Engage, Connect, Protect by Angelou Ezeilo

Author:Angelou Ezeilo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771423076
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2019-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Changing the Culture

IT HAS BEEN FASCINATING for me to see how quickly the landscape has shifted in the spaces where GYF does most of our work in the US. When first starting out, we actually approached organizations that did internships with the federal parks and lands, seeing if they wanted to hire us to help them diversify their pool of interns because it typically was exclusively white. We got a lot of polite “No thank you” responses. In retrospect, those responses proved to be the impetus we needed to create our own thriving workforce of youth of color.

Now that we’ve become a strong force in the internship space ourselves, sending hundreds of black, Latinx, and Native American young people into parks across the country, we’ve had some of those same organizations approaching us proffering the same arrangement we were offering them in the beginning, namely, that they outsource their recruitment of diverse youth to GYF. “We’ll put a line item in our budget and work with GYF to do diversity recruiting,” they’ll say to us.

Our response? “No thank you.”

We’re often competing with these organizations to win entire projects — and often winning the contracts. So why would we now be content to be a line item in their budgets? But I think they’re trying to get a little taste of the GYF secret sauce — and perhaps take us out of the competition at the same time. We made a pivotal decision early on that has turned out to be incredibly fortuitous. When we turned down the offer to be a diversity subcontractor for these white organizations, they were putting big sums of money on the table, money that was looking quite enticing for our new foundation that was still worried about bringing in enough cash to keep going. We knew if we decided to do it for one, we would have a hard time justifying not doing it for other organizations that approached us. But we’d be putting ourselves in a box. The choice was quite stark: Become an outsource for the big companies or aspire to be a big company that has the one thing that the rest of them don’t have — a diverse workforce. In other words, take the quick money and in the process play ourselves small, or hold out and say no to the money. We chose the second route, but we didn’t stop there. We looked at what these bigger organizations were doing and incorporated that into our model so that we could then compete for the big contracts.

Once we turned down the subcontracting route, we had another crucial decision to make: Do we try to become a big foundation that brings in all kids, or do we retain our focus on underrepresented youth? We had some intense internal debates over this with our leadership team and our board. But James in particular was adamant: “Let’s say we work with diverse youth. That’s what we do. And then we drop the mic.”

We knew we would get some pushback for being so explicit about it.

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