Kate Downing Khaled | Founder & CEO
One perk of working alongside systems seeking to better serve the new majority is that I learn about new shifts, values, and cultural trends that are inspiring leaders in real-time.
So my ears perked up when my colleague, Malik, told me about something the leader of a national workforce development fund that recently confided in him. That leader shared how his organization is taking a new approach to address inequity by focusing on job quality as a fundamental part of building a thriving workforce.
Job quality wasn’t a new concept, this leader explained to us, but was an issue that activist coalitions like the Food Chain Worker’s Alliance had been advocating for years. What’s new is that for the first time, well-resourced organizations are finally listening.
Too bad this person wasn’t able to see all the connections I was making in my brain. Our team has been tracking how the fight for job quality has gained a flood of attention in mainstream media, thanks to activist organizers like Chris Smalls of the Amazon Labor Union.
This story confirms what my team has always believed — to identify solutions with the best chance of success, look to the ideas that activists are already suggesting.
Activists often get discounted because they are vocal agitators. They use people’s power to push for change, outside of channels that systems deem “acceptable.” Their voices are seen as opposing the interests of systems as a whole, and people assume their ideas are not feasible or affordable.
But I actually feel the exact opposite. Ideas formed outside of old ways of thinking, doing, and being — and in direct collaboration with community members — are usually the most innovative. These ideas have the best chance of success because they were formed in an environment where nothing else was working.
So when systems see activists as key designers, it can be a game changer. When the City of San Francisco looked to community organizations to design the work of addressing the city’s harmful fines and fees practices, $32 million in criminal justice system debts were waived or eliminated.
And this debt forgiveness supported the city’s interests too. Ending driver’s license suspensions for failing to appear in court resulted in a nine percent increase in collections per ticket. (Could those collections have been eliminated as well? Probably, but that’s a conversation for another time.)
Activists are not monolithic, and every system has a unique set of historical, contextual, and regional nuances that all come into play when my team and I consider potential solutions.
Our goal is to identify and lay the groundwork for opportunities that can generate transformative change, with ideas that spring from many different sources.
But listening to activists, who do their work by making a way out of no way, will always help us stretch our ideas for justice, wellness, and prosperity to their fullest potential.
At the top of this email, I shared a new trend in workforce development that has leaped from activist town halls to mainstream policy proposals. Have you observed a similar trend picking up steam in your sector that originated with activists? Email me and let me know.
