Applied Allyship and Empowerment

Many in the planning profession come from privileged identities. This often means many are seeking to understand diversity, equity and inclusion, but struggling to connect words to actions. This roleplay session seeks to help people transition from spectators to allies that support empowerment. 

<we will be seeking to add to the panel based on interviewing some people to create roleplay scenarios>

Folks often don't know what allyship means, at least when it comes to those folks that come from privileged identities. Yet many self-identify as allies to underrepresented and marginalized populations in the communities we serve and in the workplace, even though evidence suggests that those underrepresented and marginalized populations may disagree on the effectiveness of those allyship attempts. A Harvard Business Review article, for example, indicated that the rate men identified themselves as active allies or public advocates for gender equity was double the rate in which women indicated men in their workplace were active allies or public advocates. 

This session is envisioned as a highly interactive, skit-based approach that instead of focusing on obvious extremes, focuses on daily experiences in hopes of focusing attention towards daily actions to be effective allies (normalizing allyship and expecting nothing in return) rather than performative allyship.

The skit-based interactive approach is designed to introduce not a "how to handle this scenario," but instead on critical thinking approaches that build a sustainable way to detect, think and act consistently as an ally in a meaningful, impactful way. It will intentionally not feature any "here's how I would have handled this" in order to avoid "resume allyship flexing/defensiveness," instead seeking to empower those groups that have often experienced discrimination and bigotry to identify what they would expect from an effective ally. Given the one hour limit, this will focus on workplace more than community action and discuss how allyship can be approached from any level of authority within an organization.