Hello! Welcome to the Hospitality Racial Equity Toolkit! We’re so glad that you’re here.

Before you officially get started and explore the different sections of the toolkit, we suggest setting aside some time to go through our “Getting Ready” checklist. This toolkit was originally developed as part of a 2 year Hospitality Cohort in the Greater New Orleans area. The members of this cohort went through nearly 56 hours of racial equity sessions, hours of coaching calls, dozens of hours of pre and post work, and an extremely in depth equity audit.

While you don’t need to set aside 56 hours to prepare to use this toolkit, it is crucial to make sure you’re operating from a certain baseline so that you can most effectively implement what you learn. At Beloved, we believe that people change systems. If you want to change systems and make some shifts, then the work begins with you! 

Before you get started, below are some important things to know about us at Beloved Community. 

• We believe that people change systems. The Beloved Community facilitation philosophy can be described as a people-centered approach. We aim to center and honor the experiences of our participants and ourselves as facilitators. All of our sessions include individual work about who we are as people, meaning making as a group, and pre and post-work. We are not the “face” of an organization’s DEI work. We know that issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion have deep, complicated ways of evolving and showing up in organizations so we support our participants in their meaning-making of said issues and topics, and empower them with tools and strategies to lead this work in their organizations.

• We interrogate neutrality. What this looks like is that we challenge the notion of neutrality and will always ask ourselves and others to look at the issues they are experiencing from a multifaceted approach, taking into account how their identities may be coloring how they view or perceive issues in their organization. We ask, ”Who do your policies and practices benefit  and who do your policies and practices marginalize?” 

• We center Blackness and the experiences of BIPOC. We challenge white supremacy by centering the experiences of Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities in our facilitations by naming how whiteness and anti-blackness shows up in organizations and individuals. We are clear that anti-blackness is a tool of white supremacy designed to keep whiteness in power. Centering racial equity in our examples is a throughline in our work.

• We center Intersectionality. We honor the multiple layers of overlapping oppression that is experienced by communities who have multiple, marginalized identities. We select intersectional examples to present in our facilitations and content delivery to clients. 

• We take a head and heart approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Some of us are head-focused -- we want to dive into data, look at outcomes, pour through graphs and spreadsheets and action plans. Some of us are heart-focused -- we want to bake in reflection and meditation, we’re often found discussing why these topics are important to us personally and to our work, and encourage others to do the same.  And some of us are both! Too often we think that diversity, equity, and inclusion is a people-facing strategy and we send the “heart” people off to lead that work. But we know that equity is about investments -- governance, finance, operations, etc.  Equity requires that we examine policies around pay equity, supplier diversity, staffing assignments, budget allocations, in addition to typical culture data like climate surveys, participant satisfaction, and program demographics.