NYLP: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, the New York Press Club Award winning podcast highlighting startups, businesses, and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith and in this episode we talk all about social justice with Hannah Weitzer and Alli Finn, the Co-Founders of Seachange Collective. Seachange Collective helps all sorts of organizations achieve a social justice mission. Here’s Hannah Weitzer.
Hannah: We’d really like to see a shift in the way people are doing social justice, work away from sort of outdated concepts of charity, of I’m going to give to you because it makes me feel better and I’m going to give you what I think you need to a more justice based approach that’s asking people, how can I support you in your struggle?
NYLP: Seachange Collective offers workshops, social justice audits, as well as strategic planning and assessment services that are tailored to each organization’s needs. So let’s find out more and go to the interview. Stepping onto the launch pod, we have Alli Finn and Hannah Weitzer, the co-founders of Seachange Collective, which is not a consulting agency for non-profits. They’re doing something a little bit different. What exactly is Seachange Collective?
Hannah: Seachange Collective is a training and capacity-building group or collective that works with anyone who has a social justice focus to their mission or would like to have a social justice focus. So that’s often traditional non-profits and NGOs, but it also can be for-profit companies, government agencies, community organizing groups, anyone who’s looking to really promote more justice through their work.
NYLP: It seems like social justice is a growing field, particularly in New York. Is that something that’s meaningful to you or something that you’ve realized? Why social justice?
Alli: We both come from a long history of doing work grounded in social justice. So for me that’s gender justice work, um, racial and labor justice as well. Um, and we both have nonprofit backgrounds, but I also come from the community organizing space. And I think particularly in the last, the last few years we have seen social justice become even more of a, of a buzzword of something people are grabbing onto in good ways and in bad. And reflecting on our own experiences, we’ve seen a lot of people with great intentions to do social justice work, but not always the best impact, uh, to match those intentions. So one of the reasons we wanted to start Seachange was to help fill this gap and help move people’s work from the image or the buzzword to a reality that is grounded, reflective and intentional.
NYLP: Well, you bring up a wonderful point, social justice, very important people want to do it. How are the ways that people are not achieving their social justice goals?
Alli: I think one of the deeper examples that we see quite frequently is organizations, um, and groups not listening, uh, or representing the voices of the people most affected by oppression, by injustice. Um, unfortunately that is very common, specifically in New York City, in nonprofit spaces, in for-profit spaces, um, in groups that might say have a mission, uh, around gender justice, uh, around LGBTQ rights. But maybe the people making decisions are the people who aren’t feeling the worst of all of those intersections of oppression. Um, and there’s a lot of different ways to do social justice work, but one of the most important tenants in our opinion is to make sure that it’s grounded in the needs of the communities that you are working with and part of, instead of taking decisions from above.
NYLP: And so when people start social justice missions, obviously they want to reach the people that are most effected, but there’s some sort of disconnect. Which you’re kind of highlighting that people, um, who are starting these goals are not achieving, what causes that disconnect and how are you solving that?
Hannah: I think a lot of people come in with really good intentions and a lot of assumed knowledge. Um, an expectation of what other communities want. You know, sort of this golden rule, like do unto others as you would have done unto yourselves. But did you ask them if they want the same thing that you want? Maybe you want something totally different. Um, so I think it’s sort of skipping a lot of steps. It’s, oh, I have this idea. Kids in refugee camps need shoes. I’m going to collect shoes from all my friends and neighbors and ship them to a refugee camp. Did you reach out to anyone on the ground to any refugees in the camp? Any of the local organizations that are based there and working with people to ask if they need shoes? Maybe they actually have a local shoe distributor and your shipment of shoes, has now put that guy out of business. Um, so it’s not sort of thinking through all the steps and it’s skipping a really important step, as Alli said, of making sure that you’re grounded, your actions in the needs of the communities most effected by the issue you’re trying to solve. So I think the way that we help people do this is by giving them guidelines and some tools to make sure that you’re taking those considerations into account before you take an action that could have an unintended consequence.
NYLP: So it sounds like you’re trying to be the eyes and ears on the ground.
Hannah: We’re trying to get people to, to find the eyes and ears on the ground. We’re not going to do that groundwork for them. And we work with people across a wide range of sectors. It’s not any one place geographically or content wise. So we want to give people the tools so that they can do the work on their own.
