It has been four years since the MACDC Racial Equity Pledge was launched, and we feel that now is a good time to reflect on it and the impact it has had on our partner CDCs across the state. To do this, we met with a few representatives from our partner CDCs to ask them how adopting the pledge has affected their work.

Community Teamwork is a community development corporation, regional housing agency and community action agency based in Lowell, but they serve residents in 74 cities and towns throughout the Middlesex and Essex Counties. Their primary mission is to be a catalyst for change by mobilizing resources for low-income people, providing opportunities for them to achieve stability, self-sufficiency and have an active voice and participation in the decisions that affect their lives.

“Racial equity work has always been an important part of Community Teamwork’s mission and its work, even before we developed our pledge,” Saadia Ahmad, Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, explains. “I think there was a lot of alignment between the Racial Equity Pledge and what we were already doing at Community Teamwork.” Since this was the case, Community Teamwork was eager to sign the pledge. Saadia elaborates, “for us, it is important to be doing the work internally, but also to make a public proclamation. Signing on to the Racial Equity Pledge was something we wanted to sign to hold ourselves accountable, and also to be part of this larger community of other organizations that are also doing this work.”

One of Community Teamwork’s main goals with racial equity work is to make sure that their staff members are informed and educated, to ensure that the work they do is also equitable. They have increased the number of trainings, conversations, and other DEI activities for their staff.  which have covered everything from identity, including sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, religion, family status, and neurodivergence.

Voluntary staff conversations include “JEDI Talks,” (justice, equity, diversity and inclusion) and staff-led employee resource groups which facilitate conversations about components of identity and create learning opportunities and activities for the agency as a whole. In addition, Community Teamwork established their own racial equity pledge and hosted several community screenings and facilitated conversations of Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, by lawyer, Jeffery Robinson, a documentary film about the anti-black racism in this country, beginning from the country's origins.

Looking forward, Community Teamwork plans to continue their racial equity work to make sure that their 600 plus staff members feel safe and included in their place of work.  Saadia explains that, “people’s lived experiences, and their identities are very much part of who they are. At CTI, we want to create more spaces and opportunities where people can be present in who they are, and more importantly feel comfortable sharing themselves with colleagues to build more of those personal relationships and have more of those personal conversations.”