Equitable Systems Design and Leadership Development
AOE collaborates with employers and their staff to co-create an employee-centered, anti-oppressive workplace that develops leaders and achieves equity from the inside, out.
Innovative.
Sustainable.
Transformative.
Whether your opportunities or challenges are universal or unique, our services are customized to meet your needs, and our methods are sustainable. We provide:
Trainings on anti-oppression (including anti-racism); trauma, equity, and belonging; participatory leadership development; implicit bias; and more
Discovery
Organizational audits and assessments
Toolkits
Staff retreat planning and facilitation, and organizational wellness
VIP Days
Vision
AOE envisions an American workforce where employers prioritize and fulfill their unique and vital role in stabilizing the life of every employee they hire, that which is necessary to function optimally in a capitalist society. With anti-oppressive education and leadership development, employers and their employees practice a culture that values and commits itself to co-designing an environment where both internal and external equity becomes naturally-occurring.
Values
AOE is guided by the following values which inform our praxis to co-design anti-oppressive and equitable workplaces (including our own, of course!).
Transparency
Transparency is the primary building block for equitable systems design. Equity, a measure of equal outcomes for everyone, must be verifiable. There can be no equity where there is no transparency.
Urgency
We do not treat choice like process. We will not waste time co-designing a process where one does not need to exist. When an anti-oppressive, equitable outcome can be produced by simply making a different choice, we will not hesitate to make the right decision.
Transformative Justice
Anything is teachable, and anyone can lead. When you think about transformative justice, think about the pawn, positioned as a disposable vanguard, who becomes a queen because they made it to the other side of the chess board (this is called pawn promotion). Transformative justice creates leadership pipelines and increases decision-making access among those who have been rendered the least powerful.
Alignment
We facilitate clear and honest conversations with employers and their staff to establish an understanding and partnership rooted anti-oppressive education and engagement. This is necessary and conducive to implement changes, from the most urgent to the most gradual, that align with producing equitable outcomes internally and externally.
Leadership Development
With the smallest shifts expected among executive and senior leadership, the transformative potential of junior and entry-level staff are the focal point of our praxis. We believe entry and junior level staff are the most accurate and sustainable thermometer of the shifts necessary for and conducive to equitable systems design, by both depth and scale.
Change
We are prepared to change our mind. The worst reason to do something is because that's the way it’s always been done. A delay or reluctance to embrace or get ahead of change inhibits evaluating where systemic improvements could be identified, assessed, and redirected.
Theory of Change
In 2003, Professor Thomas A. Kochan of the Sloan School of Management at MIT estimated the value of the DEI industry at $8 billion. Notably since #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, DEI is experiencing rapid, unprecedented, and uncharted growth as it harnesses the exigence of those movements, and the sacrifices of its organizers. In solidarity with those impacted communities, and to ensure that this critical work is not performative, AOE offers to build coalition with clients whose employees demonstrate equitable outcomes. Employer by employer, we will formulate and advocate for anti-oppressive labor policies that replicate the equitable systems we co-designed in the workplace. Together, we will advocate locally, regionally, and federally, for equitable processes and outcomes to eliminate unemployment in America, starting with the racial, gendered, and skill-based disparities therein.
Rashida Latef, LMSW (she/her)
Founder and CEO
Design is everywhere; and unless we create it for ourselves, we are all living in the intention and impact of a someone else’s structure. If a system is designed to be oppressive, systems can be co-designed to be anti-oppressive, equitable, and sustainable. We can therefore achieve equitable outcomes if we co-create and democratize information, language, space, and importantly, resources.
Rashida Latef has over a decade of experience in building capacity and movement alongside people with lived experience on issues such as domestic/intimate partner violence, education, food insecurity, homelessness, immigration, and movement tech. Her work with individuals, couples, families, organizations, and communities has always raised the profile of the least powerful but directly impacted, to ensure their needs and interests were included, if not determinate, when advocating for change.
Some of her notable achievements include organizing food pantry customers to successfully expand universal free school lunch in NYC public schools; registering immigrant constituents to vote in a special election won by the first formerly undocumented immigrant to Congress, Adriano Espaillat (NY-13); co-designing a national cohort of people with lived experience of homelessness who achieved unprecedented results by developing direct relationships with their elected officials to lobby for funding, programs, and policies proven to end homelessness; co-designing an open source library to provide technical assistance to electoral campaigns engaging historically disenfranchised voters during the 2020 election season; and every time she successfully organized her co-workers to change an internal workplace issue.
Rashida is proficient in Spanish, a certified yoga instructor, movement technologist, and licensed psychotherapist who teaches continuing education classes about organizing, inequity, and oppressive structures, especially in the workplace. Rashida has been featured in Allure Magazine, and you can learn more about her clinical praxis on Psychology Today.