• A complete overhaul to our personnel policies and hiring practices was conducted in the spring of 2020, and other artifacts of the organizations such as bylaws have been updated to put our values of equity and justice at the center. Policies and budgets are moral documents and should reflect our foundational beliefs. 

• Speaking of budgets, our budget seeks to reflect increased equity, access, and inclusion, not only internally, but externally. Internally, we have worked to bring our highest and lowest organizational salaries closer together, and are updating policies to ensure our employee compensation is just and transparent. In our program budget, we include funding for accessibility, whether that is ASL translation or mileage reimbursement for participants. We also believe in compensating people for their time and expertise when they share their lived experience. We have more work to do in this regard. 

• We have substantially shifted our Board of Directors recruitment and selection process in order to build a leadership that is representative of the communities we seek to support and serve. We are currently building a Board- and Member-led inclusion group to help us plan how to integrate our member voices further into our leadership. 

• Building programming and policy priorities that center our commitment to dismantling misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and colonialist power structures (such as a community reading group which grapples with the connections between gender, race, and policy, and a monthly People Power Hour which connects theory to action); 

• Partnership practices that echo our feminist roots of collaboration and a community of care. We aim to lead and follow from a place of abundance. We are actively engaging partner community-based organizations and asking where and how we can best support their efforts;

• Updating our biennial Policy Roadmap and all publications with disaggregated Maine-based data where possible. Disaggregated data (which reflects subpopulations) more accurately illustrate the people, communities, and regions who are disproportionately harmed by systems and policies. We are increasing our data-driven priority setting in our policy work, and intend to actively support data-driven decision making within state and local systems (such as advocating for including race and ethnicity in the state’s prosecutorial database, which reflects crime charges and convictions). 

• At the same time, we are working to recognize the way that white-led mainstream quantitative data collection has marginalized historically excluded populations. We are working to center lived experience and storytelling as meaningful data as we develop educational materials and set priorities. 

• Ongoing Board and staff education and discussion, including monthly readings and personal and organizational reflections.

In every step we are aiming to use our privilege and platforms to amplify the voices and needs of those who have been treated with indignity and denied their humanity – and to change the underlying systems which perpetuate oppression.

Still, we know this is just the beginning of transformative work. Still, we know we will get it wrong again and again. We commit to being accountable and to doing the work of anti-racism and anti-misogyny both as individual staff and Board members and on an organizational level. That means accepting that we will fumble as we work to grow. We continue to try to balance the need to be transparent and accountable with the need to amplify others’ voices rather than our own – as well as acknowledging the potential of engaging in performative work (efforts made to ‘look’ like a good ally without changing underlying structures of racism and misogyny). We make this statement public not to congratulate ourselves, but to be transparent about our goals and to invite community accountability. 

We are listening to our community, and working to build a more expansive, more inclusive community. We look forward to walking alongside our founders, partners, and community members as we all work to undo the harm that has been caused by white supremacy and white-centric power structures in Maine and elsewhere – including those we may have participated in – and to build toward a more just future for us all.