Thursday, November 16
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Workshops – Thursday 2:30pm
Schedule
Can We Abolish Dying Wages for Early Childhood Educators?
How can innovative budgeting solutions unlock a true living wage for our early childhood educators while expanding access and quality? The field of early childhood education struggles to provide living wages to educators, many of whom can now make more working at Walmart or Amazon warehouses. It’s time to unlock new opportunities for early childhood care to turn it into a diverse, thriving wage field — and to make sure students get the education and care they need In this workshop, we’ll bring together real estate developers, early childhood educators, and policymakers to discuss — and launch — innovative new models for early childhood budgeting and funding. We will focus on recent funding and partnership wins for Dallas College’s School of Education, including a $2.7 million grant from the Texas Workforce Commission to strengthen the early childhood educator pipeline and develop the necessary infrastructure to monitor real-time, actionable workforce data.
Continuous Becoming: Artistic Practice and Community Building In Response to Racism, Ableism, and Shame
Black and Disabled individuals living in the United States consistently contend with institutional and compounding systemic racism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, sexism, and classism. In recent years, these systemic challenges have compelled artists and leaders within Black and Disability communities to rely on art and protest as a way to find meaning and resolve within the systems that have divided communities and collectively pushed us to the margins. The cumulative psychological, physical, and emotional effects of systemic oppression, grief, and trauma on individuals in the Black and Disability communities is both well-established and documented. With this as our foundation, the workshop explores the three keystones of constructive cultural, social, and political disruption: identity, accessibility, and care. We’ll encourage participants to consider the ways in which Black and Disability communities rely on care work as a primary source of healing and how—in today’s world, especially—the act of care is, in itself, a necessary form of disruption. We’ll conclude by illustrating how artists and leaders of today’s Black and Disabled movements are pushing the boundaries on what we define as intersectionality, challenging how we navigate spaces, practices, and even the possibilities of what language can be.
Elevating Diverse Voices Through New Models of Civic Engagement
Points of Light’s Civic Circle® is a framework that helps the social sector advance a cause or social issue based on the idea that a diversified engagement strategy, intentionally expanded beyond volunteering, can create pathways for increased and deeper engagement. For those not yet involved, it provides an onramp where there may be barriers. For those already involved, it provides ways to deepen engagement. Points of Light is focusing on Civic Circle adoption in three different areas. First, we are doing a place-based pilot in Houston to explore what it would look like to apply the Civic Circle in one city in a series of partnerships to increase civic engagement. Second, we’re conducting an issue-based Civic Circle pilot around disaster preparedness, as nonprofits are often on the front lines of response. Finally, we’re leaning into the voice component of our framework to explore how we can uplift more diverse voices in civic engagement and social impact work. Our session will examine the impact of increasing diversity of voices, how nonprofits can expand their voice and advocacy work, and what we learned in the process of taking a deep dive into this element of the Civic Circle.
Leveraging Racial Equity Assessments to Spark Change in Communities of Practice
As the nonprofit sector doubles down on its commitment to advance workplace equity, we must collectively cultivate spaces for peer learning and offer accessible tools to assess diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts across the industry. Join the Building Movement Project (BMP) and ProInspire for an interactive workshop exploring how organizations use expert-tested DEI assessments to spark change across national communities of practice. The session will feature a live demonstration of BMP’s new race equity assessment tool, Building Blocks for Change (BB4C). Session attendees will explore the interactive user dashboard, automated report, and supplemental resources designed to help nonprofits move from assessment to implementation. The session will feature small breakout discussions to allow participants to dig deeper into the assessment framework and explore opportunities to use race equity assessments in their practice and organizations. Lastly, you’ll interact with and learn from a national DEI practitioner about her experience leveraging the race equity assessment process in her work leading communities of practice.
What Everyone Can Learn From Leaders of Color
“How do we make sure things at an organization meaningfully change besides just the faces around a table?” “Does the diversity of leadership really matter if an organization already factors race into its strategy?” We have heard a variety of questions like these in response to the calls to elevate leaders of color. To be sure, calls across the social sector to put BIPOC leadership at the forefront have always been there for anyone willing to listen. The case for the importance of proximate leadership for the sake of impact has already been made many times over. Bias-fueled myths about the lack of qualified leaders of color have repeatedly been debunked. This session isn’t designed to convince you of these things, but will instead elevate the assets and skills that leaders of color bring — because of their identity — that make them effective leaders. Participants will learn how organizations can better recognize and support the overlooked skills that are critical for impact. They’ll also explore how to refine their own definitions of leadership to be more inclusive and equitable.