Over the past few weeks our team has been reflecting on the death of George Floyd, the movement for racial justice, and what it means to be an ally.

Six-year old Gianna Floyd commented recently that her father, George Floyd, had “changed the world.” While no one should have to die in order for meaningful change to take place, we know she’s right.

A movement has spread across the world demanding an end to structural racism and associated inequality. The United States (alongside many other countries) faces yet another reckoning with its long-embedded systemic racism. For many, these are uncomfortable conversations, but they are essential ones.

Viola Davis, Academy Award winning actress and CEO of Juvee Productions, put it this way: "Centuries of chattel slavery, black codes, sharecropping, oppression, peonage, white supremacy, terror, lynchings, mass murders, exploitation, systematic racism, gerrymandering, Jim Crow, redlining, medical apartheid, the war on drugs, mass incarceration and the overall destruction of generations of black lives and families is the cause of the uprisings. The murder of #GeorgeFloyd was just the tip of the iceberg."

Our history books teach progress—milestones such as the 13th Amendment and the Civil Rights Movement, for example. But the progress that has been made remains wholly insufficient to eradicate this long history of injustice and the deep momentum it carries today.

Over the past few weeks our team has been processing our grief over George Floyd’s death. He should still be alive. So should Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee, Rayshard Brooks, Oluwatoyin Salau, and too many others. We’ve also been reflecting, learning from voices that are too often pushed to the side in the sustainability movement, and having conversations about what we can do in response.

We debated drafting a statement of solidarity. But this seemed hollow and inauthentic. Silence is not an option in the face of injustice, yet words seem wholly insufficient to the moment.

So how can we, as individuals and as an organization, combat institutional racism and systemic inequality?

As people of privilege, standing in support and solidarity is not enough; we must stand up for communities of color as allies. I’m heartened when I read, as one Black educator recently wrote to my local school community, "As a child of the sixties, I have experienced times similar to these, but never with this number of allies." People of privilege, she wrote, “are beginning to understand the insidious, systemic nature of racism and starting to connect the dots.”

So what does it mean to be an ally? Activists say that true allyship takes action. And that action cannot die out as the heat of this moment subsides. As a mentor in our network recently stated,  “Addressing inequality, racism, and environmental justice is all of our jobs, isn’t it?”

Our stakeholders often describe us as translators, depolarizers, critical friends, and bridge builders who help connect diverse change agents to solve systemic problems. Over the past weeks, our team has been brainstorming how we can better integrate allyship into this role. How can we make more space for racial justice advocates in our convenings and thought leadership? How can we better cultivate tools, knowledge, and diverse connections that empower our network of executives, activists, and funders to take action on racial justice? Where do we need to challenge racism in ourselves and our organization? When opportunities to hire arise, what can we do to recruit diverse candidates?

But the most critical component of allyship that we keep circling back to is listening and educating ourselves. As stakeholder engagement experts, we believe that active listening is foundational to meaningful change.

We know that we don’t have all the answers. 

Future 500 advocates for engagement and inclusion. But we struggle to live up to those ideals internally; our team of ten is not diverse. This creates blindspots. Here’s an example: one of the action items we’ve considered is committing a percentage of our time to pro bono work for organizations dedicated to racial justice. But in discussing this we realized we don’t know if or how our particular skill set would be useful to these organizations—and we don’t want to presume they actually need our input in the first place. 

This is something we intend to explore further, and we welcome your input. If there are organizations you think we could partner with, please reach out. If there are other ideas you think we could implement, our team would love to hear from you. But we also know that we need to do our homework and do the hard work of examining how we can be better allies.

As a start we commit to continue listening to communities of color, to educate ourselves and be willing to be corrected, and to channel what we hear into action.

For decades, the sustainability movement has been slow to recognize the link between environmental challenges and racial justice. Things are beginning to shift––after all we’ve recognized environmental justice as a top trend driving advocacy and activism in our annual Force for Good Forecast for several years now. But there is still much to do on all of our parts in order to integrate these challenges into our daily work. As Leah Thomas, activist and founder of Intersectional Environmentalist recently said, "the systems of oppression that have led to the deaths of so many Black people were the same systems that perpetuated environmental injustice." 

While the news cycle will eventually move on, we—all of us—must not relax our focus on this issue. If we do so, our society’s history of racial injustice, on repeat since 1619 and well before, will be doomed to continue.

Let us do everything in our power to change, together, and stop this cycle. It’s up to all of us to continue to prove Gianna Floyd right when she said her father changed the world.

We welcome conversations on how you and your organizations are reflecting on this movement and your ideas for how we can collectively leverage our work for more impact. Please contact us at 800-655-2020 if you would like to talk.

 – Erik Wohlgemuth and the Future 500 Team

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