A baseline on racial justice: where we’re at and where we’re headed

In June 2020, during the mass mobilizations around the world in defense of Black lives and urgent calls for racial justice, MakeWay staff came together at all levels to better understand our role and how we could do better. As an organization committed to helping “nature and communities thrive together”, we knew that inequality and discrimination must be addressed along the way. But how? What did we need to focus on to better tackle racism both internally and externally?  We’re laying out where we are now, and pointing to where we hope to get to in the coming months and years. We also want to benchmark ourselves against our starting point and with others across the charitable sector.

It’s no secret that the environmental movement has a diversity issue. Racism and white supremacy have long excluded Black, brown, and Indigenous people in environmental policy, conservation, and climate issues. At its worst, the conservation movement has been explicitly racist, anti-immigration, and blaming environmental degradation on overpopulation. In more benign ways, many environmentally focused organizations haven’t made themselves relevant to those beyond white settler nature-loving culture. As a leader and supporter of the environmental movement for the last 20 years, MakeWay is in some ways complicit in these ways of being.

Too often solutions created by predominately white governments and ENGOs don’t understand the community context and thus fail to achieve their vision. More fundamentally, all those working to protect lands and waters in Canada, where lands are unceded, must actively recognize the Rights and self-determination of Indigenous peoples and challenge the ongoing legacies of colonial racism and resource extraction. As the world grapples with public health and environmental crises that disproportionately affect people of colour, we cannot afford to continue a trajectory of environmental and social justice work that excludes the voices and priorities of Indigenous people and people of colour. The environmental movement will only benefit from the knowledge and expertise of BIPOC communities.

Progress to date at MakeWay

Grantmaking

Since our founding in the Pacific region 20 years ago, MakeWay (formerly Tides Canada) has worked to advance co-governance relationships and honour First Nations Rights and Title.  We recognize that across Canada land is unceded, and that treaties have been violated.  Because we work on land, water, food and conservation issues, our philanthropy has focused on supporting Indigenous-led solutions and championing, centering, and prioritizing Indigenous voices and issues. This continues today in MakeWay strategic programs in the North and Pacific, and in the Northern Manitoba Food, Culture, and Community Collaborative.

In a recent review of our grantmaking, we see a positive trend where more and more of our funding is being directed to Indigenous led initiatives and/or to Indigenous communities. For instance:

• The Pacific Program has disbursed $20 million dollars directly to Indigenous communities and/or Indigenous-led work since 2010.
• Over the last five years, the Pacific Program has increased funding to Indigenous communities by 10%, now accounting for 60% of grants made.
• However, in the past 10 years we have not had indicators to track how many grants went to Black or racialized communities but we estimate it at less than 1%.
• In our Northern program, over 90% of our funding goes to either Indigenous-led or Indigenous serving organizations ($10 million in total since 2013).
• Through the Northern Manitoba Food Culture Collaborative (NMFCCC) almost 100% of the grants go to Northern Indigenous communities, totalling $2,728,214.09 over seven years.

Shared Platform

MakeWay also advances programmatic impact at a community level through our Shared Platform.  At the beginning of 2021 we have 63 projects on our Shared Platform. Of those projects, 17 are Indigenous-led or Indigenous serving. Yet, projects that are led by or serve Black or People of Colour account for a small proportion of those projects.

In 2020 we onboarded two new Black-led projects on the platform: ENRICH Project and BE Initiative, that are working to tackle environmental racism. With these leaders, we launched an initiative to support networking, capacity-building, and public policy to end environmental racism across the country.

Overall, we have not done nearly enough to fund, center and amplify Black voices or other marginalized peoples. Our commitment moving forward is to continue building deep partnerships to further decolonization, uphold self-determination and support Indigenous-led work, as well as build new relationships with other communities of colour that we have not served well in the past.

Internal: staff, policies, leadership

While we haven’t collected data on the racial and other diversities of our employees, we understand the importance of a workplace that celebrates, welcomes, and is led by diverse people. With a growing number of Indigenous, Black, LGBTQ2 and racialized employees we do want to get to a position where the organization can attract, retain and better represent our society.

Our board of directors is growing in diversity with four of 11 directors Black or Indigenous, and with gender parity.

We have done staff training sessions on issues related to Indigenous rights, diversity and inclusion and racial justice, and established internal committees to prioritize initiatives and hold the organization to account on this work. This internal learning, culture shifts and capacity-building work will remain a priority.

Going forward

To make strides towards internal equity requires a number of improvements and adjustments to our current ways of working, including:

• more shared decision-making;
• People recruitment, retention, compensation and development;
• Procurement;
• Support/safety/advancement opportunities for racialized staff; and
• Capacity-building/training for all staff.
• Collecting the right data

In the coming FY2021 year, MakeWay leadership is committing to the following actions:

1. Continue to take more intensive steps to ensure BIPOC staff representation/hiring within the Senior Executive Team and staff, and document HR practices taken to recruit and retain/support BIPOC staff, including:
   • Updating and creating new hiring policy and practices to prioritize diversity, including drafting an official diversity policy
   • Including statement in the job postings to invite applicants to self-identify
   • Undertaking a confidential survey of current MakeWay employees and Project Directors to understand the ‘baseline’ demographics
   • Develop a reconciliation strategy for MakeWay which includes all staff training opportunities, guest speakers, the creation of an Indigenous Employees Network, recruitment, and retention of Indigenous employees/Project Directors, and draft a protocols document for staff when working with Elders
2. Fully implement fluid teaming approach as a method of shared decision-making and power-shifting
3. On-going work at the governance level to ensure we continue to attract and retain a diverse group of change makers.

For our external and programmatic work, in the coming year, MakeWay is committing to:

1. Increasing our financial support of Black and people of colour-led organizations and movements by building new funding partnerships.
2. Fully operationalizing the new Environmental Racism initiative
3. Conducting research and implementing new evaluation metrics to allow us to better understand what BIPOC communities benefit from MakeWay funding and the shared platform, and what populations are leading this work
4. Formalizing our commitments to Reconciliation across the organization and continuing to support Indigenous peoples’ rights and self-determination in all of our relationships.

We believe a better and more just world is possible. Critical to this is transforming the extractive and racist systems that disproportionately harm Indigenous, Black and people of colour everywhere. On our journey, there is the potential to become more effective at advancing environmental stewardship and community well-being as we build trust among diverse communities and model more community-led and transparent approaches to philanthropy. Diversity and inclusion cannot remain a buzzword, or an item on a checklist – it is the only way to respond to both our internal challenges and those faced by the communities we serve. We are committed to making this work happen together.