Alli: You can think about us as a check, right? I know personally, coming from the nonprofit space organizing spaces, you’re often in crisis mode, especially when you’re doing rights based work in crisis mode.
NYLP: In crisis mode?
Alli: In crisis mode.
NYLP: Which means what?
Alli: Which means the crisis can look like a lot of things, right? Crisis can be budget crisis, we don’t have enough funding. Um, we’re all overworked. We could use three more staff members for our team, that’s only two people. Um, so we’re just scrambling all the time. And crisis can also look like, okay, we are supporting incarcerated folks and there’s a new detention or there’s a new court date or there is something really tangible that we need to work on right now. So there’s a lack of space and time for reflection. Uh, that’s actually essential to doing the work and we want to be, or we are for people a check, a space for that reflection.
NYLP: And so how do you convince nonprofits, government entities, corporations, that this is a service that they need if they are in crisis mode, if they’re either not thinking about it or maybe don’t have the resources for it?
Alli: I think people are thinking about it. People are thinking, people are thinking about it and they see the need desperately. And wearing my hat, that is not Seachange, that is working in a grassroots nonprofit space. I see that need every day. So it’s there and there are often funds or resources or, or funders who want to provide it. Uh, so for us it’s about really highlighting that need and kind of acknowledging it’s okay to take this space. You don’t have to be in crisis mode for a day with us. Right. Take a step back.
Hannah: I think a lot of people, more and more people in organizations see this work as important. They don’t always see it as urgent at the same level as some of the day-to-day challenges. And so they might see like, yeah, that’s something really important. We should, we should do that next quarter. Or that’s really important, let’s write it into the budget for the next fiscal year. Um, so it is a challenge getting people to take timely action around it. I think a lot of times it does happen through some sort of crisis of some scale within a company or an organization of some kind of incident. Could be a series of microaggressions, could be a specific thing that happened in the office or in a field site or a warehouse or wherever their work takes place that all of a sudden elevates it to a new level and they realize, wow, this is a problem. We need to address this if we want to retain a happy and healthy staff.
NYLP: And what exactly is one of those examples of a problem or microaggression where someone in a company or other entity realizes that we need to address something?
Hannah: Usually it’s a series of incidents. Um, some that might be witnessed or observed by other staff members and report it up to managers or HR. Um, it does usually take some time for sort of enough of those to snowball into leadership being like, okay, now’s the time that we’re going to take a break from our busy work day and we’re going to carve out space for a day or more of, of actually addressing this. And it’s also not a one time project. You know, you’re not going to solve these issues in a one day training, um, but it can be an important step or a training can be a piece of a longer process you do with an organization.
NYLP: What are, what are some of these examples of a microaggression or something where it kind of boils up where you want Seachange Collective to be on board?
Hannah: So I think a lot of examples we’ve heard about, um, and worked with recently do center around representation issues. Um, so whether that’s just general representation of our staff, like looking at maybe we have a really diverse racially gender and otherwise entry and mid level staff, but then the leadership is mostly white. Um, and sort of general feelings of frustration from staff members that they’re not feeling that they’re reflected in the leadership and then they’re also not being supported and promoted and given opportunities for growth and leadership. Another layer of that often comes if it’s a organization that’s working with a community that’s traditionally marginalized or oppressed, incarcerated people or people of color or low income people, um, that people from that community aren’t represented in the organization and the types of programs that they’re running in the community aren’t really meeting the needs or feel patronizing, um, or maybe are meeting a need that they had five years ago, but they haven’t done a full evaluation and haven’t talked to people to update. Um, so I think it’s often coming from a sense of frustration, usually from the people on the front lines of feeling like my work, my identity is not represented, my voice isn’t being listened to and the work we’re doing isn’t having the impact that we want it to have. And if it doesn’t change, I’m going to leave because I’m in this work because I care about the issue. And if it’s just frustrating, some people say it’s burnout, but it’s also, you know, we only have limited energy and capacity to put into the world every day. And if so, you don’t feel like you’re having the impact that you set out to have, you’re going to leave. And that’s a loss for an organization or a company too, hiring takes a lot of resources.
NYLP: So, we’ve identified the problem when Seachange needs to come in and how Seachange can help. What are some of the metrics that an entity or a nonprofit will use to say, you know what, this was a successful investment in social justice?
