Building Belonging

B-side Belonging with Job Path: Customized Employment at the Heart of DEI

Join Angie Avila-Lanciotti today in her “B-side Belonging” episode of Building Belonging, a conversation with Dara Patel and Johnaddam Haridopolos from Job Path. Job Path is an organization that helps young adults and adults with developmental disabilities find work through the Department of Labor–recognized customized employment model. Dara dives into Job Path’s origins in the 1970s after the exposure of deplorable conditions at the Willowbrook Institution. She describes Job Path’s journey of expanding programs including supported living and community support.   Dara and Johnadam explain how the customized employment model operates and supports individuals, starting with the discovery process to identify a person’s skills, interests, and ideal work environments. They also share about how they educate employers and work closely to ensure great placements.  We also got the chance to meet Randy, a Job Path participant working at A Better Chance, telling us about his work and his growth at the company.  Learn more about Job Path here [https://www.jobpathnyc.org/].

B-Side Belonging with Leah Goodridge: Housing Reality Check in NYC

What if the housing crisis isn't a failure of the system, but proof that it's working exactly as designed? Leah Goodridge, housing attorney, NYC Planning Commissioner, and author of Professionalism as a Racial Construct [https://www.uclalawreview.org/professionalism-as-a-racial-construct/], came to this episode with the receipts to prove it. She has the expertise and clarity that only comes from spending over a decade in the trenches of housing law and policy. Tanya and Leah bring something valuable to the table: speaking not only from expertise but also from personal experiences. This is the episode that will change how you see the housing crisis in NYC.     This episode truly feels like a full circle moment given that Leah was our very first interviewee when we originally launched this podcast a couple of years ago. Check it out here [https://www.nycbar.org/podcasts/building-belonging-professionalism-as-a-racial-construct-podcast/].

DEI in the Time of Backlash: Why Wicked Hits Different Right Now

Everyone deserves a chance to fly! You know Wicked as a story of friendship, but do you know it as a story of Pipeline Warriors? Smashing inequitable barriers to entry, denouncing false meritocracy, allyship against systemic power hoarding – it’s all there! The deeply, deeply embedded DEI themes in Wicked make it one of our favorite cultural icons and one of our favorite movies to unpack together as a team. So today we bring you that conversation complete with our love for Wicked and all of our best takes about why this is THE movie for DEIB in our time.

Changing the World Starts with Your Theory of Change

How do you go about changing the world? For this episode we brought in one of ODEIB’s inspirations – and just one of our favorite people – Professor Susan Sturm, to share her work on what it really takes to achieve structural, systemic, transformative change.  Step 1: Know your Is, your Ought, and your What Might Be.  Step 2: Articulate your values and keep them in clear sight at all times.  Step 3: Grow your community of stakeholders by appealing to Linked Fate.  We dive deep into all of these steps and much more, including our own Theory of Change, in this episode.   Susan Sturm is the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility and the founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. In addition to her theoretical work, Susan leads collaborative action research projects with institutional and community leaders in education, criminal justice, and community development. She is the architect and creator of the Centering Change Skills Hub [https://centeringchange.org/], an online platform aimed at cultivating leadership and building the capacity to address race in law schools, court systems, and communities. And Susan is a great friend and partner to the City Bar’s Office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging.

Sh*t People Really Say to Us about DEIB

“You’re not helping Black people by helping them get jobs that they’re not qualified for.” “Community college students are too low-skill to benefit from pipeline programs.” “You’re doing ‘skin deep’ diversity and that’s not fair, just pick the best person for the job.” These are just a few examples of things people have actually said to our faces. Sometimes it’s so off-base, so clueless that we’re just lost for words. One skill that every DEIB practitioner builds is keeping composure in a micro-aggression moment like this, taking a deep breath, and taking a step back to reframe the issue by calling out biased assumptions and correcting the record. Sometimes these are moments of opportunity to claim the narrative and educate the people around us. Sometimes they are moments to center our own well-being and avoid draining our cup with someone who does not want to change. It’s all part of a larger DEIB skillset that we unpack in today’s episode, which is really about what to do – what we do, because it happens all the time – when people say wild sh*t to us about DEIB.