Anti-Racism and Equity

Anti-Racism & Equity (ARE) at Good Shepherd Services

Our commitment to anti-racism and equity is central to everything we do. We’ve made progress, but we also recognize that this work is ongoing and requires consistent effort. We’re always learning, growing, and evolving as an organization.

Please help us win the Imagine Fan Favorite Award!

We’re a finalist in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) category. This campaign lets you vote daily for Good Shepherd Services. The Finalist that receives the most votes by midnight on Friday, September 20th will be honored during the NYC Imagine Awards in October.

Visit this link or click the vote button above and select “Good Shepherd Services” to vote. You can vote once a day. Thank you!

Milestones we’ve achieved over the years.

2017

• We made anti-racism and equity a strategic priority.
• We created the Leadership Equity Accountability and Diversity (LEAD) Council to begin our journey to becoming a multicultural anti-racist organization.

2018

• We began the process of hiring its first Chief Anti-Racism and Equity Officer. Hired in May 2019, they began helping the agency set strategic workplans and directions for the anti-racism and equity work.

2019

• We created our first land acknowledgement and partnered with the Lenape Center in 2020 to produce an agency wide one. We also introduced Indigenous American Heritage Month celebrations.
• We changed our mission statement to be guided by racial and social justice so that we could hold ourselves accountable to creating a more just GSS and society.

2020

• In collaboration with leaders from across the agency, we designed ARE-specific core competencies.
• We co-founded the New York Equitable Economies Coalition to diversify the sector’s vendors, contractors, and consultants, making our best effort to ensure that dollars flow to Back people and People of Color (BIPOC).
• We created a white anti-racism accountability group (WARAG). Now in its fourth year, with the support of Kathy Obear and Elise Jayakar, WARAG hosted an 8-session cohort focused on developing staff members’ awareness about whiteness and unlearning internalized racial superiority complexes. In a recent post evaluation survey of WARAG’s cohort, 100% of the respondents said that they developed more self-awareness regarding their whiteness.

2021

• We launched an ARE Institute that supported the learning of 22 nonprofits leaders from across the child welfare sector. In 2024, we are in our second iteration, and it is supporting the learning of 28 GSS leaders. Leaders are diving deep into 140+ hours of learning focused on becoming better anti-racist leaders.
• We launched a new agencywide equitable hiring practices process. That process transformed hiring so that we were sharing decision-making power beyond hiring managers, elevating our ARE competencies and striving to diversify our leadership structure.

2022

• We flipped our executive team leadership to be more representative of the populations we partner with and of NYC. We went from a 90% white executive team to a 63% BIPOC executive team.
• We hosted a series of Building Pro-Black Institutions conversations with the executive team to decide on an ARE-informed executive team workplan. We ran those conversations with the senior leadership starting in January 2024 and plan on finishing those conversations by September 2024 to inform a senior leadership building pro-Black institutions work plan.

2023

• We started the process of looking at salary lines and thinking about raising the salaries of frontline workers. This included using a more equitable process for COLA.
• Dr. Kathy Obear hosted a series of six conversations with our white executive team members on further developing their self-awareness and anti-racist lens.

2024

• We launched a BIPOC vendors database to support an economic and racial justice agenda for the sector.
• We produced four self-paced trainings and relevant implementation guides or toolkits on the following topics: Unpacking Whiteness, Microaggressions, Change Management for Anti-Racist Multicultural Organization and Understanding Disability.
• We turned the ARE-specific core competencies created in 2020 into a new competency tool that will be used for the performance management process.