By Dennis Cass
In 1994, the MCF board approved its first Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Framework, which has led to changes across its strategies, governance and operations. The framework states that grantmaking is most effective when grantmakers reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. MCF is passionate about addressing the many challenges that foundations face, including working toward the common goal of advancing a just and inclusive society. In 2018, the topic of DEI continues to get increased consideration in foundation board meetings and offices across the state and region. And as we all dive into the topic, we learn that the work required to move toward truly diverse and equitable communities is a long journey. We have no reason to hesitate given the barriers to becoming more inclusive grantmakers, and in the last year, many foundations have invested in taking bigger steps - and even leaps toward overcoming them. The following article profiles the process and some of the early outcomes of the McKnight Foundation’s DEI journey.
Recognizing the Nuances of Diversity
While discussing trends in racial disparities in education and employment in Minnesota, board and staff members alike at the McKnight Foundation asked what more they could do to close such vexing disparities. While the private family foundation had a long legacy of championing and demonstrating equity in its grantmaking and community partnerships, the board realized it still had much more to do to fully understand the complex nuances of diversity, equity and inclusion. In other words, they didn’t know what they still needed to know.
Kate Wolford, the McKnight Foundation’s president, understood the significance of the board’s request. “Given the dramatic demographic changes in our communities, the deep and persistent data around structural racism, and feedback from community partners, we saw how this quest could enhance the impact of our grantmaking,” she says.
Wolford worked closely with Bernadette Christiansen, vice president of operations, to consider next steps. Christiansen researched how other foundations were incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion into their work in meaningful ways. McKnight chose a developmental approach and focused on cultural competency as a platform on which to build its diversity, equity, and inclusion framework.
McKnight decided to enlist the help of MCF, which had just begun offering consulting services to its members. McKnight engaged MCF to create and deliver a series of group and individual opportunities to understand and develop intercultural competency. MCF staff paired up with One Ummah Consulting, a local consulting group that specializes in intercultural development to lead the work with McKnight board and staff. Alfonso Wenker of MCF and Nehwr Abdul-Wahid of One Ummah Consulting co-facilitated the start of a lifelong journey for the board and staff of McKnight.
In the first session, the facilitators introduced the group to the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), an instrument for understanding cultural competence and a tool used to measure people’s capacity to recognize and navigate cultural differences with greater levels of complexity. This developmental approach focuses in part on developing an understanding of the difference between what’s called objective and subjective culture.
“Objective culture is art, language, food,” Wenker says. “Subjective culture is made up of all the unseen ways in which we are how we are, like whether or not you make eye contact with someone when you speak to them.” Subjective culture is where the meanings behind eye contact lives.
Differences in objective culture are easy to spot. Subjective culture is harder to see. That’s where the IDI comes in. McKnight board and staff members took the 50-question instrument online. Each board and staff member received their individual assessment, and a group profile reflecting the organization as a whole was also generated once all assessments were completed.
Facing the Difficult Truth
McKnight’s profile reflected a Minimization orientation, and according to IDI trainers, 67% of people who take the IDI use a Minimization mindset - which is marked by an understanding of cultural difference while simultaneously overly relying on the assumed commonalities between groups. People with this profile may see difference in the abstract or on the surface, but may discount (minimize) how significantly cultural differences influence behaviors, policies, and practices.
“Minimization means that I’m listening to difference,” adds Wenker. “But I’m hearing sameness. I beckon with one hand and I say, ‘Come be different.’ But with the other hand I give the stiff arm. Organizationally we say we want different perspectives, but then when we bring in people from diverse backgrounds, we onboard them for sameness.”
Learning that their organizational profile was in minimization was a call to action for many McKnight staff members. “This is a group of people who are high performers. To learn that our group profile was in minimization – just like 67% of people - showed that in the area of intercultural competency, we had a lot of room for improvement,” said Christiansen. “There was an immediate desire for a commitment from me that the group would re-take the assessment in 18 months. People wanted to see growth and development.”
The IDI describes current capacity while also indicating what kind of learning is required to build greater capacity. McKnight staff spent 18 months working to develop those competencies, and their facilitators led the organization through a series of seven intensive all-staff workshops. In addition, McKnight made coaching available for individuals and teams.
Abdul-Wahid explains that the challenge with Minimization is that one of its key components is both a strength and a source of interference. “We need commonality to recognize each other’s humanity,” he says. “Recognizing similarities between cultures and having shared expectations is a strength. But Minimization leads to an over-dependence on commonality. Minimization wants an environment of comfort. Minimization is conflict averse. There’s an inability to have honest, authentic discussions.”
Once the group understood the relative strengths and weaknesses of the orientations on the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC, the theory upon which the IDI is based), it was time to more fully explore the organization’s hidden assumptions. Through exercises that pushed the group to think about the invisible aspects of culture, McKnight started to see the hidden rules of the dominant culture in our country and in its own offices. McKnight began to see how various HR policies may unintentionally privilege some styles and approaches while marginalizing others. This made the organization more conscious of its norms and helped people see that saying “that’s just the way we do things around here” was the sound of minimizing differences.
“I’m a direct communicator,” Christiansen says. “And it’s served me very well in my career. But now I can see that my communication style is a personal and cultural preference.” Christiansen realizes that being culturally competent means being more open to other communication styles, and actively working toward being more accepting and accommodating.
