Testimonials
As someone charged with leading institutional change as it relates to diversity, equity, & inclusion I worked very closely with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond to provide the Undoing Racism® workshop to nearly 650 of my colleagues at Columbia College Chicago. The reason we chose to do the Undoing Racism® workshops was out of an effort to create a shared sense of understanding and a “baseline” for our faculty and staff around the issues we are engaging on our campus in hopes of becoming an anti-racist educational institution. While the two day workshops were at times intensive and people had a range of reactions and levels of engagement with it, the concepts covered became essential tools to be shared and understood by the larger collective in an effort to take actionable steps towards anti-racist systemic change. We will continue to build internally, as a community, on the concepts presented in the workshops and will engage in specific ways of linking the ideas shared there with how we operate as a college, develop curriculum, and engage our students, but the foundational experience and information provided in those workshops was an essential step for our community to move forward.
I've had the privilege of leaning into Undoing Racism® twice. I've learned a great deal from both sessions and I believe that I've become a greater Gatekeeper. The most recent was with my co-workers at Mid Shore Behavioral Health Inc. in Maryland. Undoing Racism has challenged me as a Black woman, to acknowledge my gatekeeper status and to call out racism within the institutions that I engage with regularly. I seek to continue engagement with those institutions, but also to undo the systemic racism that is rooted within them.
Of all the alternative approaches to undoing racism®, this is the premier approach to it because it is objective, analytical, and action-oriented.
The Undoing Racism® workshop taught us to look beyond the surface and really consider the minute workings of systemic oppression, even as they influence our own work culture. The skills we gained will be useful in dialogue, presentations, messaging, and our personal lives and interactions. Moreover, our time with you gave us countless chances to see each other as human, to acknowledge our journeys, and to begin healing across the many divides we have.