U.S. development organizations are being asked to sign a new pledge which commits them to taking practical steps “to build racial and ethnic equity” within their organizations.
The pledge has been developed and published by CREED, the Coalition for Racial and Ethnic Equity in Development — a membership group of aid organizations launched last April. The group currently includes around 30 organizations, including both for-profit and nonprofit bodies, which have made a commitment to racial equity within their own work.
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The pledge, which is open for signatures as of today, is a commitment to a list of actions to strengthen policies, systems, and behaviors which will promote racial and ethnic equity. That includes core standards that signatories must commit to meet in five areas — policy and systems; people, leadership, and organizational structure; organizational culture; accountability; and communications and transparency — via a number of actions such as commitments to review recruitment processes and annual published audits of racial and ethnic equity policies.
Indira Ahluwalia, president of Kaur Strategies and founder and chair of CREED, said the pledge is intended to take organizations beyond good intentions into trackable commitments, as even organizations that make commitments on racial equity may not make it a priority, or not follow through on those intentions.
To address this, she said, the pledge is designed in a way which makes it possible to track whether organizations were doing what they said, which they can then be held to by staff, supporters, and one another.
“We wanted a pledge which is both attainable and measurable,” she said.
Ahluwalia said that while CREED has set expectations on what needs to be delivered, it will not tell organizations exactly how to deliver, because each organization is different — though resources on best practices would be shared via a learning hub that accompanies the pledge.
“[Development organizations] have done a lot of work on gender equity,” she said, “But there are other gaps in equity that we’ve not focused on. As we build locally led development, equity has to be front and center of how we think.”
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The lack of focus on racial equity played out in statistics on development, she said. According to a 2021 survey, just 4% of CEOs in the development sector were female BIPOC — black, Indigenous, and people of color — even though half of chief executives were female.
Paul Weisenfeld, executive vice president for international development at RTI international, and a member of the core team at CREED, said that the development sector had made racial equity a priority overseas — but not within the United States.
“All of us working in development know it’s critically important to pay attention to marginalized populations,” he said. “We’ve got more sophisticated at dealing with those issues overseas. But we haven’t focused on it in the U.S. It’s always more comfortable to talk about other people’s problems than your own. But if we don’t deal with this issue at home, we can’t present the right face to the world.”
He said that elsewhere in the world, the development community “doesn’t just hope” that all communities are involved in its services. Rather, he said, it gathers extensive data and uses a suite of tools to ensure inclusion.
“Now it’s about using those tools which have worked so well overseas in our own communities,” he said.
Deidre White, CEO of PYXERA Global — also a signatory to the pledge — said that it was important not just to change processes, but to be forced to revisit those processes regularly to ensure that the change had stuck.
“Our boards have been based on who we know,” she said. “That lends itself to a lack of diversity on a lot of different levels. We have to look at recruitment of staff and board members in a very different way.” She noted that while her organization and others had had success recruiting in a more deliberately inclusive way, it is “much easier to do things the way you have always done them” without consistent reminders.
Maria Martinkov, managing partner at Palladium, stressed the importance of a community coming together to address the issue together, even if the organizations involved in CREED are sometimes competitors: “It’s really important we’re all singing from the same sheet of music.”
About the author
David Ainsworth@daveainsworth4
David Ainsworth is business editor at Devex, where he writes about finance and funding issues for development institutions. He was previously a senior writer and editor for magazines specializing in nonprofits in the U.K. and worked as a policy and communications specialist in the nonprofit sector for a number of years. His team specializes in understanding reports and data and what it teaches us about how development functions.