Implementing Change for Real Results
Soon, McKnight was ready to start putting what they learned into practice. The next step was to form what’s called Action Learning Teams, small groups tasked with bringing organizational change using the new cultural competency mindset. Nearly half of all Foundation employees participated in an Action Learning Team. After staff identified key areas where they recommended seeing changes to policies and procedures, McKnight settled on three focus areas for the Action Learning Teams: deeper learning, grantmaking, and employee leave policies on bereavement and holidays. Each team was charged with collecting feedback from their colleagues, developing a plan and making specific recommendations.
“The simplest one was Human Resources,” Christiansen says. “One of the outcomes was the decision to change from having 11 assigned holidays to having 12 non-assigned holidays that people choose for themselves and then observe.” Even a seemingly simple change like this wasn’t so simple. “The switch has ramifications for facilities, for reception, for operations, and for the people in HR,” she says. In the end, the group was able to implement the change.
In the summer of 2017, the group held an all-staff retreat that marked a capstone to all these months of learning and testing new ideas. The facilitators revealed the results of a recent reassessment the staff had taken. Everyone wondered if the time, money and effort that McKnight employees invested over the 18 months resulted in increased effectiveness in Intercultural Development. IDI trainers say the shift from Minimization to Acceptance, the next orientation on the developmental continuum, is one of the most difficult; most organizations do not shift immediately. When it was revealed that McKnight's intercultural development had indeed shifted to Acceptance, the room broke into applause and there was a collective “Whoop!” at the news of the developmental shift.
At the staff retreat, Wolford made it clear that the Foundation’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion didn’t end with the IDI staff trainings. “We see it as mission-critical to have our staff be better equipped to engage across differences, and the IDI was one tool to help us increase organizational capacity and effectiveness," she says. "The next step is continuing this development while increasing our area of focus to advance diversity, equity and inclusion through our policies, practices and behaviors. We have identified some next steps including deeper learning on implicit bias and structural racism to inform our strategy and approach. Using what we have learned through this initial phase of work we will consider how we approach our external role as a funder, an employer, economic entity, institutional investor, convenor and thought leader.”
Institution-Wide Changes for the Better
McKnight has implemented a number of changes as a direct result of the IDI work. A program administrator in the International team is now devoting 40 percent of her time to supporting the DEI work. A DEI advisory committee – consisting of Wolford, Christiansen, and Kara Carlisle, the vice president of programs, along with the three staff leads of the original learning teams – has formed to guide staff-related work on DEI. In January of this year, McKnight released a public statement of commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Grantmaking Action Learning Team developed a plan to collect benchmark demographic data of the board and staff of grantees who apply for McKnight funding.
Wolford has asked everyone – regardless of position or department – to budget 5 percent of their time to intentionally focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. This can mean anything from continued individual coaching to learning from grantees who are leaders in equity work. Or it can mean actively pursuing different grantmaking outcomes, such as the Art team’s ongoing work as part of the Racial Equity Funders Collaborative, or the Mississippi River team’s exploration of diverse community partners.
And it’s not just the program teams who are strategizing how to integrate DEI into their work. The finance, communications and operations teams have also sought ways to incorporate DEI into their practices. The reception and facilities team brainstormed ways to make McKnight’s meeting space even more welcoming and inclusive. The communications team examined how to use more inclusive imagery and language and took steps to make its website more accessible to users with different abilities. At one manager’s meeting, the IT director asked, “Do we have any guidance on how to talk to business partners about diversity? Because I’d like to speak to a partner organization that has no diversity on their staff.”
“We recognize this is a journey, and we won’t always get it right,” says Wolford. “We’ve had uncomfortable conversations and moments of consternation. We’ll always be impatient to see results faster. Even so, we are encouraged by the shared commitment among board and staff alike to more fully embody the values and vision we seek with and for our community.”
Dennis Cass is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones and the online journal Slate. He is also the author of HEAD CASE: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain (HarperCollins). Dennis lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife and son and wouldn't have it any other way.
If you are interested in bringing the IDI to your organization, MCF has staff trained as Qualified Administrators that can bring this tool to you as one of our many services to enhance your DEI approach.
The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) puts people and organizations on a developmental continuum of intercultural competency, as defined by Dr. Mitchell Hammer, of IDI, LLC. On one end of the continuum is Denial, which reflects a monocultural mindset, defined as seeing and experiencing the world primarily from one’s own worldview. When individuals or groups are in this mindset, they’re disinterested in other cultures and try to avoid situations where they’re forced to interact with different cultures. On the other end of the continuum is Adaptation. This describes an intercultural mindset – which is defined as seeing and experiencing the world from multiple perspectives. People who use an Adaptive mindset have the capacity to comprehend difference with much greater complexity and therefore are better positioned to consciously strive to build bridges across cultures. In between are Polarization, Minimization and Acceptance.
Please inquire with MCF should you desire to begin this work. Contact Camille Cyprian, MCF Director of Program Strategy and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at ccyprian@mcf.org or 612.335.3556.
Photos provided by McKnight Foundation:
Nehrwr Abdul-Wahid leads McKnight Foundation staff on an intercultural bridging strategies session.
Alfonso Wenker and Nehrwr Abdul-Wahid lead McKnight staff in an IDI Guided Development session.
McKnight staff participates in an IDI Guided Development table session.
Karyn Sciortino Johnson discusses emerging tension points during an IDI workshop.
Callie Londo addresses staff during an IDI workshop.
Alfonso Wenker leads McKnight staff as they prepare for their action learning presentations.
Nate Wade discusses structure and accountability during an IDI staff retreat.
Alfonso Wenker leads a presentation during an IDI staff retreat.
President Kate Wolford addresses staff before an IDI session on intercultural conflict & communication styles.
