Intertwine Alliance Equity & Inclusion Strategy
Vision for and values about racial equity
The Intertwine Alliance’s vision for equity is that people of all identities and ages are connected to nature and work together to create and sustain communities in which they can fulfill their promise to be prosperous, healthy and safe. For many communities, specifically communities of color, this is not a current reality, which highlights the need to increase access to and availability of basic resources, including nature. Read The Intertwine Alliance's land acknowledgment.
The Alliance honors the diverse ways communities already connect with nature while recognizing the historical and current barriers that have been put in place to create disproportionate access to new and existing resources: that there are structural barriers that marginalized communities face that are often reinforced by cultural barriers. We work to dismantle these barriers and both ends in order to create more equitable access.
In order to successfully realize The Intertwine vision, it is our intention that The Intertwine Alliance will include, represent and serve the full cultural and demographic diversity of the region. We find that while there are many differences in approach and perspective, our fundamental vision -- that nature is a crucial component of life in the metropolitan region -- is shared by different geographical and cultural communities across the region. With this in mind, the manner in which The Alliance has chosen to pursue a vision for a regional system of parks trails, and natural areas is to find common ground among multiple communities, perspectives, organizations, political affiliations and ideologies. Anything short of that would be a failure to fulfill our most fundamental purpose. We believe our work can be a force for making our community healthy and whole – environmentally, economically and socially. We are different in many ways, but The Intertwine is where we come together as a community around those things with which we have a shared commitment. It is our common ground.
The idea of strength in diversity, and of building bridges among organizations and communities that share common purpose but are diverse in perspectives, is a central value at the very core of The Alliance. This value extends to building bridges across racial cultural divides through relationships.
The Intertwine Alliance will harness the power of our coalition as a force for change. We will support Alliance partners in becoming more diverse and culturally conscious and in addressing inequities in how the benefits of parks, trails and natural areas and associated programming are distributed and accessed. For Alliance partners already working on diversity and equity issues, we will provide a platform for them to further their work. Read more about the Intertwine Alliance Equity & Inclusion Cohorts.
Our path so far
The Intertwine Alliance completed its first equity strategy in the fall of 2014. Staff and board have worked to achieve many initiatives including:
- Successful efforts in increasing the diversity of staff and board
- Organizing and completing the organizational assessment cohort
- Organizing anti-racism trainings for our partners and staff
- Supporting the regional parks directors peer learning workshops
- Beginning a broader effort to prioritize equity as an issue for our sector
- Supporting four cohorts/30 Alliance partner organizations along their path toward operationalizing DEI
- Strengthening the Alliance's internal DEI lens through practices and policies
Moving forward
The Alliance strives to further grow our equity work, knowing that equity is not a project that can be completed through a check list, but rather is an ongoing and evolving process. The next phase of our equity work will build on what we learned from previous work.
We recognize that inequality affects individuals differently, and that privilege is a dynamic system that expresses itself differently in individuals and their environment. Social determinants of health act both independently and dependently to create negative consequences. It is important that we recognize all types of inequity, yet leading with race will allow us to target our efforts enough to be effective, while still affecting change in the other areas. As a coalition, our equity work is both internal as a staff and board, and external as a convener and connector with our many partner organizations. The following strategy is divided into these two aspects of our work.
Internal Alliance Efforts
We strive to incorporate equity and inclusion awareness and practice into all Intertwine Alliance work processes and programs. We acknowledge that we are continual learners around racial equity and inclusion and that internal efforts needs to be ongoing and responsive to needs.
Continue efforts to achieve a diverse staff and board. Sustain staff diversity by continuing to improve and utilize best practices regarding hiring new staff and board members. The Alliance board will define governance practices that are both transparent and geared toward engagement, inclusivity and shared decision making.
Build stronger, more meaningful relationships with underinvested-in communities. We invest in relationships and seek to support and add value to the work of a wide range of organizations and communities. We particularly emphasize building relationships with communities of color, low-income communities, persons with disabilities, and youth, by reaching out to and welcoming organizations that have been excluded in the past. We are interested in the priorities of our region’s various communities and how they think about the social, economic and environmental challenges they face. We acknowledge that the dominant culture paradigm does not supply the only or all the answers to our region's problems, and support and include different approaches to addressing the issues our communities face. We respect the wisdom of the people who live here, and strive to work in partnership with them to create a shared vision among our regional community. In these ways we work to build a coalition that truly reflects in its membership the rich diversity of our region, and reflects the values and ways of our community.
