At the end of 2020, we as a country were confronted by a number of different crises that upended life and work as we knew it.
Amid a simultaneous international health crisis, economic downturn, and social events sparked by political unrest, the country also took on a long-overdue reckoning with racial injustice and moved inequity to the forefront of our collective consciousness.
As we now look toward the future with cautious optimism, some of the lessons learned from recent times will undoubtedly inform the culture of our communities and professional organizations moving forward. Here at Accelerate Institute, we’ve been considering changes we may need to make in order to heighten awareness and promote racial equity in our systems.
We used this opportunity to complete the first version of our organization’s Equity Stance, which was originally born out of our 2019 training with the diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firm San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools (SF-CESS). The training was motivated by our commitment to continuously building new awareness of how inequities impact our team, schools, and students, and to develop practices to combat inequity within Accelerate Institute.
Through the creation of our Equity Stance, Accelerate Institute has been able to formally summarize our organization’s values, contextual history, and commitments to creating equity for both internal and external stakeholders. It serves as an evolving blueprint for fulfilling our critical equity goals and calls for high vulnerability and constant review and refinement.
We invite you to review the Accelerate Institute Equity Stance. As we continue to learn and refine our approach, we will update and share future versions of our Equity Stance.