tips & tools
Considerations for Inclusive Convenings
This document is a resource for groups holding large gatherings who hope to make them more inclusive. It offers numerous considerations to make the event inclusive for the attendees regardless of race, ability, gender, class, stage of career, religious beliefs and more. For more see attached document.
DownloadDecolonizing Environmental Education
This is a Zine put together that can be used as a tool to begin the work of changing and decolonizing the field of environmental education. The Zine shares personal experiences of POC and Indigenous environmental educators and activists, provides links to numerous articles and resources and offers tools on how to call for systemic environmental justice. For more read here.
Color Brave Space – How To Run a Better Equity Focused Meeting
This resource from Equity Matters provides a framework for how to create a equitable community norms in a meeting space. They argue that standard “safe space” norms for meeting spaces end up maintaining existing norms making white participants too comfortable, rather than challenging them to create an equitable environment. For more read here.
Transforming a Movement: How foundations can support effective Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion capacity building efforts in environmental organizations
This report, compiled by the consulting group J.E.D.I. Heart, explores how funders and organizations can contribute to and more effectively engage in DEI efforts within the environmental movement. The report draws on research conducted with funders, DEI point people and staff of color at environmental organizations to analyze the limitations of ongoing DEI work and provide concrete suggestions for how to improve. Their findings suggest that environmental organizations view the act of beginning DEI efforts as a success in itself, rather than critically exploring the effectiveness of the work. For more read here.
Public lands in the United States: A curriculum
This article provides an introduction to a curriculum on public land in the United States created by The Wilderness Society and The Avarna Group. The curriculum teaches a holistic view of the history of public lands, which includes the displacement of Indigenous people and exclusionary conservation practices. For more read here.
Disability Language Style Guide
This is a resource designed for journalists that covers offers suggestions around the use of over 200 words and terms used to describe people living with different types disabilities. This resource is also available to Spanish. For more read here.
Workforce Development Racial Equity Readiness Assessment
This is a tool put together by Race Forward, a racial justice advocacy organization, for the field of Workplace Development. It offers a toolkit to assess organizational approaches to racial equity on a number of levels and resources for how to improve racial equity within the organization. For more read here
Land Repatriation and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit
This is a brief guide for Resource Generation members and other folks with access to land to support in education and resource sharing around land reparations. This is a great guide for conservation organizations, agencies, and land trusts interested in learning about land repatriation. For more click here.
Why am I always being researched? A guidebook for community organizations, researchers, and funders to help us get from insufficient understanding to more authentic truth
Chicago Beyond created this guidebook to help shift the power dynamic and the way community organizations, researchers, and funders uncover knowledge together. It is an equity-based approach to research that offers one way in which we can restore communities as authors and owners. It is based on the steps and missteps of Chicago Beyond’s own experience funding community organizations and research, and the courageous and patient efforts of our partners, the youth they serve, and others with whom we have learned. Visit the web page here.
My Role in a Social Change Ecosystem: A Mid-Year Check-In
Deepa Iyer demonstrates the ecosystem of social change, i.e. how we all show up in different yet essential ways to make positive social change and provides guiding questions for us as individuals and organizations to identify our role in this collective work. See her Medium post here.
New equity v. equality v. justice image and definitions
Here is a PDF of an equity v. equality v. justice image series for you to use. Check out our blog for more information on why we created yet another image series.
DownloadCharting responses to white supremacy
This chart, created by Tobin Miller Shearer, provides a context for how to respond to questions often asked by white liberal communities regarding system-wide white supremacy: http://tobinmillershearer.blogspot.com/2017/11/charting-responses-to-white-supremacy.html