2023-689-E-Housing Dept-Inter-Faith Council -Outside Agency

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Outside Agencies/Human Services Cover Page Page 11 of 32 IFC’s "Approach" document operationalizes our mission, vision, and values which focus on equity and social justice. In 2017, we held the first meeting of IFC’s R.E.A.L. (Race.Equity.Action.Leadership.) Transformation Team with a pro-bono consultant. The R.E.A.L. Transformation team's responsibility was to focus on racial equity and make recommendations to Board and Staff on changes to policies, procedures, and practices to advance equity and anti-racism within and beyond IFC. One of their projects was to create and conduct a Racial Equity Organizational Assessment for IFC, which facilitated conversations about racial equity at all levels of each of our programs – members, residents, volunteers, staff, and board. The R.E.A.L. Transformation Team evolved over time to form two affinity groups – a group centered around white-bodied experience and a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) group - to start the difficult work of self-reflection and learning how to become a social justice organization. The two groups meet regularly and separately so that we can each do our own anti-racism work specific to our experiences. In addition to the affinity groups, in February some of us will begin the Finding Freedom Workshop which “aims to deepen our individual and collective understanding of how we as white women are complicit with white supremacy, how we can make changes to live more deeply and consistently into our racial justice commitments, and how we can move ourselves and other people in our networks to join the fight for racial, economic and gender justice right now” (https://www.wearefindingfreedom.org/workshops). We sponsor participation for staff, board members, volunteers, and members at racial equity trainings and other trainings and equity discussions are regularly part of staff, board, and volunteer meetings. We focus on racial equity values in our hiring and board recruitment process. We include our equity filter on each board meeting agenda, and have board members with experience doing anti-racism work in other realms. We recently increased our Community Engagement Manager to a Director position to elevate our efforts to onboard volunteers and build a social justice and anti-racism culture at IFC. We also increased our Activate! IFC Manager to a Director position and created Activate! IFC Manager positions in order to build capacity in our social justice work. Our Development and Communications department incorporates racial equity through social media posts, and we encourage all voices to be heard in our newsletters, including stories written by members. We embrace the principles of Community Centric Fundraising, such as “fundraising must be grounded in race, equity, and social justice” and “we foster a sense of belonging, not othering” (https://communitycentricfundraising.org/ccf-principles/). This past year we contracted with a culture change consultant to work with all stakeholder groups in creating our agency’s Theory of Action. 6. Please describe how you have involved the intended beneficiaries of the proposed project in the planning and design process (in 100 words or less). IFC’s community power value asserts that the people experiencing problems are best suited to lead us to solutions. We prioritize lived experience in hiring. IFC members are involved in day-to-day and higher-level agency decisions, such as co-creating programs DocuSign Envelope ID: ADB1956F-5741-4274-B652-5562A8CFE5E4