Organizations looking to ground their collaboration practices in values of diversity, equity, and inclusion would be our ideal clients! At GAC we are committed to continually stretching and growing as an anti-racist organization. Our overall approach and methodology is called “Equity-Centered Strategic Planning & Strategic Doing”. All our consulting, advising, and coaching centers justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging not only for collaboration practices but for all practices including how planning happens. Our value of social justice and racial equity has guided the refinement of our planning methods to integrate equity from the inside out. By integrating equity and restorative justice practices into strategic planning, we are intentionally liberating the empowering experience of authoring our collaborative futures from the militaristic and corporate roots of planning – which reflect white supremacy culture, defer to hierarchy, reinforce mindsets that often echo the very systems we are trying to transform, allow urgency to steal the opportunity for meaningful engagement, and elevate the written word of a plan above the experience of co-creation and strategic doing. We encourage our clients to learn about our values and equity principles and we ask permission to provide “loving agitation” as part of our strategic facilitation by holding up the mirror for deeper reflection, especially around equity, and modeling truth-telling and grounded choice-making. The framing of our strategic plans always includes strategic priorities that focus on the internal capabilities needed to deliver programs and catalyze impact. Often these priorities explicitly include the development of an anti-racist culture and measuring progress toward this goal. Our preferred tool for a race equity assessment is Building Blocks for Change (BB4C) from the Building Movement Project that “assesses staff experiences through the lens of four key Capacities – Learning, Leadership, Conversation, and Voice… The assessment process aims to deepen nonprofit organizations’ understanding of the changes necessary to become more inclusive and racially equitable” (https://www.buildingblocks4change.org/). To reinforce the importance of collaboration practices for all organizations, the theories of change we develop always includes a summary of outcomes related to the organization’s vision that are complementary but driven, or co-driven by collaborators/partners. When our clients focus on justice and sustained transformation of systems during planning – instead of centering a single organization – they see that their vision needs and deserves the investment and commitment of so many beyond their walls. This part of the theory of change answers the essential strategic questions: what will we do, what will we not do, and what will we do in partnership? The strategic plans we develop also commonly include strategic priorities for authentic community engagement and intentional partnerships. Within planning processes, we help clients to explore a spectrum of community engagement and center voices of the community. Our team members bring depth in asset-based community development and participatory action research, and they have experience designing processes that are trauma-informed, multilingual, culturally aware, and humble.