anti-racism committee facilitation

Mar 2023 - Sep 2023

Opportunity

In its second year, one of the greatest challenges the Tufts School of Medicine Anti-Racism Committee (ARC) experienced was maximizing engagement of ARC members and addressing frustrations related to moving best practice recommendations into an implementation phase across all sub-committees and school divisions. Struggling to navigate the challenge within the committee, citing challenges of solving for complex issues with many stakeholders and issues with team effectiveness, ARC leadership identified an opportunity to involve a neutral 3rd party to help identify a path forward, doing so in the Tufts Technology Services Design Practice.

Following an initial discussion with ARC leadership, the Design Practice developed and proposed goals which were further refined following a consultation in May with the full committee, which are as follows:

Pause & Reflect: ARC & Personal
Provide an opportunity for the full committee and the individuals who comprise it to review the foundational elements of ARC, build a shared understanding of committee goals and expectations, explore a definition of and philosophy around progress, and an opportunity for each member to step away, reflect, learn, and engage.
Align with Leadership
Investigate and build a shared understanding with leadership of the future vision for anti-racism and the institutional conditions by which a relationship between ARC and TUSM aligns with strategic goals while building trust to facilitate progress towards this relationship
Ensure Sub-Committee Effectiveness
Build a shared understanding of the model for an effective sub-committee, identify the organizational and team conditions to enable that effectiveness, and provide instruction, tools, methods, and support to facilitate effective and sustainable collaboration, supportive culture, and committed members.

My Role

Upon receiving the initial request to support ARC from committee leadership, I led the engagement through to handoff in September. I served as the primary point of contact with ARC, organizing and conducting meetings with leadership, subgroup committees, the full committee, and attendees of optional reflection sessions. I led the formulation of goals and steps to achieve them, developed the materials to advance consensus and execution of them, and facilitated the conversations to advance them, responding to emergent and shifting goals, needs, and roles of committee members.

My ability to effectively facilitate in this context of Anti-Racism was supported by prior efforts with strategic planning for the School of Medicine, experience as a facilitator of a racial dialogue series since 2021, and experience tackling similar institutional challenges on this topic as a member of the Tufts Technology Services (TTS) Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) committee.

Approach

Towards the stated goals, the Design Practice proposed two overarching next steps, one oriented internally to the committee and one externally in engaging with leadership:

Engage in personal reflection
While there is great benefit to be had in diving into conversations on what would enable ARC to bridge the gap and work more effectively, these discussions may be better served with some time to personally reflect. The Design Practice proposes a structured reflection for committee members to engage in over the summer around key questions to be explored together in the Fall and beyond.

Invite leadership into the process
Acknowledging leadership will be vital in accomplishing these goals. The ARC might collectively craft a message that describes the challenges experienced, goals they hope to achieve, the trajectory of the process to achieve those goals, and the role they are inviting leadership to play.

Towards the first goal of structured reflection, The Design Practice crafted prompt questions, built a virtual whiteboard for individuals to share their reflections, facilitated reflection sessions with committee members in the middle and at the end of the reflection session, and synthesized what was heard and sharing it back with the committee.

Towards the second goal, the Design Practice worked closely with a subgroup of the committee. The Design Practice facilitated the ARC full committee meeting in June to agree on the proposed next steps which were subsequently fit to a timeline of multiple steps crafted by the Design Practice, iterated upon and improved with the committee subgroup, and shared with school leadership in the ARC year-end report in July. Following the conclusion of the reflection sessions in August, the Design Practice met with ARC leadership to review what was heard and hand-off continued discussion and engagement with school leadership.

The structured reflection sessions were designed and developed around the following set of prompts and touchpoints:

Structured Reflection

A core question for the committee to explore is how we might reconcile (a) the personal interest in making tangible progress during the length of a committee appointment with (b) the reality of how quickly change is made at the institutional level. To guide reflection on this overarching question, as well as provide an opportunity for members to decompress and explore additional questions pertinent to this work, the following questions are proposed for members to reflect on in sequence:

Feelings | Reflecting on your time on the committee to date, how are you feeling about your experience and about the committee’s work? How have your feelings changed over time?
Motivation | What personally draws you to participate in ARC? What do you hope to see in the process and results of the committee that keeps you involved? What might you consider a detractor from your interest in the committee?
Enablers | What skills and knowledge are you hoping to bring to ARC? In what kind of team environment do you work best? In what kind of organization do you work best?
Gaps | What are you personally interested in knowing or hearing from leadership or ARC? What would it look like for that information to be shared?
Vision | Consider the year 2035. What do you envision TUSM will have achieved in becoming an Anti-Racist institution? What role will ARC have played?
Expectations | Consider the role you expect ARC to play in the long term. What does the pathway to playing that role look like? What progress towards playing that role do you expect from ARC in the next year?

The reflection questions are proposed for each committee member to engage with in whatever manner works for them before reconvening in the Fall. For those who are interested, the Design Practice proposes and would support the following structure:

Virtual Whiteboard

For committee members who wish to share their thoughts asynchronously and read the responses of other committee members, an online whiteboard can be made available with the prompt questions and space to post responses, anonymously if desired. To encourage use of the whiteboard, the Design Practice would send an email on a regular cadence, inviting members to share their thoughts on the prompt questions in sequence.

Reflection Sessions

As a venue for discussion on the questions, the Design Practice offers to help organize sessions among interested members. An initial suggestion is to organize two sessions, one in July and one in August.

Impact

The collaboration between ARC and TTS Design Practice ultimately supported ARC in enduring membership, recommitment to mission, and the formation of regular discussions with school leadership.

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