, instead of hiring one person from the community, we hired individuals on client projects? After gaining alignment on the reasons for hiring another member of our team and the capabilities we were looking for, we were able to shift that thinking when the project came up and see the potential for the part-time position. We also learned a lot about Philadelphia’s workforce at our Breaking Barriers: Sustainable Employment for Women event in March. There is an underengaged workforce of women in the city that is looking for deeper connections with meaningful work and flexible job opportunities.
We still are working on our goal of expanding our team. Businesses creating family-sustaining jobs and having inclusive hiring processes are a major way to create equity in our economy. Meantime, we are also continuing to expand our Community Specialist Initiative. We are honored to have added 4 people to our team this year who have gained professional skills, a deeper network and broader experience by working on our team. But more importantly, we deeply appreciate that they have brought a critical expertise to our projects and so brought higher quality results to our clients. Our clients are seeing the value and we hope that we can continue and expand this initiative going forward.
