By Julie Jung, Operations and Finance Director

At Inclusive Action, we’re proud to have a diverse and inclusive team. For us, this means our board and staff reflect the diversity of the communities we serve and share cultural experiences with community members to ensure our services meet their needs. For example, our team is nearly 100% people of color, many team members come from disinvested communities, and a handful of team members are even entrepreneurs themselves!

At the same time, we recognize that diversity, equity and inclusion work is not just about checkboxes — this work requires a real investment of time and resources into our team members. We think about both their immediate-term needs — do they have the equipment, compensation and resources to do their jobs effectively? — and their long-term needs — are they able to grow into and with their interests as professionals while building sustainable livelihoods for themselves and their families?

As part of my work leading operations at Inclusive Action, I value how we value our team members. In nonprofits, we often focus on the mission, which of course is essential. At the same time, I always ask myself: how do we uplift the people who are looking to uplift others? There are real people behind the activities and programs that we explore at Inclusive Action, and we think holistically about their access to economic justice too.

Here are three principles we take into account to support our team members.

Most organizations hire for job experience. While this is one factor we take into consideration in hiring, we also look for lived experience, or experience in the communities we serve. We believe a traditional background of having a degree in the specific field of the job description is not a prerequisite for success.

For example, our business coaches may not have MBAs, but some have started a small business or worked as a street vendor themselves! We carefully evaluate the years of experience or requirements for each job to ensure that we’re not biasing our hiring practices toward traditional markers of skill, like education, without consideration for other key factors that indicate potential for impact. This is especially important when hiring people of color and immigrants, who might have had to face a number of barriers in building their careers.

From the hiring process to retention, we’re keen to set people up to succeed. We want to give people a podium to showcase their work while also supporting their growth. We want Inclusive Action to be a place where you can experiment, learn from your mistakes and grow in the process.

Part of how we do this is through our professional development fund, which we’ve designed to be as flexible as possible. While traditional funds might only focus on skills within a team member’s existing function, we recognize that people may want to explore new fields and areas of study. We want to ensure people don’t feel they have to hide their potential interests to ensure their job security.

I’m personally an example of this. I started at Inclusive Action doing communications and development and found I was really drawn to the logistics of events. I communicated that interest to my manager, and the leadership team helped me see how my skills could fit the organization’s needs at the time — specifically, in developing our operations function. Another example is a team member who joined the policy team and focused on research, but demonstrated a passion for innovation and community ownership, so he moved over to the community innovation team to further activate his passions.

Everyone from senior leadership to junior staff has the opportunity to use their professional development stipends, and we make sure that managers are intentional and aware about the use of these funds. We especially encourage team members to travel to a workshop or conference that they might be interested in, because we believe it’s important that our staff are meeting other people in our field and in their professional communities to stay inspired. Travel is particularly effective for exposure to new ideas and ways of working — we’ve seen that once a team member travels, they always come back energized with a whole new view on the possibilities to doing our work.

Three to four years ago, we began recognizing that the work we do to ensure economic justice for our constituency should be extended to our staff as well. There’s often an expectation in nonprofits that we need to accept lower pay in order to support the mission and the cause. But we asked: can non-profit workers create a career where they can line up passion with pay?

We don’t want to be compensating our team members at the lowest possible levels. Our coordinator levels, which are entry level positions, started at the minimum salary for California, and we have taken steps to raise their annual salary close to that of for-profits. To that end, we began benchmarking our salaries and benefits packages against both non-profits and for-profits in Los Angeles, recognizing the cost of living here. We want our team members to have the capacity to build wealth as they define it — which could mean a retirement fund, home ownership, or having a healthy work-life balance. And as many of our team members are first-generation immigrants, this might also look like having the resources to support family members and elders.

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Over a year ago, I was asked by our strategic planning consultants what I want the future of Inclusive Action to look like. I said that I wanted it to be on a list of “Best Places to Work.” I think we are on our way, and we won’t stop until we get there.

How We Invest in Our Team Members — and Build a Diverse Team