Ahimsa Strategies and Satori are pleased to share our latest offering: Building an Equity Container, a workshop hosted by Equity In The Center. This workshop hones in on an aspect of equity work that often goes unaddressed – Relationships. It is also a major milestone for us in over three years of collaborative work focused on the question: How can multiracial organizations dismantle their internal white supremacy without falling apart themselves in the process?

In our first blog in this series, we introduced the idea of an equity container: A set of conditions that allows groups to move through racial justice work without falling apart or reproducing white supremacy culture. A strong equity container allows teams to work through conflict, disagreement and harm in ways that strengthen team alignment, which is critical to operationalizing equity at organizations. When a team’s container is fragile or fractured, the team is likely to create harm and lose its ability to have the honest, vulnerable conversations needed to dismantle white supremacy. What does it look like to actually nurture a strong container? We’re iterating on a simple framework for this: Build, Maintain, Repair. 

An organizational container is a set of conditions that allows a group to move through difficult work without falling apart. It fosters the trust and safety needed for groups to build relationships and maintain momentum for dismantling white supremacy. It enables groups to hold the tension, conflict, trauma, and intense feelings like anger, fear and shame that inevitably arise when groups confront their own internalized white supremacy. A healthy container indicates to group members that the group can actually hold them as whole people, with all their parts, powers and flaws.