Alli: We offer a number of tools that organizations can use that make some of these abstract concepts a bit more practical. So really the simplest one, uh, that we offer is something we’ve called a social justice spectrum, right? And the goal is to help people see their work or see a particular example, not in a black and white, good, bad binary, um, but part of a process, right? How can we shift our work a little bit more from good intentions to effective impact? How can we shift decision-making from something that is top down non-representative to more grassroots decision-making or representative if you’re in a structure where grassroots doesn’t work for you. Uh, so our goal is not to, we can’t in one day move everyone from point A point B immediately, but to give people the framework to see and give people tangible tools to shift. Um, so one thing that we offer to build on that is a six stage process of something we called grounded program design. Uh, it’s a tool to help people from the conceptualization of a project, uh, to the implementation and evaluations from identifying the problem, mapping the stakeholders, understanding your own positionality, your own relationship to that, understanding participation within that project and looking at how we can, um, improve and enhance ways for all people affected, to participate, uh, to the implementation and to the evaluation and updating and continuation, um, in ways that are true to their social justice values.
NYLP: How long would that process take?
Alli: Um, so we tangibly, we run a day long workshop that introduces people to that. But the process, the reason why this is a little bit hard, there’s no one secret sauce, right? Um, you can’t do social justice, deep meaningful social justice work, in one day. I can’t say this is a three month process and after that you’re done. You’re over. Woo Hoo, congratulations. Bye Bye. See you never. Um, it takes reflection and it takes ongoing work. We acknowledge in our workshops, in our trainings that people are already at different stages of this process, right? We’re not just trying to hit people before they bring an idea to the ground, but we want to give people that moment to pause and to say, okay, I’m here now. What can I do to improve the rest of this cycle if they’re running on a program cycle and for next time, how can I start a little bit further up that, up that ladder, up that spectrum? So if you wanted to implement the process, it might take a few months to really dive into your work and reflection. Or you might start with us for a day long workshop and leave with some ideas that will impact you for the next year.
NYLP: And is this more important for nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations, governments or corporations? What really is the target?
Hannah: We really think it’s everyone. Um, I mean we do both come from mostly nonprofit and community organizing backgrounds. So that is mostly where our networks are. We have found, I mean we have worked with individuals and entities that come from large tech companies, from government agencies, from other non nonprofit spaces and have found that the same challenges exist and our tools are also really useful for them. I think also something that makes us a bit unique. There’s a lot of other really wonderful trainers and facilitators and organizations that are doing work similar to what we’re doing and we really do try to learn from them and see ourselves in conversation and in support of the same goals. Something we really do is deeply contextualize and customize our work. And so even our open grounded program design workshop that people come from all different organizations, we asked people to come with their own context with their own problem that they’re grappling with right now. And we, throughout the course of the day, we’ll give them tools to work on something concrete, but the next day they can go back to the office and have some goals of this is what I want to shift in the short term. And this is what I want to shift in the long term.
NYLP: And can you talk, this is, this is something that we talk a lot about on the New York launch pod, but why it’s important to be in New York. I have to imagine that a lot of entities are focused on social justice and what being in New York means to you and what you’re doing.
Hannah: New York is such a rich place to do this work because there are so many people. I mean, and this is probably true for so many of your guests on the Pod, it’s just, there’s so many rich ecosystems. Um, so just our ability to interact with so many different organizations and companies of all different sizes who are at different stages in this process, um, is really amazing for us in our work and also for our own learning. We’re constantly learning and new people and ideas are popping up and it, I think it’s something that we do want to eventually bring to other cities and maybe other countries. Um, but New York is just a great place to start because of the ecosystem that exists here.
Alli: Working in New York City, you are impacting other cities and other countries for better and for worse. Right? Being the center of so many things. There is a ripple effect and I think we also see a lot of organizations that maybe their headquarters are in New York, they’re doing national level work, so the decisions are centralized, their decisions are top down, um, from New York City. There’s benefits and disadvantages to that. Um, so we’re able to, uh, also work with a lot of people who are in a position of distance, sometimes from the work, um, and people who are very much on the ground. And I think that mix is really dynamic. Um, and the other personal thing for me is I’m extremely invested in New York City as, as a city, uh, and as a, as a space where I think especially in the last few years, um, there, there is potential for new ideas and, and new growth, uh, when times are a little bit dark.
