Racial Equity: Right Work

In the United States, the systems, policies, practices, and beliefs that seek to serve children and families are rooted in a history of racism, and not designed to create a society that is characterized by equity and justice. Worldwide, similar histories of bias and inequity by gender, caste, income and a host of other dimensions of identity yield the same marginalization.

Through our work, we seek to confront issues of structural discrimination and inequity and collaborate with mission-driven leaders, organizations, philanthropists, and investors to ensure such practices are addressed in service of unlocking the equitable impact that our clients seek.

Team members collaborating around a laptop

Questions We Help Clients Address

Understanding and addressing the effects of structural racism as it relates to your organization’s goal can be a complex endeavor. We work with clients that are not already addressing structural inequities in their work to help ask questions that lead to higher-impact answers. We also work with organizations already guided by racial equity approaches in service of scaling equitable impact:

  • Centering on equity: How does structural racism contribute to disparate outcomes related to your organization’s goals? Or globally, how does ethnicity, gender, and caste, contribute to disparities? And how does the intersectionality of identity further contribute to and exacerbate inequities?
  • Examining the role of race and racism: How does your organization incorporate an understanding of race and racism into strategy development? This includes interviewing an inclusive range of stakeholders, disaggregating data on outcomes by race, and identifying the root causes of inequities.
  • Understand the implications of choices for communities of color: How does your organization ensure that its work benefits communities disproportionally affected by structural racism and other forms of systemic inequity?

Our Equity-focused Clients

Kingmakers of Oakland

This organization, born out of the Oakland Unified School District’s Office of African American Male Achievement, seeks to address the US education systems’ failure to foster learning environments that allow the innate greatness of Black boys to be fully expressed and realized. Kingmakers supports school district teams invested in transforming their systems, structures, conditions, and culture. Its targeted universalism approach creates systemic changes that better serve Black male students and, in so doing, better serve all students. In service of helping Kingmakers expand its impact nationally, we supported the codification of culturally relevant impact model and goals, centered Black culture and history in both content and process, developed a landscape to examine the state of Black-led philanthropy to inform fundraising strategies as well as developed supports to build understanding across various stakeholders, including funder audiences less experienced with racial equity work.

We have been proud to work with many other equity-focused clients, including these organizations:

  • Campaign for Black Male Achievement
  • The Chicago Community Trust
  • The Kendeda Fund
  • PolicyLink

Thought Leadership

Some of our publications on the topic of racial equity.

The Bridgespan Group and Racial Equity: Reflections on our Journey

Our mission to break cycles of intergenerational poverty is impossible if we do not also include a pursuit of racial equity.

Racial Equity In Philanthropy: Closing the Funding Gap

Racial bias—both personal and institutional—causes nonprofits led by people of color to receive less money than those led by whites, inadvertently reinforcing longstanding social ills.

Equal Opportunity Schools: Helping Teachers Close the Classroom Equity Gap

Helping educators see students as whole learners to create more equitable access to Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes.

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