Outside Angle’s 2023 Impact and Equity Update

The Bottom of the Change Curve

The world has changed a lot since we started Outside Angle in 2020. Just as we launched, the horrifying murder of George Floyd once again made clear the kind of brutality that Black Americans face all over the country every day. What followed was an unprecedented outpouring of acknowledgement and grief that promised a sea change in business and society.

But coming up on four years later, not much progress has been made. Pew Research Center has found that only “40% of Americans say the increased focus on race and racial inequality since 2020 has led to changes that are improving the lives of Black people.” Many leaders are dialing back investments in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Well-intentioned people seem to have spent more time fighting with people who look like them than educating themselves and engaging with people who don’t. Leaders have discovered that, while creating identity-based affinity groups can positively contribute to a sense of belonging, sadly many of these efforts miss the mark by failing to center uniquely individual human beings.

In recent months, international conflict has laid bare the reality that reasonable people can share in common the desire to break inequity but disagree vehemently about how to get there. And it has demonstrated that we can never successfully dismantle “isms” of any kind if we simply replace one unfair, oppressive hierarchy with another.

This trajectory breaks our hearts. But, it is not surprising. There are no quick fixes. As Audre Lorde wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And if we try to use the very same tools to build a new house, we can anticipate the very same problems. If this is not an argument in favor of real, sustained change, nothing is.

Our Recommitment to Centering Humans

Against this backdrop, Outside Angle has also grown a lot since we started. We co-founded this company with just two people, and since then we have had two dozen amazing collaborators. We have been privileged to work with parents, partners, women, men, BIPOC, and on and on. At the end of the day, we have been privileged most by the opportunity to work with human beings who have their own unique talents and contributions to make in this world.

Today, we are more committed than ever to holding ourselves accountable to being attentive to who we serve and how, who is on our team and what they are asked to contribute, and who benefits from our work. It matters very much that we attend to and work conscientiously to serve women and people of color in particular.

Even as we do that, we have also realized that no matter what we do, we must place everyone’s humanity at the center of our work. We will only accept real, fundamental change in the way we see and treat each other. Less judgment. Less division. We don’t always have to agree (in fact, we genuinely value alternative points of view and values). We do always have to respect each other as people. More empathy and understanding. It’s the only path forward.

Outside Angle’s Annual Update

In the past two years, we have held ourselves accountable to continuing to learn and share our progress publicly here on our blog. We have always believed that organizations that learn, change in positive ways that enable them to succeed and sustain in the long run. We apply this mindset to ourselves as well.

This is what we know about our efforts so far and what we will continue to monitor and evolve as we grow.

I. WHO WE SERVED

In our fourth year of business, Outside Angle continues to serve a diverse portfolio of organizations. While our client partners operate in very different spaces and geographies, they all share in common the belief that their work has the potential to make our world more equitable, just, vibrant, and sustainable.

We are proud that more than half of our clients play a role in the vast education ecosystem that includes K-12 schools and partners, adult learning and higher education systems, and other youth-serving institutions. We are equally proud to work with teams making an impact in healthcare, public policy, transportation, religious communities, and more.

II. WHAT THEY DO

Our clients believe in a better future. The missions of the organizations with whom we work inspire us, and we are humbled to get to be a part of their journeys as they do their part to make this world a better place for all, and especially for those who have been overlooked, underserved, and left behind. As our colleague Felix Lloyd, Zoobean co-founder and CEO, has said, “It feels good to do good.” We share this sentiment.

Here’s a look at how just a few of our clients from 2023 are creating a better, more equitable world:

• HCM Strategists, a woman-owned, impact-driven consulting firm is championing accessible, affordable, equitable, and student-centered education and work-based learning across all 50 states.
• KID Museum, a pioneering experiential museum and educational makerspace, is fostering the “Mind of a Maker” in kids and youth, empowering the next generation with the skills to invent the future.
• Literacy Pittsburgh’s is enabling “Better lives through learning” by providing free education programs to help individuals build a more secure future for themselves and their families.
• Maine Connectivity Authority is expanding access to reliable, high-speed, and affordable internet service statewide so that all Mainers can enjoy the economic, social, and educational benefits of being digitally connected.
• The O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University is improving health outcomes and health equity, and dedicating their team of legal experts to building capacity at local levels to advance more effective policy and legal solutions across the US and global south.