NYLP: Well, it also seems to me like New York City, something that we don’t often talk about is really a center of social justice and really kind of leads the charge in terms of a lot of the items that you talked about.
Alli: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I think New York City has a deep history of organizing and social justice that is often glossed over. Um, I think also that small towns in Alabama and North Dakota and California have even more hidden histories. So I don’t want to put New York up on this, on this pedestal and say this doesn’t happen. Um, I think that you have people also coming from all over the world here and there’s a lot to learn, um, from each other. And I think that the history, particularly the history around racial justice organizing in this city, um, is super important. The history around indigenous rights in the city is super important. Um, and there’s a lot to learn from that.
NYLP: And what does success for Seachange Collective look like? How big can this get?
Hannah: Well, first maybe let’s talk a little bit about the idea of a collective. Um, we, we chose the name and the hypothetical structure intentionally. Um, right now it’s the two of us and one other partner. Um, but we envision it being a flexible structure that will allow us to grow and invite in other organizations or other individuals to be part of that. We still have to figure out the details of what that looks like. Perhaps we’d need some legal advice at some point.
NYLP: Very nice plug, thank you.
Hannah: Anytime. Um, but we do envision it being bigger than just the two of us. Um, so I think that’s one, one piece of it structurally. Um, and then in terms of impact, we’d really like to see a shift in the way people are doing social justice, work away from sort of outdated concepts of charity of I’m going to give to you because it makes me feel better. And I’m going to give you what I think you need to a more justice based approach that’s asking people, how can I support you in your struggle? You know what you need, let me, let me support you as you lead and I’ll be there to provide whatever I can based on the power and resources that I might control.
Alli: Um, we envisioned the collective not only as people who do work exactly like Hannah and I are doing our third partner Sophia, she is a fundraiser. She is a top notch fundraiser for folks specifically doing racial justice work and justice work around immigration and migrant rights and she’s excellent at what she does. Um, so we envisioned people with different skill sets, but the same mission, ideally expanding our collective.
Hannah: We also have a vision of implementing a social justice audit. There’s been a growing trend around gender audits, which is a really great thing. And that’s, you know, I think people are probably familiar with an audit audit, financial audit, making sure that the books are in order and everything’s looking good. A gender audit looks at all aspects of your business or your organization through a gender lens from representation and hiring and programs and communications and research. Any aspect. Um, so we want to build off that model and creating an even broader tool to allow organizations or companies to assess themselves or for us or others like us to help them assess are we really pursuing justice in every aspect of our business.
Alli: One thing that has been a challenge for us that I personally feel passionate also about addressing in the collective, uh, is looking at this labor as having deep value. So when you’re coming from a background of doing values driven work, justice based work, a lot of your labor ends up being unpaid, right? Historically, nonprofits, people are often, underpaid, uh, in community organizing spaces. A lot of that labor goes unpaid in your personal life. I think it was really hard for us at the beginning, um, to reframe that in our, in our brains, right? To say this labor has value and this labor is needed and we know that. But when you’re coming from the background of justice based work, you get so used to doing unpaid labor that it’s really hard to, to reframe that for yourself. So I would like to see, um, part of the collective also is bringing people in, um, to acknowledge that their labor has value, to acknowledge that this is something worth investing in. That it’s needed to invest in and something, um, that we hope is integrated more widely across nonprofit, for profit, education, and other spaces.
NYLP: Well, that is a wonderful note to wrap things up on. How do people find out more about you and Seachange collective?
Alli: You can go to our website, www.seachangecollective.org, find us on Linkedin, on Twitter, on Facebook, all the social medias. Uh, and please do reach out to us also at info@seachangecollective.org. We’re extremely collaborative. We want to develop projects with you. We want to talk things through. We don’t just want to bring you into an existing workshop. Uh, we’d like to think through how we can do this work together.
NYLP: Alli Finn, Hannah Weitzer, thank you for stepping onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us.
Hannah: Thank you for having us.
Alli: Thank you so much.
NYLP: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media @NYLaunchPod or visit NYLaunchPod.com for transcripts of every episode, including this one. And if you are a super fan, Alli and Hannah, are you super fans?
Hannah: Of course.
Alli: Obviously
NYLP: If you’re super fans like Hanna and Alli, please leave a review on iTunes and Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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