Centering Equity In Crisis: A Values Moment
When stuff hit the fan back in early March one of my first inclinations was to look for costs to cut. I may not have known how my income would be impacted but I for damn sure could eliminate anything non essential to soften the blow. It also felt like the responsible thing to do. It also gave me a sense of control.
Once I got through all of the easy cuts (suspended the gym and student loans), I still wasn’t satisfied. I needed a dramatic slash that would make a meaningful dent in my monthly expenses.
I combed the list until I came to CeCe’s name.
On paper, CeCe is our biggest line item besides rent.
In real life, she is one of three most important people in my toddler daughter’s daily life. During the week I have the breakfast and morning playtime shift and Alana handles dinner, bath and bed. Everything in between is all CeCe. From 9-5, she is Ella’s world and our third parent. She is an amazingly gentle, patient and kind woman who adores Ella and who Ella adores in return.
But that wasn’t on my mind in early March. I was thinking strictly about our family’s survival so I went to Alana with a plan to cut CeCe’s days, hours and possibly to lay her off.
My wife, bless her, just asked why we needed to do any of that.
I had been in such a reactive space that I didn’t really have a good answer.
Alana went on: “We can afford to keep her; we need her; and I’m sure she needs this job.”
The conversation ended as quickly as it started but a lot has come up for me since that moment of panic.
Looking back, we weren’t (and fortunately still aren’t) in imminent danger of financial disaster. And even though we may not be on track to buy a home as soon as we had hoped, a) our marriage is as strong as ever, b) our daughter still has her adoring caretaker c) our humanity has deepened.
“You’re talking about decisions regarding people’s livelihoods,” Jeremiah Program President and CEO Chastity Lord says in this week’s LCTC pod. “It’s not like a traditional furlough or a traditional lay off,” adds Chastity, whose organization focuses on disrupting generational poverty through housing and education for women and mothers. “You know anybody that you are furloughing or laying off—there ain’t no jobs. They are going to be unemployed.”
This is especially true of domestic employees like CeCe. If I’m honest, I knew good and well she wasn’t going to find another job in the middle of a pandemic. And as essential as people like her are, few states provide meaningful protections and benefits to domestic employees. For us, however committed to social justice for marginalized people we thought ourselves to be pre-pandemic, keeping CeCe employed has been a gut check. In the heat of the moment, we chose to be “both-and” instead of “either/or” people.
For Chastity, facing and grappling with the existential gravity of the situation has been humbling, silencing and centering. Inasmuch as she leans on past heroes and sheroes, this is unequivocally her defining moment.
“I said to my leadership team, I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do this. But one of the things I do know that this is a value based decision and we need to make decisions based on that because typically what happens here is our folks who are at the entry level actually are cannibalized and the most senior. And ...we're going to think about this differently.”
Chastity is not only thinking differently about the future of her people. She also revamped her leadership team to flatten the communication curve (“what would your leadership structure look like in this new paradigm?”), instituted an emergency fund for staff (“You email me directly.”) and leaned into hockey great Wayne Gretzky’s sage advice to “skate to where the puck is going” (“When you cut down geography, you start to be able to play with things like central office space, some of your largest overhead.”)