Resource List | United Way Equity Framework

Equity Toolkit – Overview

Advancing Equity In Your Organization

Content integrated from the Equity Toolkit is designed to build the internal capacity of local United Ways to become more equitable ORGANIZATIONS. This includes strategies, tips, process related to implementing equitable internal practices in hiring, retention, promotions, organizational leadership, board representation and all internal United Way work processes.

This toolkit is designed to support you in being bold and effective on your race, equity and inclusion journey. It focuses on what you might consider “getting your own house in order”—building our understanding of the core issues; building our organizational capacity to focus on race, equity and inclusion; and creating supportive and thriving work places for our staff so that we can mirror an inclusive culture as we go out into the community.

Whether your United Way is small or large, with few or many staff, you’ll find guidelines, tools and stories here to support you on your journey. Please dive in. Get ready and practice equity daily! The UWW Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Community Impact Teams are also available to support your thinking and practice. If you’re reading this toolkit in hardcopy, you can request a PDF version from the UWW Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Team. That will enable you to use the many links that are embedded throughout the document.

Data

D5: Making the Case For Demographic Data Collection D5 Coalition	This document makes suggestions for designing, implementing, and assessing the impact of programs and investments through gathering and analyzing demographic data ensuring responsive and relevant approaches to impact.
By The Numbers: A Race for Results Case Study Using Disaggregated Data to Inform Policies, Practices and Decision-making Annie E. Casey Foundation	This publication is the second installment in the Race for Results case study series. It features an inside look at how the W. Haywood Burns Institute and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Social Policy use disaggregated data on race and ethnicity to improve the lives of children and communities. These examples illustrate why the collection, analysis, and use of race and ethnicity data should be an integral part of any strategy, initiative, or legislative agenda affecting children, families, and communities.
Next Steps on DEI: Collecting Better Data for Greater Impact McKnight Foundation	The McKnight Foundation describes how collecting and analyzing disaggregated data can inject fresh thinking and asserts that there’s a significant body of evidence showing that this effort helps institutions adjust strategies and uncover hidden patterns of impact.
Report: What Does It Take to Embed A Racial Equity & Inclusion Lens Living Cities	This report seeks to support organizations in better operationalizing racial equity and inclusion in their work.
Operationalizing Racial Equity & Inclusion: Contextualizing Systems, Data, and Place" Living Cities	This series highlights the twelve themes uncovered in Living Cities’ scan of practices being used by organizations to operationalize racial equity.

Community Mobilization and Engagement

Community Engagement Webinar – United Way Worldwide	This webinar, convened by United Way Worldwide, profiles the equity efforts of two national nonprofits: The National League of Cities’ Race, Equity and Leadership (REAL) initiative, designed to strengthen the knowledge and capacity of local leaders to eliminate racial disparities, heal racial divisions, and build more equitable communities; and Policy Link’s Equity Atlas, a data tool for organizations, including United Ways, to use to understand the prevalence of inequities in the communities they serve.
Nonprofit Service Organizations Civic Engagement: Addressing Challenges and Moving Forward Building Movement Project	Building Movement Project describes a continuum of strategies for civic engagement that can be adopted by service providers and other nonprofit groups, especially in terms of how groups can significantly involve their clients/ constituents in their communities.
Pursuing Racial Equity Through Civic Engagement and Mass Media National Network of Grantmakers, Wilder Research, and the Northwest Area Foundation, The Catalyst Project	This paper discusses social justice and ways to attain it. It provides background for the 2005 National Network of Grantmakers conference “The Power of Generations: Pursuing Social Justice through Sacred Relationships.”
The Principles for Equitable and Inclusive Civic Engagement: A Guide to Transformative Change Kip Holley, Kirwan Institute	This guide asserts that for people to exercise their civic power and voice equitably, we must change the way we think about civic engagement, making transformative changes in our longstanding customs, assumptions, and institutions.
Facilitation guide for community engagement How to Foster Effective Conversations about Our Work and Our Communities National Gender and Equity Campaign In Minnesota	This guide is intended as a resource for effective dialogue about work with communities, with the overarching goal of beginning to collectively explore the vision, assets, and commonalities that will help build a movement for positive and lasting social change towards a more just and equitable society.
All the People, All the Places: A Landscape of Opportunity for Rural and Small-Town Civic Engagement Ben Goldfarb, Wallace Global Fund & New Venture Fund	Ben Goldfarb a long-time organizer and grassroots consultant, presents a nuanced landscape analysis and strategy review, providing cogent insights for funders across the issues and challenges that affect those who live in small towns and cities. He outlines a set of options for investments by national and place-based donors and their grantees to reverse our absence.
Strategies Guided by Best Practice for Community Mobilization Advocates for Youth	This document summarizes 14 key strategies that are based on best practices in community mobilization, collaborative partnerships, and coalition-building.

