written by Jenny Poon and Paulo Gregory
I was facilitating a workshop for one of the first AmeriCorps programs. We were a short distance from the restaurant at which we were having lunch, and had planned to “walk” down and back. One of the participants used an electric wheelchair. Not a problem, it was just several blocks away. We got within one block of the restaurant, turned the corner, and the curb didn’t have a curb cut, ramping the cement at crosswalks so that wheelchairs can navigate intersections. It prevented us from moving any further. The group went on, and it took the two of us a half hour to find a different route that would enable navigation in the chair to reach the restaurant. This was eye opening. I had never imagined the impact of such a seemingly small thing.
This was an experience faced regularly by millions of folks in wheelchairs before the advent of the curb cut. Interestingly, this advance has become a metaphor called The Curb Cut Effect in which adaptations designed for one specific, often statistically small, group that creates benefits for the broader community. "When the wall of exclusion came down, everybody benefited — not only people in wheelchairs. Parents pushing strollers headed straight for curb cuts. So did workers pushing heavy carts, business travelers wheeling luggage, even runners and skateboarders.” This offers a model for innovation, not only related to folks with disabilities, but for invention and adaptation in all areas of ecosystem design.
During the last ICU Community Call on Diversity Fatigue, Jenny Poon mentioned her efforts to diversify her ecosystem at CO+HOOTS, which was in its early days, 90+ percent White males. In more than 25 years of work with organizations and networks attempting to bridge similar diversity gaps, there have been few who have had the success in changing culture, community and belonging that Jenny and the CO+HOOTS team have demonstrated. Most who have attempted to change the DNA of networks expend lots of energy and time — putting the word out for folk-of-color and women — inviting “others” to the table. This is often how “inclusion” is thought of and described. If you are really about evolving “beloved community”, one needs to move past the paradigm that the dominant culture owns the table, and are simply trying to bring a little color to it. To create belonging, the table needs to belong to all who are engaged. To take that one step further, communities that have been marginalized have always been forced to innovate to survive. This adaptation creates a new and unique set of skills and inventions that are benefits to the community as a whole. It is not a zero-sum game. It is a plus-some process for innovation. This is the essence of the paradigm of Cohado, the game in which the whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts.
Jenny shares some of CO+HOOTS’ innovative actions that led to real results. Jenny, along with ecosystem builders Fay Horwitt and Michelle Benham from Forward Cities, all working towards creating communities of belonging, will also be sharing strategies in more depth during the Wednesday, March 11th ICU session at SCN’s San Antonio Summit.
In CO+HOOTS with Jenny Poon: How to radically shift your approach to inclusion
“Inclusion”, the hot topic, buzzword that circulates all the startup world. We have been working on this for a while and I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I can say we have made progress. Over the last decade we have gone from a coworking/incubator space that was 90% white male to one that is 50/50 female-male and 40% underrepresented and have made inclusion a priority across our city.
Here’s how we did it. 6 years ago I looked across our community of 150 some entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses and I saw brilliant, talented business owners striving and growing. Businesses owners who started out scared and unsure of how to venture into their own business, now confident and excitedly planning their next growth steps. Incredible success stories of people who have grown successful businesses through our education programming and community building work. One thing struck me when I sat there admiring all we’ve achieved in 4 years. 90% of our community was white, middle-class men. This just wasn’t representative of the world I knew existed beyond our four walls, nor was it fully optimizing the incredible talent we have in our ecosystem. I also knew this lack of diversity was crippling our city and state by not activating all our people to their full potential. As an activator of innovation economies, we couldn’t possibly claim we are the most innovative space in the nation if our business community didn’t include ALL our people.
As a woman, person of color, from an immigrant family who grew up in a low/middle class family, there is so much that isn’t discussed in the homogenous communities that we often see in business. Conversations about the incredible scents in Asian food that inspire my design work, or the clever approaches to business that my mother who escaped war taught me, and the beautiful Buddhist beliefs that are great guides for managing people. These vastly different experiences are great resources for sparking innovation.
In 2014, I decided to make a drastic shift. I decided to make a commitment to inclusion. I broke it down into a several stage approach.
Step 1. Set the intention.
