Racial Healing and Equity
An Emotional Intelligence-based Approach to Racial Healing & Equity
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Healing at work? Absolutely. We must heal. Healing is a natural process; it serves our resiliency and our wellness. Healing is restoration - it restores us to wholeness. You cannot serve from a place of wholeness if you have not done your own work to serve those that are relying on you to be whole in order to best serve them.
Healing is not only personal growth, it is professional development. If you work with children and are in service to others, it becomes even more imperative. If we work in service of others, especially as a leader, then healing is part of our own professional development and moral responsibility to those that we serve because:
Tovi's Approach to Equity Work
In today's world dynamics, we know that the issues of race are becoming more and more pervasive in our lived experience. Race plays a role in our leadership and our teaching, whether intentionally or not. In our work and in our lives, race shows up and is mirrored back to us in our overall sense of “equity and inclusion” - whether we are exploring this critical topic from being a person of color or not…
Why a focus on racial healing? Because our leadership lens is often reflected by our overall relationship to “whiteness.” Whiteness refers to “a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.” Our schools operate in whiteness. Being raised in this society, whether a person of color or not, we are impacted by these very "sets of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed." Thus, a large focus of my approach to equity work explores how we must embrace race & our lived experience with whiteness a part of our work in order to be more impactful and effective in getting the outcomes we want with our students and families – and colleagues. How do we embrace the potential and/or lived reality of the discomfort of all of this? How might we extend an invitation to ourselves to heal? This is some of what we will explore together…and engage in deep reflection of how this impacts our embodiment, our leadership, and our lives.
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The blessing is that in my more than 25 years as being a leader of equity, I have cultivated both the emotional/relational competencies and the technical skills to support, coach, and develop them in others. In my workshops, dialogue is always compassionate and direct - that is why participants get results. This is work I am deeply committed to and have done enough of my own inner work to be able to meet this work with the grace, compassion, and kindness that is needed to grow others in this critical aspect of our leadership development.
Again, we cannot successfully transform our schools until we have successfully transformed ourselves.
You can not teach what you do not embody.
-Tovi Scruggs-Hussein
Tovi Scruggs-Hussein
Educational Leader & Healer
Tovi Scruggs-Hussein is an award-winning urban educator with over 25 years of leadership and transformation experience. Tovi serves as an expert leader in equity & inclusion, trauma-informed resilience, and emotional intelligence development for leaders so that the cultureclimate of our organizations is transformed to improve outcomes. Tovi boldly supports others in dismantling barriers to equity, social justice, organizational/team dysfunction, poor culture-climate, and wellness. She is on a mission to heal our leaders and organizations through Adult Social Emotional Learning, Emotional Intelligence, Equity/Racial Healing, and Trauma-Informed Resilience. Tovi is a founding adjunct professor of Trauma-Informed Leadership at Mills College and is the National President for Coalition for Schools Educating Mindfully.
Dr. Itoco Garcia
Superintendent Sausalito Marin City School District
Co-Executive Director HipHop Scholastics
Dr. Garcia has been a transformative educator for 21 years in some of the most challenged schools in the Bay Area, and has dedicated his life and career to achieving educational equity for all students traditionally failed by our public school system. He spent the last two years as an Educational Consultant working across Eight school districts in California and Nevada focused on developing systems and structures to support school transformation including equity mindsets and heartsets amongst educational leadership. He is a member of the National TurnAround Arts Equity Committee, the Principal Leadership Institute Equity Advisory Committee, and the Alameda County Arts Integrated Principal Leadership Network.
I thought that Tovi's practice and norms allowed us to voice some of the factors holding back the conversations with African American Families. The structure of the discussion allowed teachers be reflective on their bias toward these conversations and begin to plan on how to grow in this area.
Key Outcomes
With Tovi’s expertise, all of these services and programs are delivered using a lens of racial healing, equity, and inclusion:
Praise for BE-ing with Tovi
This session was fire!!! I was challenged through so many critical lenses... If my being doesn't change the strategies don't matter.
Let's Heal Our Schools & Systems with
Conscious, Connected, & Courageous Leaders™