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Impact Through Coalition

For many of the people who participate in the REI trainings, the experience is the first time they have had focused discussions and professional training on racism. Our theory of change is that by educating established leaders, as well as cultivating rising organizers, we will equip them with tools to assess and identify disparities within their organizations and industries, and to infuse more equitable policies, practices, and business models. As a result, New Orleans will shift to a new growth model: one that focuses on creating networks among minority and majority communities; combines skilled and knowledge workers with institutions; and builds quality infrastructure to innovate and provide advanced services. Please visit our Covid-19 page for updates on how we are responding to the pandemic.

systems Leaders have been trained through our Equity Leadership training

emerging Professionals have been trained on our groundwater presentation

"CENO today calls upon all elected officials, business leaders and statewide task forces to center racial equity as the focus of its work given the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on African Americans. "If COVID-19 teaches us anything, it's that an injury to one is an injury to all: public health is economic health," said Shawn Barney, CENO co-founder.
Read our Press Release & Alumni Letter in full.

COVID-19 UPDATE: Our programs are currently on hold. We are hosting weekly virtual symposiums for alumni. Please stay tuned as we begin to post them via podcast.
CENO is rooted in the belief that we must first have a common language and shared understanding of our community's challenges. Our efforts focus on expanding awareness, training, and connecting leaders through networks. Trainings facilitated by the Race and Equity Institute (REI) form the foundation of the Campaign. Through the trainings we explore the interplay (" Groundwater ") of systems -- education, health, housing, income, criminal justice - and what thoughtful leaders who control as well as influence systems, need to know about the gaps in outcomes between blacks and whites across all systems.

Equity Leadership Training

Designed for executives, managers, and "systems leaders" - individuals who control power and resources in our city, the Racial Equity Workshops occur over two days. The process guides participants through history, data, and an organizational definition of racism.

Groundwater Workshop

A 3-hour introduction to Racial Equity designed for group participation - cohorts of staff members, students, or community groups. In these lively and participatory presentations, REI organizers use stories and data to present a perspective that racism is fundamentally structural in nature.

Our process requires both deep personal reflection and the courage to look critically at the systems in which we work, live, and lead. Through a concerted effort of building increased awareness of our history, understanding the existence of inequity, learning about the design of unequal systems, and having a shared language to describe with specificity how systemic racism impacts every facet of life in New Orleans, we will have taken the first step towards creating a more equitable city.

CENO's vision of New Orleans becoming the most equitable city in America is reliant on connecting people to each other, to education, and to opportunity.

check out calendar for upcoming trainings
Workshops are offered every other month and fill up quickly. Click here for training dates.

Refer A participant
We rely on our alumni leadership to help enroll other leaders - colleagues and friends - in future training sessions. We also encourage all staff and community members to join a Groundwater Workshop. If you would like to refer someone or yourself for a training or register for one of our Groundwater Workshops click below.

Make a Donation
Your donation supports the training of leaders and community programming to drive New Orleans towards becoming the most equitable city in America.

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For many of the people who participate in the REI trainings, the experience is the first time they have had focused discussions and professional training on racism. Our theory of change is that by educating established leaders, as well as cultivating rising organizers, we will equip them with tools to assess and identify disparities within their organizations and industries, and to infuse more equitable policies, practices, and business models.

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Organizations who make a commitment to race equity move through somewhat predictable stages, illustrated in the accompanying diagram. Familiar Dysfunction Many organizations start their equity…

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We're committed to building a new ecosystem that can sustain equitable, diverse schools and neighborhoods. To do so, we must address underlying economic inequity and the ways that our society contributes to those.

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Let's talk, corporate America. It has been a week.

Did you:

Send out a Black Lives Matter tweet and statement to social media? Check.

Send your staff an appropriate Black Lives Matter-based email? Check.

Analyze your demographic data to assess your diversity? Check.

Hire an acceptable consultant for a quick, one day, one-off unconscious bias training? Double Check.

That's a start. You did not know what you did not know and you did the best that you could with the knowledge that you had. But we also have to create space to wrestle with a deeper question. What do we do when "the work" requires so much more? How do we actualize and operationalize the intentions of anti-racism, so that they don't ring hollow when it comes to our actual actions in the workplace?

The reality is that the work of increasing and embedding a culture of diversity, inclusion, and equitable practice in the workplace is so much more than a checklist. To treat diversity, equity, and inclusion work (DEI) as a to-do list with a finite start and finish will only result in the stunted growth of the very culture you are hoping to manifest. It is not sustainable, and there are better ways to address equity so that it not only sounds but is authentic.