I changed our mission. Actually, we came up with a mission (because let’s be honest, we really didn’t have one). We wrote it on the walls of our most visited part of our space - near our coffee machine. “Entrepreneurs, regardless of race, age, gender, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status, have a safe place to launch, fail and scale their dreams here. Our tagline went from a “collaborative space for the creative class” to an “Inclusive, purpose-driven workspace”. We put it on our cards, on our website, in our intros when we do events. We said it again and again until it was a natural part of explaining our work.
Step 2. Set measurement goals and do research
I know so many groups that don’t like tracking gender or ethnicity numbers because it triggers a fear of tokenism or quotas. But the reality is if you don’t measure then you have no baseline. So we literally counted how many women there were in our space.
It wasn’t good enough to just say we were going to try to create equity in our community. Defining it was important to see that our efforts were returning the right result. We first started on addressing the gender gap.
When we said “community” we defined that as the greater innovation ecosystem, not necessarily our space. This was an important distinction in our approach. You can’t be authentic in helping someone if your goal is self-serving, so we set goals not around sales, but around how many people we’ve helped. How many have we connected to resources or leveled up their business in some way. As a designer rooted in design thinking, we started with talking to the communities we aimed to support. What are the challenges? Why don’t they come to coworking spaces? Do they know we exist?
It helped that I am also a woman of color and could relate, deeply and personally. We discovered women enter new spaces differently than men. Women and communities of color said they feel safer when there is someone they know in the space and they typically prefer a direct invite. A lot of conversation was around “Safety”. Safety to be themselves and to be vulnerable. Safety to exist without judgement. Women like being in spaces that feel like home. There was a common fear of not being good enough. Many thought we were all established entrepreneurs who had everything figured out. But the reality was, as we all know, that we are all just figuring it out.
I joined women’s groups, not to recruit but to learn. From these learnings we tweaked our messaging and revised our space. I worked to build a women’s happy hour event with other women entrepreneurs to understand challenges and be a resource.
Step 3. Integrate with every touchpoint.
We took a deep look at the experience of a woman from the moment an individual found us online to when my team received her through our space. From the moment she reached out online to the calendar invite she received and the welcome email from our team or myself. When a woman entered our doors, they were immediately greeted and my team was expected to spend time to understand what challenges she faced. Our goal was to formulate a plan to support them and their business through connections, potentially our incubator program or resources that existed that were often inaccessible or invisible to them. I created a post tour form that required my staff to fill out what the challenges were for the women they just toured. It is now the norm for any tour we give.
I instilled in my staff the value of inclusion and the importance of spending this extra time to support underrepresented entrepreneurs. That also meant we spent 2x more time connecting with women entrepreneurs than their male counterparts. It wasn’t something we had planned for, but something that we knew was necessary in supporting women and in creating the gender equity we aimed to achieve. It took 2x longer to tour a woman because women actually don’t get asked how someone can help them in their business. The simple act of asking was new. I toured 5 coworking spaces in the last month in another state, and not 1 of them asked me what I did. These little things were small levers we were pulling to shape our community, set the expectation for community building and bring power to women and underrepresented entrepreneurs.
We had to be ok with spending this time, knowing that this may not turn into any financial growth for us.
Step 4. Celebrate each other
Digging deeper into touchpoints, we made a concerted effort to celebrate the diversity and inclusion we were building across communications. On our website and social media channels, we used our reach to feature the incredibly talented women and members from communities of color. We made sure to elevate their thought leadership by nominating them to awards or asking them to be on panels. We focused on how we can provide value, and if that turned into joining our coworking/incubator space, then great. If not, we just helped a female entrepreneur, and that was good enough too. After reaching 50/50 gender ratio, we went back and reevaluated this process for communities of color.
The learnings were different between women and communities of color. We went from gender equity to race/class equity. Slowly learning more about the barriers and working on how we present ourselves and support others. In communities of color, it is vital to build trust and build partnerships. You can’t do any of those things if you are not authentic in your approach. Communities of color can see right through that. One of the things we have really focused on this year is how to expand networks and provide support beyond physical boundaries. We are doing that by building a global network and online incubator that supports entrepreneurs regardless of location and can be delivered by any community partner.
My best piece of advice is to focus on HOW you can help. Realize we all come from a place of power and we are all just trying to figure it out. Every person that is more advantaged than another has the ability to build power for others which nurtures the entire ecosystem. When we create equity in our most marginalized communities, we elevate everyone.