Meet the Design Team

The Design Team is a small group of connectors, visionaries, and subject matter experts that will support and guide our work to operationalize racial equity. HAND has curated this group of industry leaders to provide their perspective and help shepherd the vision of this work. We look forward to working with the Design Team, HAND members and our greater network over the coming months to translate ideas into action for a more equitable region.

Over the course of Spring 2020, HAND members, allies, and partners participated in Red Lines, White Papers, and Blue Prints: A Four-Part Learning Series Exploring the Dimensions of Racism and Strategies Towards Racial Equity. With a cohort of 120 individuals and a slate of expert speakers, the series centered racism and racial equity and created space, time and resources for participants to process this information. The sessions began by exploring Structural Racism, followed by Implicit Bias, White Privilege and Operationalizing Racial Equity.

Where We Are
During our fourth and final session “So What? What Now? Operationalizing Racial Equity,” we grappled with the learnings to date from our featured speakers, Ibram Kendi, Julie Nelson, and Robin DiAngelo. Building from those reflections, we learned about the intersection of systems thinking and racial equity, and identified the many levels of intervention we can take individually, within our organizations, within our sectors, and even as a network to operationalize racial equity. We concluded with self-reflection on how our interests individually, organizationally, and beyond are served by a racist status quo. Through this activity, we identified the economic, political, and cultural self-interests that we need to interrogate in order to truly achieve racial equity. We closed with the understanding of the choices we need to make to eradicate racism, and racist policies, systems, and outcomes.

Where We Go From Here 
If this series has shown us anything, it’s that continuing education and convening for HAND members and partners will be critical for addressing racial disparities in the Capital region. Continued racial injustices, the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and escalating police brutality call us to recognize that these dynamics are not new, and will take incredible time, energy, and resources to repair. We intend to continue our work on this topic through the following initiatives:

Missed the Spring 2020 series?
Stay tuned for a toolkit summarizing the learnings regardless of where you are in your racial equity journey!

HAND will organize and facilitate working groups to operationalize racial equity in our everday work. Groups will be based on the industry sectors represented in our membership (e.g., Financiers, Property Managers, Developers, Service Providers). We will also convene our network as a whole to discuss our shared goals and further our collective work around racial equity. More details to be announced!