When we are talking about equity, it can be fun, it can be with love and “it has to be [done with all of these things], otherwise, it’s not.” — Sara Gray

I love to talk about words that encompass big cultural pursuits. Words like compassion, leadership, investment. These are words that deserve deep consideration, conversation, and activation to fully understand the pursuits they stand in for. We also need to consider their context in the past, present and future, because when you “freeze frame”, as I like to say, on any one moment, chances are high that you’ll miss their full texture and meaning.   

Recently I created an entire campaign around another “big” word, equity. I wanted to spend time exploring the word equity and how its meaning encompasses the pursuit of equity. What does equity look like, and what does it sound like? How do we do equity? Can partial equity be achieved, and can equity exist in the presence of inequitable activities? The list of questions goes on and on, and this campaign was an opportunity to dive into these questions and to build my own practice of equity.

To further my practice, in early January I spoke with Sara Gray, Senior Director of Communications and Marketing at the National Equity Project, on Instagram Live. For the past 17 years Sara has worked at a national nonprofit whose mission is to support systemic change to increase the capacity of people to achieve thriving, self-determining, educated, and just communities. It felt like a great practice point to dig into the term equity - as a verb, a noun, a practice, a state of being - with Sara.

It’s an understatement to say Sara dropped an immense amount of knowledge for us all during the conversation. I was so touched by the conversation because of the deep thinking and care present that is so clearly habitual to Sara. I was moved to seek out the resources Sara mentioned as part of my own continuous learning, and I went back through the conversation to list the resources for all of us. I’ll share these in my next blog post, and I hope these spark inspiration and action for you as it did for me.

Before you read the next post with our resources, I have FOUR asks of you:

1. Share with me what struck you about my conversation with Sara. You can find the recording here on my personal IG!

2. Consider becoming a recurring monthly donor to Food Recovery Network. The conversation with Sara is part of a series of conversations I’m hosting about equity to underscore my pursuit to activate enough monthly donors for FRN to reach $1,000 per month in recurring donations. This would be used to help underwrite a portion of FRN’s employer paid health insurance costs. You can learn more about my Birthday Equity Walk by reading my linkedin article.

3. Become familiar with the National Equity Project. I am hopeful to have a second conversation with Sara on FRN’s platform later this year.

4. At the start of this post I wondered, how do we talk about words that represent big cultural pursuits? How do you talk about these words? How do you make these words into actionable pursuits? I think about this work of activation as a practice, and one way to talk about these big cultural words is, with and in love, to just start.

I would like to end with the definition of love that I read in bell hooks’ 2001 book All About Love, taken from M. Scott Peck: love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is an act of will—namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

With love,

Regina