Communications + Awareness Building

Words Matter: Language and Social Justice in the US South Grantmakers for Southern Progress	This short paper aims to provide grantmakers with a better understanding of how the language they use may be received by different funders based on research conducted by Grantmakers for Southern Progress highlighting the thinking and motivation behind social justice in the U.S. South.
Racial Equity Communications Strategy W.K. Kellogg Foundation	This document outlines the long-term communications strategy toward racial equity as incorporated by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Racial Equity Value Statements Partnership for a Healthy Durham	This document contains racial equity value statements from various organizations located in different places.
The Bias of ‘Professionalism’ Standards Aysa Gray, Stanford Social Innovation Review	The authors of this piece describe how the standards of professionalism, are heavily defined by white supremacy culture—explicitly and implicitly discriminating against non-Western and non-white professionalism standards related to dress code, speech, work style, and timeliness.
Communicating on Racial Equity Tools Racial Equity Tools	This resource offers information about using communication as one strategy to pursue racial equity goals. The resources cover four specific topics that surface often in racial equity work including communicating for racial justice, how to create frames and messages in ways that are heard as intended by the audiences for racial equity work, working with the media and the use of social media.
Paying Attention to White Culture and Privilege: A Missing Link to Advancing Racial Equity Gita Gulati-Partee, OpenSource Leadership Strategies, & Maggie Potapchuk, MP Associates, The Foundation Review	This article discusses tools for identifying how white supremacy shows up in the workplace and helps leadership create spaces to establish intentional group norms, explore accumulated racial advantages and disadvantages, reflect on white culture, and caucus by racial identity

Policy & Advocacy

An Integrated Anti-Oppression Framework for Reviewing and Developing Policy Margaret Alexander, Springtide Resources	This toolkit aims to help organizations review and consider changes to policies to make sure that they are equitable for all employees and members, and their community. Funded by the United Way of Toronto.
Awake to Work to Woke Equity in the Center	This publication describes the necessity of building a race equity culture within organizations. Attaining race equity requires examination of the levels to which racism operates (personal, interpersonal, institutional, and structural), recognize the role in enduring inequities, and committing to change
Leading at the Intersections: An Introduction To The Intersectional Approach Model For Policy & Social Change Women of Color Policy Network	This publication calls on small grassroots organizations, foundations, and legislators to shift the framing and the approach to social and policy change. It is a starting point and a tool to begin the conversation of how to make change without losing individuals, groups, and communities along the way
Racial Equity Policy Design and Advocacy: A Primer Prosperity Now	This primer aims to identify the elements of advocacy, policy design, and implementation practices that improve outcomes for people of color
Best Practices for White-led Organizations to Promote Health Equity and Racial Justice in Health Equity Community Catalyst	This toolkit also aims to help white-led organizations align their work with existing health advocacy, organizing, and community-building work already happening in communities of color in ways that are respectful and grounded in an understanding of power and racial justice principles.

Fundraising, Resource Allocation + Grantmaking

Leading by Example: Diversity, Inclusion and Equity in Community Foundations Coalition of Community Foundations for Youth and California Tomorrow	This piece describes how foundations have identified the importance of inclusion and equity in strategy development as the communities that foundations serve are experiencing dramatic changes because of recent demographic shifts, enduring systemic inequities in the economic, political, and social arenas.
Report: Grantmaking with a Racial Equity Lens Annie E. Casey Foundation	This guide explores how a racial equity lens can help develop new leaders, encourage innovative approaches, get people talking, and inspire change inside foundations
Liberate Philanthropy Justice Funders	The Liberate Philanthropy blog series inspires us to reimagine and practice a new kind of philanthropy that redistributes wealth, democratizes power, and shifts economic control to communities.
Resonance: A Framework For Philanthropic Transformation Justice Funders	Resonance: A Framework for Philanthropic Transformation is a guide to support philanthropic organizations in accelerating a Just Transition by reducing extractive practices and increasing regenerative practices.
Breaking Bad Philanthropic Habits Justice Funders	In 2017, Justice Funders released a blog series on “Breaking Bad Philanthropic Habits” as a way to reflect and identify actions to take. This publication centers on setting new practices that will better serve the funders of the movement’s support.
Funding Movement Building: Bay Area Approaches Bay Area Justice Funders Network	Funding Movement Building: Bay Area Approaches details the findings from the Bay Area Justice Funders Network’s 2012 survey of Bay Area Social Justice philanthropies.
How Donor-centrism Perpetuates Inequity, And Why We Must Move Toward Community-centric Fundraising Nonprofit AF	The author of this piece speaks about the pervasiveness of the donorcentered approach model in the nonprofit sector and how it may be perpetuating the very inequity that we are seeking to address as a sector.
Operationalizing Equity Annie E. Casey Foundation	This brief report serves as a resource and reference point for other organizations that share the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s desire to embrace equity as a core value reflected in all elements of the institution’s programs and operations.

Local Capacity Building

Advancing Racial Equity Through Capacity Building: The Kresge Foundation’s Talent and Leadership Development Efforts Grantcraft	The Kresge Foundation describes how it addresses capacity-building programs by focusing specifically on leadership development through a racial equity lens and investing in the talent and leadership capacity of its grantees. This investment better equips nonprofits to advance racial equity and achieve better outcomes in their organizations and communities.
A Framework For Inclusive Governance: The Continuum From Exclusion To Inclusion Foundation Consortium for the Results for Children Initiative	A continuum that describes the varying levels of exclusion to inclusion on a five-point Likert scale.