Supporting schools and school systems to serve all students by addressing intersectional and institutional racism, privilege and power.
Our Mission. Our Approach.
Raise the conversation,
revolutionize your organization.
Initiate Equity is on a mission to help educators understand the role race, ethnicity, and culture play in providing an equitable education to all children. Our work frames both the historical and current realities that contribute to racialized achievement outcomes, and centers the questions that can support their mitigation and reversal. How do schools serve all students in ways that are inclusive of their background? How do educators and school systems factor in the specific cultural and linguistic needs students bring into the classroom? What are the pernicious barriers that undermine access to a quality education and cause certain racial, ethnic and cultural groups to remain under-achieving and/or under-served? How can schools be more proactive and responsive to these complex realities?
Initiate Equity works to support schools and school systems to answer these questions through our approach in centering schools around a racial and social justice framework for education. At Initiate Equity, we believe a quality education is one that includes a pedagogy that centers the identity of the student; one that takes into account the specific cultural, racial, linguistic, ethnic and gendered needs of students who reside outside the dominant frames. However we also believe that a pedagogy that supports the most marginalized students ultimately benefits the educational development of all students.
Initiate Equity focuses on helping school leaders,
leadership teams, and educators begin a conversation to support racial equity within their school systems through the below processes:
(1) Establish a clear understanding of current racialized outcomes.
(2) Build the capacity to initiate and drive change.
(3) Sustain the progress made to support equitable educational principles rooted in racial and social justice.
While racial equity is the intentional focus, an intersectional frame is also incorporated into supporting ways schools can serve our most vulnerable and marginalized students.
About Initiate Equity
Advisory Board
Learn more about the individual leaders from a variety of fields and sectors who advise our team and enable us to drive equity and inclusion work forward.
Core Values
Integrity
We acknowledge the truth of our reality and openly confront institutional and structural racism through critical conversations, and respond with focused action aligned to a racial justice framework. This process requires us to embrace organizational change and continually align our ideals of educational equity to concrete action.
Liberation
We recognize the intersection of race with other identities and respect and celebrate each individual’s right to show up in the fullness of their humanity. By consciously not perpetuating the systems and structures we seek to undo, we believe we foster the opportunity for each individual to reach their full potential.
Transformation
Equity
Initiate Equity looks to be an organization that demonstrates what is possible when we commit ourselves to equitable practices that are in service of all. This requires us to ground our work in racial and social justice theorizing in order to continually improve our approach to racial equity. Initiate Equity also recognizes we are a work in progress. As a result, we model what it looks like to routinely evaluate our current actions and make meaningful shifts when necessary.