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.

Franklin County CDC is based in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and has been serving the central and western regions of the state since 1979. Their main objectives include providing business development education, access to capital, and commercial office and manufacturing space.

Executive Director John Waite recalls that FCCDC signed onto our pledge “a little over a year ago. We were not one of the first ones, although, I’ve talked to a lot of the CDCs. I go to a lot of the meetings. I think we’ve been working on racial equity, trying to integrate it into our programs, maybe longer than some other CDCs.” FCCDC eventually adopted the pledge to show their solidarity with the other signers.

According to Traci Talbert, FCCDC’s Racial Justice and Community Engagement Leader, their main goal for racial equity work is

to examine everything that we do and ask ourselves, “how are we embedding [racial justice] into our programs and making it a part of everything we do daily?” instead of [having] racial justice as a separate program that we offer as a CDC. We began to examine language. We've examined documents, job postings, [and] looked at what the disruption of white dominant culture actually means. We've been we have our racial justice meetings monthly, and we come together. We read together. We… even feel pain together.

One of the programs being offered by FCCDC is the Racial Justice Reflective Journey. Traci describes it as a series of questions for participants to respond to, then to reflect on their responses. She elaborates by stating that the Journey is

a space for you to just be with yourself and respond to these sessions and… questions in a way that is honest for you, so in the moment, you're able to reflect and say, “Man, I didn't realize that was who I was when I showed up at work,” or “I didn't realize that that's how I behaved,” or “I never thought there was another response to this.”

As of August 2024, around 200 people have participated in in the Journey, and feedback from participants has been good, although some white participants have expressed feelings of discomfort during their self-reflection.

Another program that FCCDC offers is a virtual monthly workshop called Linguistic Bias: What’s the Harm? These sessions focus on identifying and discussing commonly used words and phrases that perpetuate social inequity. However, FCCDC have not limited their focus on minimizing linguistic bias to their monthly workshops. Traci mentioned that FCCDC has also purchased “a software called Textio... We got it one year, and it just was this buzz of helping individuals upload their written documents into the software to help them create a more neutrally toned document.”

John and Traci also said that FCCDC has made a significant adjustment to their hiring practices. Instead of seeking out applicants who would be a good fit to their culture, they are actively looking to add complementary members from all cultural backgrounds. Traci elaborates, “we don't do a ‘perfect fit.’ We're looking to add to our culture, and not looking for culturally fit people.”

Looking ahead, Traci plans to develop a complementary session to FCCDC’s monthly linguistic bias workshop that focuses on “when we judge people based on how they say things. That's something I'm going to be developing because I remember… somebody said they were in a job [interview]… and because of the way they said, “Ask,” they ended up being disqualified from the pool of applicants. FCCDC aspires to continue integrating racial equity into their everyday work and focusing on people who haven't had opportunity to develop wealth as well as those who have been harmed in the past to ensure that they are equitably serving their target communities in Greenfield and western Massachusetts.