CLIENT
neighborhood design center
THE CHALLENGE
NDC staff are eager to clarify and identify the organization’s means to promote justice in the communities with which they work and within the organization.
background
The Neighborhood Design Center is a nonprofit working in Maryland to support community-driven improvements to indoor and outdoor spaces. A series of events, including internal conversations and strategic plans, the COVID19 crisis, and several racial justice uprisings, led the NDC to assess its relationship to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. In 2020, HGVenture was hired to lead NDC through the assessment process.
What a radical, honest document. Bravo.
—Board Member, Neighborhood Design Center
our approach
HGV started with a comprehensive listening process that included engaging staff, board members, and community partners to understand their perspectives and experiences related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ). HGV used data collected from this process to make recommendations on how the organization could move forward.
One recommendation was to formalize NDC’s organizational values to reflect the values they bring to their work. Doing so strengthens internal commitments and approaches to NDC’s work, and makes those commitments and approaches transparent to clients and the public.
the impact
From January to September 2022, HGV facilitated a volunteer group of NDC staff and board members in regular sessions to assess and reframe organizational values. The highly collaborative process reflected NDC’s approach to co-design work in communities and also responded to indications of a transactional internal culture, with several sessions of container building (purposeful creation of a group structure and norms that the group agreed would contribute to their feeling safe, generative, and effective). Leading up to the September 2022 finalization, HGV also facilitated a one-day board and staff retreat, held listening sessions, and convened additional ad-hoc groups to collect feedback.
The final values were enthusiastically accepted by the NDC team in September 2022. HGV also provided scaffolding to shift ownership of values activation to staff.
The HGV team continues to provide ongoing coaching for the leadership team and ad-hoc support to the staff (i.e., employee mediation, employee transition support).