Corporate leaders who are ready to pursue the true work of DEI need to be able to answer five key questions for their employees:

How will this impact leadership decisions?

How are we expected to implement this into our daily work functions?

How will it impact our mission and vision?

How will my manager uphold these values in our day-to-day interactions?

How will we codify all of this work that we say is so important to us?

If you are looking at this list and feeling overwhelmed, take a breath.

The glue to the change that you are seeking begins with a simple word: capacity. A sense of urgency to change your organization, particularly through checklists or other quick fixes, can potentially do more harm than good. An organization primed to change the world in the absence of the capacity that it needs to see that change through will fall short. People with urgency and no skills or tools to be urgent cannot shift your organizational culture or support you to reach important equity goals such as an increased staff of color, more diverse representation on boards and in leadership, and greater retention and feelings of belonging within your current staff.

In our work, we know that the best way for organizations to reach their goals and to sustain these outcomes requires a multilayered cultural approach. There are three very specific practices to embrace.

Top-down efforts

First, the work must begin with the C-suite and board and cascade down to the rest of your organization. Organizational change begins at the top. DEI not only requires knowledge from leaders about what DEI is through the lens of your organization. DEI also asks our most formal executive leaders to communicate through loss (people do not fear change, they fear loss), and to communicate a vision even in the face of uncertainty.

DEI-based work will push leaders to ask critical questions about your culture, your data, and what accountability will mean. These conversations must happen before engaging the rest of the organization. Your staff looks to you to provide clarity in uncertainty, even, and perhaps especially when the way out is uncertain. Staff and other leaders need their superiors to clearly communicate what is on the other side of this DEI goal. If you do not know, you must be able to say you do not know. Therein lies the root of why C-suite leaders must be coached and trained on DEI practices through the lens of their organization before the staff.

Key partnerships

Second, the human resource function and managers are the heart of codifying the change that you want. Without this, the culture of DEI cannot live or be embedded within your organization. Managers and directors are key partners, along with HR, in building and sustaining your culture. They need to be brought along from day one. This work requires more than a lone warrior.

Managers serve a crucial role in supporting accountability. It is not enough that executive leaders can walk the walk; it is equally important that managers are able to provide similar clarity and progress toward a vision and to ensure that their teams can contextualize DEI work within their respective work functions. Managers should receive training and coaching that will support them in understanding how they can manifest the company vision, and new HR policies and practices.

Well-timed training

Lastly, the staff should only be trained after company leadership has established the why and the how of your DEI work, after significant thought has been put into the ways in which this culture will live within your organization, and how your leadership team will clearly and transparently communicate it as an authentic call to action.

The "why" begins with the C-suite and cascades down, when leaders of organizations ask themselves some fundamental questions: "Why is this work of dismantling inequity so important to me?" and subsequently, "Why is this work so important to my organization?" The "why" validates the authenticity of the work, and employees need to hear a "why" to authenticate why their leaders are invested, outside of public relations.

This call to action can be communicated in many ways. There are grand gestures that instill an initial belief in the movement, such as all staff town halls and company-wide communications. But just as important are the many small gestures that are the most sustaining ones: consistent internal communications that percolate throughout the company, validated by managers, and state in no uncertain terms to employees that every corner of the company is committed and accountable to the work.

Business leaders who are willing to go deeper at this moment have the opportunity to be part of a paradigm shift in corporate America's approach to systemic racism at a time of dire need.
Darnisa Amante-Jackson, Ed.L.D., is a diversity, equity, and inclusion advisor to businesses and school systems across the country.

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3 strategies that ensure your diversity initiatives go beyond box-checking

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Let's talk, corporate America. It has been a week. Did you: Send out a Black Lives Matter tweet and statement to social media? Check. Send your staff an appropriate Black Lives Matter-based email? Check. Analyze your demographic data to assess your diversity? Check. Hire an acceptable consultant for a quick, one day, one-off unconscious bias training?

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The Black Lives Matter protests aren't just about police brutality. The movement asks all institutions, including schools, to take a hard look at themselves and identify policies that contribute to systemic racism-and then to reform them.

Data is a crucial tool for teachers, administrators, and principals to begin this reflection process. But too often, racial blindness and deficit-based thinking can corrupt data analysis. When they do, school personnel may inadvertently arrive at conclusions that mischaracterize or harm students of color.

