Equity and Inclusion
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.
The Work
Tovi’s expertise and services in DEIB are vast and customized to your organizational context. Tovi supports schools & organizations in facilitating workshops, thought-partnership/coaching for executive leadership teams, organizational development, and culture-change.
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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.
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 systems, until we have successfully transformed ourselves.
You can not teach what you do not embody.
-Tovi Scruggs-Hussein
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®