Tag Archives: Talent

A Day in the Life: Q&A with Kat Black, Bellwether Talent Services Intern

Kat Black, Bellwether Intern

Bellwether was thrilled to have Kat Black join our Chicago office as a summer intern on the Talent Services team from June to August 2016. She came to us in between graduating from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and beginning a full-time role in human capital consulting at Deloitte Consulting in New York City.

We spoke to her about her career goals, highlights from her time with us, and what makes Bellwether unique.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did you get inspired to work with underserved kids?

My love for helping students started in undergrad at Amherst College, where I worked as an intern in the admissions office helping with diversity initiatives. Following graduation, I accepted a fellowship role as an admissions officer at Amherst. One visit to a particular school, the High School of Leadership and Public Service in New York City, had a great impact on me. I’ve never forgotten the kids there. It was a predominantly black and Hispanic school, and for those students to see someone who looked like them coming from a school like Amherst meant a lot. It also reinforced my awareness of the lack of resources so many students face. Since then I’ve done a substantial amount of college preparatory tutoring for students at different under-resourced high schools in NYC and Chicago, but want to do more in the future.

My dream is to open up my own organization that works directly with kids doing college prep work. Starting an organization requires resources and knowledge in terms of how to actually run things. I have the passion from my experience at Amherst, and now I’m working to put the skills behind it.

How did you hear about Bellwether?

I came to Bellwether through Education Pioneers. I was studying abroad in South America and said look, I’ll have four months off between graduation and my next full-time role, how can I keep growing? I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but from the moment I spoke to the Talent Services team, I have never looked back.

I don’t think I’ll ever work in another organization where one of the cofounders invites me out to brunch before my start. Coming into an organization and already feeling like I was part of it was a big deal. My first day didn’t feel like a first day because I’d already been welcomed so much in advance.

I went from wavering about how I wanted to spend my summer to meeting the people at Bellwether and saying this is literally a dream job. Continue reading →

Diversity: Necessary (But Insufficient)

By Xiomara Padamsee

Our country has a long history of social movements that fight inequity, injustice, and institutionalized oppression and which are led by marginalized or oppressed groups. But the educational equity “movement” is unique in that it has, from the beginning, been led largely by white, economically privileged leaders and funders, while the communities most impacted by educational injustice are largely brown, black, and poor.

The outcomes of this disconnect are approaches, practices, and structures that are not deeply and authentically informed by the communities being served. They often lack sociological and cultural context and relevance. This reinforces power dynamics between school leaders and families, educators and students, and organizational leaders and their key constituencies. And these dynamics perpetuate dominant white culture, practices, and beliefs and maintain the systemic oppression living comfortably and largely untouched at the root of educational inequity.

In recent years, the consciousness about this disconnect has risen in our field, and with that increased awareness has come a desire to change. School leaders have started to shift away from zero-tolerance discipline policies that fuel the school-to-prison pipeline and towards restorative justice approaches. Educators have started to examine pedagogy for cultural relevance. Organizational leaders have started to prioritize diversifying their organizations. Funders have started to see the dramatic lack of ways to track data and metrics related to diversifying school staff, organizational leaders, and volunteer bases and boards.

As more nonprofits, charter schools and networks, and district leaders have come to our Bellwether Talent Advising practice frustrated by lack of progress on their diversity, equity, and inclusion aspirations, we have articulated an approach called the Funnel of Impact. This approach helps organizational leaders to build and run educational equity organizations that are what we call “talent-ready,” organizations that live and act in deep alignment with beliefs around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Continue reading →

Talent 2.0 in Baton Rouge

By Jason Weeby

via www.pamelaspunch.com

I attended the second Education Ecosystem Summit hosted by New Schools for Baton Rouge (NSBR) last week and was treated to phenomenal Southern hospitality and a glimpse into a city that’s primed for some serious systemic reform. The event was top-rate and the showing from education leaders from across the country was as impressive. NSBR’s convening power is another indicator that we should expect a lot of innovation coming from smaller cities in the near future.

I moderated a panel on the challenges, opportunities, and innovations in the talent world which included Elizabeth Shaw, CEO of Education First, Rich Harrison, CAO of Uplift Education, and Krysta DeBoer, ED of the Center for Urban Teaching who each brought very different perspectives to the topic.

The overarching theme was how to move from where we are now to the next “version” of talent practices. We called it the transition from Talent 1.0 to Talent 2.0. We defined Talent 1.0 as an era of talent practices and organizations overwhelmingly focused on building pipelines and improving evaluation. What Talent 2.0 will look like was an open question and my panel raised some excellent insights on what’s to come.* Continue reading →

Let’s Talk About Race: An Uncomfortable Necessity for Education Leaders

By Jason Weeby

Dialogue by Pedro Paricio via Halcyon Gallery

When I’m in a professional setting and I see a conversation about race materializing, my heart beats faster and I become acutely tuned into the room’s social dynamics. My whiteness is top of mind. I interrogate my observations and comments before sharing them. I load my statements and questions with qualifiers the way you might pack a fragile vase to be shipped cross-country by freight.

And I shipped truckloads of freight on Tuesday night.

Education Pioneers (EP) hosted an alumni event called Black Lives Matter to the Education Community, where I joined about 20 education leaders representing EP’s diverse network to reflect independently and engage in small- and large-group “courageous conversations about race” prompted by the tragic deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

It’s my understanding that the event was first-come-first-served, so the demographics were largely a function of chance. Even so, the room was fairly racially diverse, although there were fewer black attendees than I would have expected considering the topic.

The Education Pioneers’ program team is full of expert facilitators so it wasn’t surprising to see a thoughtful agenda that began with introductions and brief check-ins on everyone’s feelings and expectations for the evening. “Eager,” “vulnerable,” “nervous,” and “open” were common sentiments.

But even with the best facilitation and when everyone’s part of a trusted and familiar professional network, there’s always a fair bit of hesitation to dive into a discussion about race with semi-strangers. Raising issues about race in a professional setting can be fraught with risks including personal discomfort, poorly received messages, and marginalization. As a result, public dialogue tends to be academic in nature and disassociated from lived experiences and feelings. In general, this was the tenor of the conversation on Tuesday too, but there were moments when people left their comfort zone to share their perspectives. In those moments, the room seemed quieter and participants were more reverent, sensing that something uncommon was happening.

“How incredible would it be,” I thought, “if these moments were the rule instead of the exception.”

I’ve recently vowed to be more proactive and vocal around issues of race and class in my work and am always looking for patterns, barriers, and opportunities to improve myself, my colleagues, Bellwether, and our clients. So here are my three big takeaways from the night:

Continue reading →