Anima Café Podcast

Anima Leadership co-founders Annahid Dashtgard and Shakil Choudhury host an interactive conversation about this tricky moment in equity, diversity and inclusion work. Topics include where we are in challenging times, how we can navigate these changes together as a community, and how Anima Leadership can offer some extra support.

Do you struggle with leaders who think they are EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) experts after a single anti-bias training session? Or leaders who may “talk the talk” regarding privilege, but are oblivious to their own biased behaviours? If these are your leaders, it’s time for your organization to reframe equity, diversity and inclusion as a literacy project. 

Research tells us that adults need about 360 hours to develop basic proficiency when learning an additional language. This time, practice and intention helps us build the pattern recognition skills that are key to literacy: how to decode letters from squiggly lines, combine letters into words, find meaning in sentences and more. 

Like the pattern recognition we use to acquire a new language, we also need to develop this recognition to identify patterns of systemic discrimination. Being able to identify these specific and concrete patterns in the workplace—whether based on race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or disability—is the first step in being able to interrupt them. Understanding EDI literacy as a 360-hour project can help to challenge some of our misguided beliefs about the training and commitment required for EDI work. This 360-hour guideline offers a clear, measurable reframing of what it takes to truly lead organizations as an EDI Champion.

Listen to this podcast to learn more about this essential reframing of equity, diversity and inclusion work and how to apply it to your own leadership development.

Leaders often, and unknowingly, jeopardize their organization’s EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) efforts, wasting time and effort as well as the most critical resource: employee morale. This results in negative impacts on both racial marginalized and white people.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In this webinar we’ll explore four common traps that trip up leaders in their EDI work and how to overcome them. Here’s a hint: data is key. Measurement efforts like EDI assessments can help your organization identify what’s going well and where you’re falling short, especially in relationship to barriers faced by minoritized groups.

Date: Wednesday, May 25th, 2022

Host: Annahid Dashtgard

Guest: Deepa Purushothaman

Join Annahid Dashtgard in conversation with Deepa Purushothaman, about her new book “The First, the Few, the Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America“.

Since #metoo we’ve seen a societal tipping point moment in realizing the gap between gender forward policies and what happens in reality. That gap is even wider for women of colour. According to Deepa Purushonotham’s new book “The First, the Few, the Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America “ one in three women of colour in corporate America want to quit. And yet, BIPOC women represent among the most highly trained and talented workplace demographic to attract and retain. 

In conversation with Anima CEO Annahid Dashtgard, Deepa shares what propelled her research and why major media are paying attention. What will it take to move past the tired debate about meritocracy? What will it take for us to break the invisible barriers holding us back? What does a future look like where everyone, regardless of identity, has the opportunity not just to survive, but thrive.

It’s common for anti-racist practitioners to turn to the language of “white fragility” to describe those moments where white folks “freeze” out of fear of doing the wrong thing. And the resulting dynamic for people who identify as BIPOC often includes anger and frustration. In both cases, it’s easy for disempowerment to set in. And when that happens oppression wins.

So what does it look like to push against the edges of whiteness, to be centered, authentic and remain in relationship as we seek to achieve racial justice in the workplace and beyond?

Co-founder of Anima Leadership, Shakil Choudhury and Director of Training Emma Lind will host a conversation with the Anima community where we explore strategies for breaking out of the existing scripts whiteness has trained us all to adopt. Together, we will explore leadership practices of being in more authentic relationship in the equity struggle whether in the workplace, in our personal or community lives.

In a time of extreme political polarization, call-outs and cancel culture, how do leaders support constructive dialogue and de-escalate conflict in society and organizations? How do we make meaningful change leveraging our diverse identities while working with opposing beliefs and experiences? Join Shakil Choudhury and Adam Kahane in an intimate fireside chat as these two amazing leaders, facilitators and authors discuss their new books and approaches to constructive dialogue both inside organizations and in broader society.

We’re witnessing unprecedented openness and vulnerability from leaders over the last year in addressing anti-Black racism and overall equity in their organizations. Despite this, the struggle persists to create long-lasting systems change. Leaders are still misfiring on who they hire, advance, and retain because of limitations in JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) knowledge and skills. Black, Indigenous, and people of colour are still disproportionately approached to “fix” diversity problems in organizations. Those who call attention to systemic instances of racism and discrimination get unfairly stereotyped as “troublemakers” or “difficult” colleagues. Burnout, increased levels of stress, retaliation, and constructive dismissal are the stories that equity advocates tell when they recount the toll of pushing for organizational transformation. And occasionally, in progressive organizations, JEDI goals can sometimes be hijacked by a small subset of activists who themselves may be deregulated or wounded.

In this Anima Café, our co-founder Shakil Choudhury will present a new tool to identify the stages of JEDI transformation that leaders and organizations are at: The Anima Transformative JEDI Model. Exploring 3 different stages on the JEDI journey, this instrument helps identify strengths, weaknesses, and pathways to change. This is the last of three sessions on effective strategies to teach justice and equity issues without shame and blame.

Humans are born with basic pattern recognition skills which allow us to make meaning and navigate the world around us whether learning to speak, read and write, or identifying songs we like to navigating our phone controls by touch and feel. Pattern detection is essential to our very survival as a species. As social justice activists and educators, we have developed a keen awareness to repeated cycles of racial inequity, whether it is the school-to-prison pipeline in education, over-policing in criminal justice or undertreatment in health care. And we are bewildered and often enraged when others do not, or cannot, recognize these systemic patterns that appear so obvious.

But what is obvious to some can be learned by all.

This session will introduce the concept of “racial pattern recognition” as a frame to help learners detect systemic issues related to racism and oppression. We will also explore why the “prejudice habit” is hard to break and why the principle of “slow-is-fast” from trauma therapy is critical to individual as well as policy change. Join us as we continue to discuss effective strategies to teach justice and equity issues without shame and blame.

On the eve of the most important US election in generations, democracy in that—and other western contexts— is in crisis. We need to stop being hypnotized by Donald Trump’s theatrics and incivility to see the broader patterns of behaviour: that of a classic authoritarian leader.

In response, leaders from civil society, workplaces and beyond need to get comfortable using the “f” word: fascism. Although still incomprehensible to most mainstream North Americans, using an evidence-based approach to demonstrate  the frame of authoritarianism and fascism better helps explain the current political moment of Trump and his allies, putting their words, actions and the related violence into context…with implications for racial minorities globally.

In this episode, hosted by Shakil Choudhury, we call to action the need to build community and capacity in our personal, community and professional lives as a response to the current stormy political era we are in.