Mission

Empowering our communities to be change makers, one course at a time.

Learning for Equity (L4E) is the education arm of Rising Communities, focused on building the agency of our participants to affect change.

Our Approach

At L4E, we are dedicated to fostering liberatory and emancipatory learning experiences that promote equity and empower agency. Our curricula are designed to address systemic and institutional racism, tailored to meet the unique needs of communities and organizations. By embracing a strengths-based, community-driven approach, we affirm the inherent value of BIPOC communities and prioritize participatory design that equips learners to drive meaningful change.

Our commitment to creating safe, inclusive spaces is foundational. Through collaborative tools and strategies, we ensure participants feel secure, valued, and empowered. Our team delivers comprehensive modules that build core competencies for all participants, supporting their journey toward collective action and equitable futures.

Our diverse facilitation team aims to cultivate a collaborative and empowering atmosphere in our courses and programs, connecting learners with a supportive network that encourages collective action and sustained engagement toward a more equitable future.

Read more about our three-pronged approach.

Restorative

Dismantling Racism Means Dismantling White Supremacist Ideology

White supremacy is riddled with all the same issues that limit innovation, inclusivity, sustainability and most importantly growth. Building a restorative culture includes acknowledging harm, building positive relationships, taking collective responsibility and advancing repairing practices informed by those who have been and continue to be harmed by structurally racist systems, policies and institutions. White supremacy is a social construct that is deeply embedded into our society and generationally perpetuated through flawed systems, practices and mental models. JEDI efforts have been widely invested in for decades and have yielded little, if any, results against set metrics. White fragility has been identified as one of the key barriers to transformational change. JEDI strategies cannot achieve sustainable impact without a willingness to confront white supremacy ideology, regardless of how difficult it may be for people who identify as white, to acknowledge past and present harms connected to white supremacy. For this reason, our approach focuses on creating safe, healing spaces for whites as well as non-whites to share and grow in their JEDI practices together.

REPETITIVE

Repetition is a Tool for Integration

In keeping with evidence-based approaches to organizational development and change, we will partner with you to deploy a multi-year, multi-pronged, mixed methods approach to positioning ASU College of Health Solutions as a case study for how to meaningfully dismantle racism and operationalize equity in higher education. In addition to white fragility, another on-going barrier to impactful and sustainable JEDI transformations is the pernicious segregation of JEDI strategies. While having dedicated steering committees or task forces to ideate and drive JEDI plans is largely effective, these bodies eventually hit several walls that are guised in ‘lack of funding’ or the ‘centralization of resources and/or people.’ Our idea of repetition centers on patternmaking. Humans gravitate towards patterns and our minds enjoy the certainty of rituals, which makes dismantling inequitable patterns all the more difficult. Like addiction treatments or weight loss programs, we use the tactic of repetition to establish new patterns and practices to replace the unwanted ones. JEDI efforts should not be contingent on funding nor relegated to specific cultural events, departments or peoples. JEDI efforts should be a both/and proposition where these specific events, departments or peoples are accompanied by the repetitive presence of operationalized, integrated JEDI practices throughout the institution. Without repetitive, integrated strategies JEDI efforts become inherently inauthentic, and categorized as window-dressing. Our approach is disruptive, which is what JEDI work needs to be in order to create sustainable transformational change.

TRANSFORMATIVE

Sustainable JEDI practices change people, not just systems

Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) speaks to the liberating nature of education. The exercise of teaching others moves from transactional to transformative when everyone embraces their interconnectedness and the social responsibility of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. The successful transformation of an institution from its entrenchment in historically white supremacist systems, policies and practices is most evidenced by the social, emotional transformation of its people. We focus on the transformation of people as well as systems and policies. People, not things, will ultimately be responsible for sustaining JEDI policies and practices. Transformation requires agency and agency requires power. JEDI strategies that create sustainable transformation systematize the sharing of power at all levels of the institution.