This is where data equity comes into play. Having an equity approach to data analysis means maintaining an awareness of potential distortion and taking proactive steps to counteract it. We must adopt an equity mindset in the collection, interpretation, and use of education data.

Equity in Collection

Collecting the right information is the first step of any data project. Racial equity analyses often seek to understand how or why school opportunities, outcomes, and environments differ along racial lines.

This project requires collecting student race and ethnicity data in a way that allows for disaggregation by demographic group. For instance, in addition to examining your school's or classroom's test scores, you could break that data down by race. Maybe as a school, your test scores sit above the state average-but are below the average for particular racial or ethnic groups. To see that trend, you must collect the data.

It's important to keep in mind that racial equity issues also intersect with matters relating to other demographic groups, such as gender and class. Breaking up data only by race may reveal that Black students disproportionately receive disciplinary action, as is true in many schools across the country. But adding in gender may uncover connections between race, gender, and specific disciplinary policies, such as how school dress codes often discriminate against Black girls. Collecting and then disaggregating for a variety of demographic factors can help uncover such inequities.

Equity in Interpretation

After you've collected the data and identified some trends, the next step is interpretation. If you see racial disparities, ask why they're present in your classroom or school. It's a difficult question, and the answer will depend on your unique context. That said, you can improve interpretation by using two practices: avoiding deficit-based thinking and using qualitative data.

Deficit-based thinking in interpretation means attributing differences in education outcomes among racial groups to student deficiencies while ignoring the impact(s) of systemic racism on those students. By failing to address systemic issues, deficit based thinking tacitly accepts them-and expects more of students with fewer resources.

Take SAT scores as an example: Black and Hispanic students tend to score below the national average. Deficit-based thinking might conclude that Black and Hispanic students need to spend more time studying to close this gap. That would ignore phenomena like intergenerational systemic racism, which has privileged White perspectives in curricula, produced racially segregated schools, and caused students of color to internalize negative stereotypes. Some describe the persistent discrimination against these students as creating an " educational debt," so that simply providing them test prep or other services wouldn't be sufficient. Avoiding deficit-based thinking means understanding these systems of oppression and taking the time to look beyond the student to explain trends in your data.

A helpful tool for avoiding this pitfall is using qualitative data. Relying only on quantitative data often leaves out students' contexts and lived experiences. Interviews, surveys, and focus groups that allow students to describe their experiences can often help explain trends in your data or spark ideas for new investigations.

Educators already use a host of qualitative data-gathering techniques. Parent-teacher conferences offer a window into students' home lives, and educators often speak with students one-on-one to learn their perspectives. Free survey services, such as Google Forms and Survey Monkey, offer methods of collecting qualitative data and have easy-to-use interfaces. Focus groups can be difficult to facilitate, but guides abound. They can also be much less formal than the guides recommend, and could simply mean taking aside a group of students and asking them a few questions.

Equity in Use

If your analysis reveals troubling trends, then it's time to act. The specifics of how you change classroom culture or school policies will depend on your particular circumstances, but two points of guidance can make a difference.

First, don't get stuck on symbolic changes like affirmatively stating support for anti-racist movements or adding racial diversity to leadership staff without doing the hard, necessary work to dismantle racist systems.

Second, after you make a change, test whether it had the desired effect. No plan is perfect, and implementation often reveals unforeseen hiccups and hurdles. I've witnessed this many times. Once, I worked with a program that primarily served low-income children of color, and it identified that there were many students who had low attendance. Unfortunately, the program initially fell into the deficit-based thinking pitfall, decided that the low attendance resulted from students and families not valuing education, and "solved" the problem with harsher penalties for absences.

We evaluated whether implementing the harsher penalties improved outcomes; it didn't. Students still had low attendance and now had the added stress from the penalties. So we altered our approach. We started collecting qualitative data by having conversations with families and students to try to understand their perspective. Far from the faulty deficit-based thinking rationale, we discovered that usually the causes were transportation issues or other commitments. After this realization, we changed our approach. The harsher penalties stopped, and instead the program began calling the families of chronically absent students to try to better understand their individual circumstances. The program then worked with these families to create a flexible plan that suited their needs.

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The Black Lives Matter protests aren't just about police brutality. The movement asks all institutions, including schools, to take a hard look at themselves and identify policies that contribute to systemic racism-and then to reform them. Data is a crucial tool for teachers, administrators, and principals to begin this reflection process.