Shine the Light Chat: Chris Burton

SHINE THE LIGHT CHAT

SMBW sat down with Chris Burton from the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities to discuss his role at VCIC and how we can create inclusive environments.

Chris Burton is Vice President of Programs at the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities (VCIC), an organization that works with schools, businesses, and communities to achieve success through inclusion. In his role, he designs and facilitates educational programs on diversity, equity, and inclusion for institutions across Virginia. Chris particularly specializes in VCIC’s workplace and community programs.

Tell us about you work.

I’m Chris Burton, Vice President of Programs for Communities and Workplaces and I’ve been with VCIC for about ten months. I’ve been an AntiRacist educator for several years, and I especially enjoy working with faith communities, whether it be interfaith dialogs or really delving into ways that inclusion lines up with their theologies.

I've been teaching for 11 years, and I was director of equity and inclusion for a couple of years before that.

Just in terms of systems and ways in which you can really make an impact, I think about how when you're in a classroom setting, you’re engaging with about 30 kids at a time.

If you're an administrator, you’re working with the whole school community. But what does it mean?

What does it mean to make an impact with folks who are also in positions to make impacts as well? What really attracted to the work VCIC does is that ability to speak to whole communities at a time.

How would you describe the nuances and differences between VCIC’s three main focuses: schools, workplaces, and communities?

I think the commonality is helping organizations realize that they can achieve success through inclusion, though success is different in each of those places. So if you're a school, you're not necessarily thinking about the bottom line or whether profits were down last quarter. For a nonprofit organization, success correlates with how many people they were able to impact with their services, while a business considers sales and profits. If we're talking about like on the college level, success is measured through alumni participation; do the kids who matriculated want to give back?

So when you say you work with communities, can you give me some examples of the types of clients?

It's really varied, I've worked with city governments, groups of faith leaders, small nonprofits, nonprofits that have sites all over the state of Virginia, businesses that are global, and businesses that are just starting up.

How do you make it a safe and productive place when you're facilitating these groups?

I think having good norms, the sort of center of the space where you talk about the importance of confidentiality and really to get people to speak from their perspective.

Instinctively, people will say, “some have said” or “I've heard” or “many of us think” instead of just talking about their perspective. It’s very hard to do that in a large group, especially if you're afraid for whatever reason.

I have found that small group discussions really prime people to talk to their peers honestly and openly.

Then I bring everyone together. It's most important for me to see that they're actually talking about what's going on. I've seen it be very successful where those sorts of conversations have moved from the abstract, safe and universal enough idea, to people actually taking some very pragmatic steps of like, “Hey, we should actually have this conversation more often.”

I think about colleges that recognized they had a crisis not being able to retain kids between their freshman and sophomore year. And a lot of those kids were disproportionately coming from marginalized communities. How do you respond to that? I think that's a similar problem to the great resignation in workplaces.

From schools to businesses, the issue of retention often comes back to the organization’s success and culture.

How do we solve that, for lack of a better phrase? When looking at ways in which we can help organizations, the first is to create a climate that's inclusive so people want to stay, while also helping them brainstorm ways to create, support, and reinforce equity.

How would you describe an inclusive climate?

I would say an inclusive climate is a place where I'm not just invited to dinner but I have the say of what's on the menu, and I'm not on the menu myself. I think too often we treat diversity like a false oasis. We've sort of been satisfied with saying, wow, like we have so many different people. There's a lot of organizations that have not made that leap or haven't even prioritized diversity at all. But for those who have, many have made diversity into this false oasis, meaning that they're satisfied with that as an endpoint. They haven't done the necessary work of saying, okay, even if people are different here, we still have to tap into those differences to allow it to be a part

of who we are. I think it's a good stretch for organizations to think about the ways they can embrace differences while maintaining a common ethic.

Yeah. What is what do you think is the most challenging part of your job?

I think the most challenging part of my job is that there's a lot of trust involved on both ends. The client trusts you to be able to deliver the concept, and we’re trusting the client to take what they learned and build upon it. I sometimes get concerned that people view the workshop or the consulting service as the solution in and of itself and not like visiting the hardware store to get the tools. I think that organizations do themselves a disservice by saying, “We had those trainings and we solved it.”

I just worry because we can't work with every client indefinitely. It’s a bit like we give them a push and now they’re riding the bike on their own. There is that hope that they're able to incorporate this into their culture. I don’t think you want to view inclusivity as something that you can fix; I think the real work is the maintenance of it.

It's not just that you build the inclusive space, you must continue to maintain it. In the same way that if you had a lovely home and you never cleaned it, the problems would really start to compound after a while.

You’ve had a chance to work in and visit many facilities.

Which ones stand out to you as inclusive spaces, and what did they do that that made an impression on you?

Maybe it’s the teacher in me, but I like spaces with an open floor and you're able to just talk and walk around while I'm talking. I don't necessarily want to have a pulpit set up where I'm ust on one side and everyone's listening, I like being able to move on to something.

I think about one of the clients I worked with who had a bunch of circle tables set up in the room. I was able to have the participants move around the room, and I moved around the room with them. They called it the deep centered classroom, where like you sort of flipped the classroom concept. I think I really enjoy that because it speaks to what’s really important, what's actually going to stick: the participants getting into the rhythm of not just talking about working with one another, but actively doing that sort of like critical thinking analysis application to their actual circumstance. They aren’t just talking about equity as some abstract ideal, but what would it look like? Where can we point to within our organization to see clear examples of a lack of equity? What are the things that we are doing well? What are the things that like we're on the right track with? What do we need to strengthen? That's going to happen from people actually working with each other I worked with a government agency a couple of weeks ago where the conversation was so rich that we went overtime not because I lost track of time, but because they wanted to keep talking. It was a virtual session, but

afterwards they met up for lunch and kept working on it, which I thought was really wonderful and powerful. I kind of went into it with very neutral expectations, but just to see that they not only bought into the work, but without my prompting, they wanted to continue the work. We always encourage our clients to stay in touch with us, and it'll be interesting to hear from them and see where they take those conversations six months from now.

What are some common mistakes or misperceptions people have around these sort of programs or creating more inclusive cultures within their workplace?

I think a lot of organizations assume that they’re doing better than they actually are. I think that's the most common mistake. So because people aren't raising their hand and complaining, or they haven't had specific incidents, they think, oh, we don't have an issue right?

Treating no news as good news doesn't really allow people to actually do the work.

Another mistake people make, is when people don't remain as cognizant of how the outside world bleeds into their organization. So whatever the social issue may be, there's an assumption, that that's not their problem.

But a company’s employees are going to live outside of the organization, and undoubtedly, particularly for employees from marginalized populations, the outside world is going to bleed into the workplace. I think that's something that a lot of organizations underestimate. If the outside climate right now is an untrusting one, why are you assuming that inside climate, especially when you haven't done anything to maintain trust, is a trusted one.

How would you challenge us as planners and designers of those places where these people get to work and and sort of spend their careers?

Yeah, I would love to see intentionality and not just an assumption of universality. Design becomes exclusive when the designer only takes into account the experiences of those in power, the majority. I think it's about framing every project through that lens of accessibility and just understanding,

Chris Burton Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, Vice President of Programs