The BrandLab
Report date
August 2018
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Thanks to the support of the Bush Foundation, The BrandLab was able to hire our first Fearless Director, Suzanne Oh. This addition has built capacity for The BrandLab and allowed us to expand the our workshop offerings, add new volunteers, and reach new organizations. Suzanne comes to us with experience from College Possible and Pillsbury United Communities and has four years of experience in working with students in the Twin Cities. With the addition of our Fearless Director, we’ve increased our Fearless partners from 12 organizations in 2016 to 21 in 2017. This expansion of partners has demonstrated the financial viability of our earned income model, as we’ve brought in over $50,000 in earned income through this mission-aligned revenue stream in this past year.
We’ve been able to leverage funds from the Bush grant to secure this partnership of both funding and skills-based volunteer support. We are in year 2 of our partnership with Social Venture Partners to help develop and grow The BrandLab, including our Fearless work. This partnership has brought financial resources and increased volunteer support, which has helped us think through our financial sustainability and the purpose of Fearless. With their support, we have been more clearly able to articulate our vision for Fearless: we hope that one day Fearless does not exist because we have done the work to help agencies confidently pursue their own D&I journey. SVP has helped us see this means creating content beyond workshops. With their support, we have created a plan to retain a long-term relationship with our agency partners. We have created an assessment and scorecard to help agencies see where they are on their diversity, equity, and inclusion journey, and what areas they need to work on. In addition, the scorecard and assessment will be followed with bi-annual check ins and resources tailored based on where the agency exists on the scorecard.
Key lessons learned
Even after nine years of being embedded in the marketing and advertising industry and working side-by-side with partners, we learned more about how the industry perceives diversity, equity, and inclusion work. People want immediate results and easy fixes for a long-term historical issue, but we at The BrandLab know that long term change happens with long-term commitment. We are creating concrete tools for agencies to know where they are on their diversity and inclusion journey, and also working with agency partners to build a long-term plan for addressing their DEI commitment. The plans we’re building with partners are challenging, yet we hope to create tangible, achievable steps that feel like success and lead to long-term impact. This long-term strategy supports the change we want to see in the industry, and has the added benefit of contributing to a sustainable business model (see above).
One failure we had this year was around establishing affinity groups for people of color and white people in the industry. The POC group was to build community for those communities, while the white anti-racist collective was for white people to have space to ask questions, find answers, and decrease the emotional burden that people of color face day-to-day when educating their white coworkers. Overall, there was a lack of clarity around what the white affinity group was for, both for white people and people of color. We set up different meeting times and dates for these two groups, but it was confusing and people-- both participants and TBL staff leading these events-- were both too busy and not ready for this support system. TBL staff also struggled with our own role in this: are we teachers, guides, conversation partners? We are considering how to staff this support work while on our own DEI journey. Overall, we’re rethinking the purpose of these groups, and thinking about how to use TBL volunteer opportunities to bring people together to do some of this work.
Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving
Resourceful and inclusive have been very important to making progress.
Resourceful: There are already many folks focused on DEI in the community. We need to share their expertise instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Our work is stronger by building connections to existing collaborations instead of duplicating efforts and developing something solely for ourselves. Our partner agencies also encourage us to be resourceful; agencies and industry volunteers donate their time and financial resources to host interns and participate in Fearless work.
Inclusive: We continue to rely heavily on our volunteer Fearless Leadership Team (FLT) and agency partners’ input. Our FLT is comprised of People of Color in the industry who bring their marginalized experiences are leading and shaping the workshops. Since they’re actually in the industry, they bring real-world examples and experiences to the workshops, grounding it in reality and creating a sense of urgency for the partners hosting the workshop. We’re also working with HR in agencies to build HR-specific workshops around best practices, challenges, and improvements.
Resourceful: There are already many folks focused on DEI in the community. We need to share their expertise instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Our work is stronger by building connections to existing collaborations instead of duplicating efforts and developing something solely for ourselves. Our partner agencies also encourage us to be resourceful; agencies and industry volunteers donate their time and financial resources to host interns and participate in Fearless work.
Inclusive: We continue to rely heavily on our volunteer Fearless Leadership Team (FLT) and agency partners’ input. Our FLT is comprised of People of Color in the industry who bring their marginalized experiences are leading and shaping the workshops. Since they’re actually in the industry, they bring real-world examples and experiences to the workshops, grounding it in reality and creating a sense of urgency for the partners hosting the workshop. We’re also working with HR in agencies to build HR-specific workshops around best practices, challenges, and improvements.
Other key elements of Community Innovation
The current political climate has created a sense of urgency and people and agencies feel pushed to do something now based on their employee feedback. Additionally, people in this industry are considering the intersection of gender and the marketing industry with the emergence of #MeToo. People define diversity in different ways and that this industry is struggling to grapple with intersectionality as the definition of diversity and inclusion becomes more complex. Industry partners want to know what more they can do to be supportive to people who have experienced sexual violence and harassment in the industry, both from a personal supportive level and to ensure the organization has adequate training and coverage in case of an incident.
Understanding the problem
We’re understanding our work is not just about race and socioeconomic status, but more intersectional. People in the industry see DEI work beyond just race, most specifically gender. We see the intersectionality of this work, and need to bring people along with us. We are exploring how to do this when TBL focuses very specifically on race and socioeconomic status. Gender is most prevalent, however, we’re also considering issues of gender assignment, disability, and mental health. We’re exploring how to acknowledge these important identities while focusing on our mission of race and socioeconomic status.
We’re also seeing the need to collaborate between TBL programs. Fearless conversations are being had by between our students on their own in our internship program, and students are figuring out how to support each other. In collaboration with our Connect alumni program, we also see that we need need to bridge this emerging workforce-- especially our TBL alumni-- with the leadership making hiring decisions, and creating a culture our students can thrive in once they enter the workplace.
We’re also seeing the need to collaborate between TBL programs. Fearless conversations are being had by between our students on their own in our internship program, and students are figuring out how to support each other. In collaboration with our Connect alumni program, we also see that we need need to bridge this emerging workforce-- especially our TBL alumni-- with the leadership making hiring decisions, and creating a culture our students can thrive in once they enter the workplace.
If you could do it all over again...
With the onboarding of our new Fearless Director, we would reach out to more people through that process. We’d do more one-on-ones and connect with more people in the DEI industry and marketing industry. There is a lot of wisdom that currently exists, and we want to tap into what already exists. Additionally, we would find a mentor/therapist while doing DEI work. This is an important self-care aspect, and the need to feel a connection with someone to talk to is essential. We also would encourage Bush to consider building in funds for therapy in the budget for DEI work, especially being done by people of color. This is a valuable aspect of self-care and professional development and naming it as such will create validity for others doing this work. We would also more deeply engage key volunteer leaders in the nuts and bolts of this grant, through the work of the Fearless Leadership Team.