Space limits our ability to shout-out every team we’ve worked with in the last year, but we are also tremendously proud to have worked with AdventHealth, A.I.M., California Community Colleges, DICK’S Sporting Goods Foundation, Hispanic Heritage Foundation, Temple Emanuel of South Hills, WPS Institute and Zoobean. Their missions are no less amazing, and we encourage you to learn more about their great work.

III. LEADERS WE SERVED

While we are pleased to work with any and all teams doing good in the world, we especially seek out organizations led by women and people of color. We do this because we believe there are many women and people of color who possess extraordinary leadership and visions for change that have been historically denied the opportunities and capital to lead organizations. Despite improvements in recent years, today women (and particularly women of color) continue to be under-represented in senior and executive leadership roles.

With this in mind, we track the demographics of leaders in our client portfolio. Since Outside Angle began operations in July 2020:

• 74% of our clients have been led by women or people of color; and
• 35% of our clients have been led by Black or Latinx executives.

While we have seen rises and falls over time, those rates are comparable with the data in 2023. Last year, 79% of the clients with whom we worked were led by a woman and/or person of color, and more specifically 36% of clients were led by a Black or Latinx leader.

IV. WHO IS ON OUR TEAM

Thanks to new opportunities and a growing portfolio of clients, our team is now bigger than ever. As of the end of 2023, our team is comprised of 15 full-time employees and part-time collaborators. We are a team of former leaders in non-profit organizations, for-profit companies, and the public sector. Outside of our professional roles, we are parents, students, athletes, volunteer board members, and more.

Diversity of the team matters to us as much as the diversity of the clients we serve. At present, 73% of our team members identify as women or people of color. More specifically, 67% identify as female and about one-third (29%) identify as Black or Latinx. We aspire to continue building a diverse team of individuals who embody our values and possess strong leadership skills.

V. WHAT WE LEARNED

Our journey is ongoing. We committed to making our effort public even though we realized early on that we might have peaks and valleys in meeting our goals to serve the purposes and people we are most committed to serving. While we’re proud of our track record, we see real room for improvement. Our work continues to evolve, and with that we hope to be even more aligned with the vision and goals of our target constituents in the coming months and years.

VI. GOALS FOR 2024

In 2024, our team has have five focus goals for Outside Angle’s engagement development and internal team efforts.

1. We want to deepen our work on the issues that we believe to be the most urgent of our time. These include environmental justice, economic mobility, and educational equity among others. We’re committed to helping people in these spaces navigate transformational change as well as possible.
2. We want to increase the representation of BIPOC leaders among those we serve. Our goal is to be back above 40% in 2024, as a measure of the impact we can have by supporting diverse leadership.
3. We continue to grow our team, and as such we aim to continue growing our team’s diversity. On this front, we ask for help in referring any qualified candidate our way with a focus on helping us meet people we might not otherwise meet.
4. We want to double down on our efforts to build management and leadership capacity, helping managers and leaders sustain and succeed through the rigors of change leadership. With this in mind, we are launching our first cross-organization manager development cohort in April 2024.
5. We want to bring more rigorous data to our work with organizations to hold ourselves accountable, and make it easier to measure the impact of our partnerships. This is why we are introducing our Organizational Health Assessment as a tool available to all of our clients.

Overall, we want to continue to do what we do best, which is to help meaningful change efforts succeed by helping organizations sharpen vision, strengthen processes, improve culture, and solve complex problems.

We’re grateful for the chance to keep serving so many communities through our work and for the opportunity to set ambitious goals that keep us accountable to our commitments. Thank you for being a part of our network and for helping us continue to improve and impact the world around us!