Equity Council
The Equity Council is committed to ensuring Prosper Portland’s internal practices embody anti-racist strategies to support organizational culture change, strengthen cultural competence, and increase diversity, inclusion and access. We prioritize structural transformation by way of all-staff training, policy development and review, strategic employee engagement efforts, and creating clear and equitable accountability measures.
Contact: Meleani Bates, Equity Council Project Manager
Equity Frames Guiding our Work
Antiracism is the identification and elimination of racism by changing oppressive systems, structures, policies, practices, and attitudes so that historic and future harm can be eliminated for people of color. Prosper Portland strives to become an Antiracist Organization.
Striving to become Anti-racism at Prosper means the following:
- To restructure all aspects of institutional life to ensure full participation of people of color, including their worldview and culture; and the full participation of white people as allies in eliminating racism;
- Diagnosing and addressing different types of racism within the organization in a manner that builds strength, community, and trust;
- Implementing structures, policies, and practices with inclusive decision-making and other forms of power-sharing throughout the institution;
- Commitment to the struggle to dismantle racism in the wider community;
- Building clear lines of accountability to racially oppressed communities.
The City of Portland defines equity as, “Equity is when everyone has access to the opportunity necessary to satisfy their essential needs, advance their well-being and achieve their full potential. We have a shared fate as individuals within a community, and communities within a society. All communities need the ability to shape their own present and future. Equity is both the means to healthy communities and an end that benefits us all.”
Equity and equality are not the same thing. Equality is treating everyone the same, while equity is ensuring everyone has what they need to be successful. While equality aims to promote fairness, it can only work if everyone starts from the same place and has the same needs and goals.
Advancing equity at Prosper Portland means the following:
- Because opportunities currently do not exist for everyone, equity is a restorative measure of redistributing benefits and burdens.
- Because as individuals we operate within systems that create inequities, equity requires both individual and systems level change.
- Because “business as usual” will not change by itself, equity requires transforming the culture that produces different outcomes of the organization.
