What Happened at the What We’ve Learned Event?

In October, Mission Capital hosted a conversation and share-out about what we learned over the past year, as we have worked towards a more inclusive process of program design and feedback. By inclusive, we mean more inclusive both across our organization and with those we serve. We have been working to change ourselves and what we do. In that process, we intentionally and iteratively evolved how we work.  

This has looked like building more internal feedback loops and intentional structures to scrutinize our work collectively. It has looked like building cross-organizational teams to tackle initiatives. It looked like hosting more conversations with our clients and stakeholders to understand what they think we should be doing or how we should adapt ourselves with our work. It has also looked like asking for more feedback from customers before, during, and after engagements. This is sometimes formal and sometimes informal. It also means that we have been trying to gather data that helps us better understand the differences in experiences of those we serve. For instance, is there a difference in experience for folks who identify at BIPOC in our programming from folks who identify as White? What about different roles or service areas?  

In this event, we shared a bit about our history at Mission Capital over the past year, and how we have evolved. There were a lot of questions that emerged during the event, and we pivoted to focus on group discussions. We were asked about our equity journey and about some of our data collection strategies, especially around how we try to understand differences in experience and how we collect demographic data.  

The highlights of themes in what we learned through our work over the past year are:

• Increasing community input and engagement takes more time than we even thought we were setting aside for. 

• How we unintentionally diminished the momentum of our work by not bringing others along (read Multipliers by Liz Wiseman).  

• We are going to make big mistakes, but we must learn from them. 

• We need stamina and self-regulation. 

• We need to bring lots of visuals, lots of repeating, lots of relationships to the table. 

• We constantly were navigating a pull between accessibility versus moving fast. It was a tough situation, and we didn’t do as good of a job as we would like.  

• It is not always clear when learning breaks down and we need more time and pauses to identify those breaking points.  

• We needed to start small but also go big at the same time.  

• When we question rigor, we are digging into our own failures and must be ready for that and the consequences. How do you know what you don’t know? 

• We had to swallow our own medicine over and over and lean into the unlearning. It is exhausting.  

During the event, we also listened to participants’ feedback on our learning and the questions they had. We used ahaSlides “Brainstorm” slide feature to have participants submit thoughts, questions ideas—whatever may be “coming up” for them. They went into breakouts to discuss them further and to then vote on all the submissions to decide what Mission Capital might dig into more.

The top vote-getters were: 

• How do we have conversations with funders about multi-year funding to allow the year one program adaptations/iteration process to inform/tweak programs in a thoughtful way, and year two continued accountability and outcomes with a sustainability plan?  

• What has been the best way(s) to include community input into programs? Large-scale surveys? Small-scale focus groups?  

• Challenge of how best to influence broader parent/funder organization/collaborations which may need to more successfully address broader organizational equity concerns  

• More details on Participatory Design    

• Reflection re: involvement vs power - I love the question "inclusive, but of whom". I find that we often create questions and the general direction BEFORE we get input from the community/users, etc.  

• To achieve systemic change doesn't everyone need to be involved in the conversation? How do we ensure that everyone has a voice, understanding that the playing field needs to be leveled dramatically? 

 
We have committed to trying to identify ways for Mission Capital to lean into this feedback and look for opportunities to support the needs identified by and prioritized by attendees. We are hoping in the first half of 2022 especially to dig into the way we collect demographic information, especially about race and ethnicity. We have an internal team that has been iterating on how we collect this information so that we are adapting and evolving our practices to be more responsive to changes in how people identify themselves.

We want to bring that learning and brainstorming back to the folks we serve for additional feedback and refinement as we heard from folks during the event that they are wrestling with this too. We can all learn together and build systems that support our abilities to improve our services to be more equitable and understand differences in experience.

Be on the lookout for more details in 2022 about this initiative and peer learning/unlearning opportunity as we continue this process within ourselves, our organization, and our external relationships.