The Intertwine Alliance will seek and apply resources to increase our community outreach work with underserved communities. By and large, this includes showing up at their events and inviting them to ours, providing support as needed, and taking the time to show a commitment to their work and values. Additionally, we will create policies to allow these organizations to more easily become partners. We recognize that this work occurs over time, and we are in it for the long haul. We hope to reflect that sentiment in our relationships with community organizations.
Equity as a part of our communications -- leadership in the message. The Intertwine Alliance has a strong communications reach, and we can use it to advance awareness of our mission, goals and activities. We will utilize our various communications platforms to promote equity in the region. We can also communicate equity messaging via the website, our newsletter, at our summits and at other events.
External Efforts
Identify leverage points. As a coalition of 85 organizations, The Intertwine Alliance has a broad reach. We engage with large and small organizations, private and public organizations, non-profits, all the major parks systems, local governments and others. Through this, we have innate leverage points we can access to deliver equity work and bring in a broad range of stakeholders. Our points of leverage include:
- Intertwine Summits & other events. We hold a large Summit every 18 months, and many more frequent gatherings like quarterly Intertwine Connect events, where we are able to reach community leaders in the sectors we serve. Breakout sessions or discussions on equity in the region engage stakeholders while providing feedback from the community and partners on progress.
- Communities of Practice. We convene partners around specific topics on a quarterly basis, providing a strong platform for inclusion, advancing justice and more. These include the Regional Parks Leaders, Regional Trail Advocacy, and Regional Urban Forestry Leaders groups.
- Communications channels. We have multiple communications channels, including social media platforms and a monthly newsletter. We will continue to work on incorporating equity into our messages and their uses.
- Visioning. The Intertwine Alliance is the steward of a regional vision where nature is integrated deeply into the fabric of the metropolitan region. We have an opportunity to ensure that the vision reflects the values of the diverse communities that make up the Portland-Vancouver region, and to use the vision as a guide to help create a more whole community.
Generate conversation on intersectionality of equity issues and change the conversation from an “us” to a “we." The intersectionality of racial, sexual and gender inequities means that by effecting change in one of these areas, there is change in the others. By leading with racial equity, we will achieve some success in other areas as well. By acknowledging and addressing the intersectionality of these issues, we can achieve broader successes.
Too often equity is seen as an issue of marginalized communities that receive the majority of the burden. However, equity indeed benefits everyone. By creating a shared vision and language between white dominant culture and underserved communities, we can work together to broaden the impact and understanding of how inequities negatively impact us all.
Support partners’ existing collaborative initiatives and generate new collaborative initiatives. We will promote and supplement the programs that our partners are already involved in and connect them to resources that could further expand their reach into the community. We will initiate and facilitate projects and programs that support our partners in working together collaboratively to advance equity objectives in the region.
Support for Organizational Equity
Engage Alliance partners in creating an ongoing learning community focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. Our goal is to bring equity work to scale across a broad and diverse array of organizations in order to fundamentally transform the multiple sectors we work with. We learned several lessons from our first equity strategy:
- For organizations, the path to diversity, equity, and inclusion is a long-term project that, by its nature, is somewhat unpredictable. There is no “one size fits all” program. Each organization learns and grows along a somewhat unique path.
- While each path is unique, there are certain sequences of learning and activities that seem to make sense. For example, it is important to provide training in the history of racism and its societal, institutional and personal manifestations as an early step in the journey. It is important to have done this work prior to attempting any kind of deeper organizational assessment, for example.
- Because of the findings of the two preceding paragraphs, it is important to create support for organizations that is sequenced intelligently, but which retains enough flexibility to respond to individual needs.
- Cohorts of organizations where organizational leaders work together and share best practices can be very effective, and are good ways to “bring the work to scale” -- but they work best among organizations that are of similar size and at a similar stage on their equity paths.
- Organizations don’t always know what they need for support, or where to find it.
- Commitment by top leaders is among the most essential determinant of success.
Questions or ideas? Please email Director Tara Wilkinson at tara@theintertwine.org.