Critical to the audit process was the development of the rubric itself. We spent a lot of time not just developing the strands to evaluate, but thinking through what a [rating of] ‘one’ looks like versus a ‘five’. It pushed us to think beyond our current moment and towards a future that is even more equity-centered.
As we shared earlier in this series, we began our JEDI journey with a clear goal: to drive meaningful progress. Achieving this required a clear view of both where we see ourselves now and blind spots, as well as a roadmap for moving forward.
This is where our JEDI rubric came into play. While many Diversity, Equity and Inclusion rubrics often focus on internal structures, policies and ways of working, we intentionally expanded ours to include how JEDI principles influence our external work and how that work impacts the broader landscape. We wanted to examine how JEDI shows up in our interactions—with each other, our partners and within the larger ecosystem—and included specific, concrete examples in the rubric to guide us forward.
Our rubric was built through an iterative, collaborative process that first required Dr. Moore and her team to truly understand IF as an organization: why was JEDI important to us and why did we feel it was critical to do this work? This process included broad discussions with Dr. Moore and her team to explore questions like, “What is our vision for JEDI?”, “Who do we want to be in the broader philanthropic landscape and how do we bring JEDI principles to that space?”, and “When we’re operating at our best, what does that look like?” The point of these discussions was not to land on an aligned answer. It was to help Dr. Moore hear—from different perspectives on our team—who IF is, what we value, how we work with our partners, the communities we serve, and the larger philanthropic ecosystem.
Leveraging qualitative insights from these conversations, as well as JEDI best practices and research, Dr. Moore and her team identified key themes, or “strands” against which IF could measure our growth. These informed a preliminary rubric that was refined through team feedback. This collaborative process resulted in a rubric uniquely tailored to philanthropy and our organization.
It's incredibly important for teammates to make meaning of it [the JEDI rubric] for each of the actions that they're doing and their work streams.
With the rubric in place, we started a comprehensive assessment that included a mix of quantitative and qualitative inputs. We began with a full staff survey to gauge the general sentiment and assess how team members assessed IF’s progress on JEDI. Next, Dr. Moore’s team conducted one-on-one interviews with almost 90% of our team, allowing for deeper exploration and the opportunity to ask probing questions to ground sentiment around the rubric with real examples and experiences from our team. These candid conversations provided rich insights into how the team viewed various aspects of the work and helped generate buy-in, trust and ownership among the team. Finally, Dr. Moore’s team conducted an in-depth review of over 100 documents, analyzing our existing policies and procedures as they relate to JEDI to get a comprehensive understanding of how JEDI resides and manifests within our written structure as an organization and in our ways of working.
Taking a step back and looking at all the inputs, insights emerged. We saw team perceptions of how we were doing on our JEDI commitments were significantly stronger than our policies and procedures demonstrated. This raised the question of whether this was a result of our team believing that we’re on a JEDI journey, but haven’t gone back and updated our systems and structures to align with how we’re operating, or, whether it’s human nature to believe we are doing better than we actually are?
We also saw a lot of positive work happening with our partners as it relates to the power dynamic IF holds as a funder. There was evidence in team conversations and various documents that showed how we were working with partners to discuss how to better give power, autonomy and authority to proximate leaders and their communities.
All of this informed concrete scores for each of the five themes, which served as a baseline for understanding where we are in our work and where we had growth opportunities that we could address through our action plan. For example, while there is still plenty of room for improvement, our work against the strand focused on leadership and philanthropic partnerships was slightly more developed than other strands. This made sense given we have been taking active steps in this area. On the other four strands, we saw that while we started JEDI work in each (by acknowledging the problem(s) and beginning discussions on how to address them), more intentional focus is needed to progress much of this work forward.
With these baselines in mind, we created a plan of action, aligned with our overall strategy, to continue moving our organization closer the “end” of the continuum which we might call “Exemplary.” It is critical to note, however, that rather than fixating on these scores as endpoints, we view them as tools for reflection—opportunities to assess where we stand and position ourselves to take meaningful action in the years to come.
For every aspect of our policies, it’s important that we interrogate it. If the decision ends up remaining the same and it’s the right one for our organization, that’s fine. However, it’s incredibly important that we examine our context and remain intentional toward our goals.
The strength of our JEDI rubric lies in its adaptability and flexibility, designed to evolve alongside changing needs in the systems that shape our work and our organization. This flexibility is not merely a nice-to-have; it is essential to be effective over time. As our understanding of JEDI deepens and our work changes, the rubric is structured to grow with us and serve as a learning and measurement tool that will help keep us accountable to our core values and continue to push us to learn and evolve on our JEDI journey, as opposed to reaching an endpoint.
As we continue our JEDI journey, we share our approach not as a rigid template, but as an adaptable model for other organizations, who may find this helpful, to customize based on their missions and goals. And we are happy to speak with any organization about our journey, and also learn from yours. As our results show, we have challenges and areas where we can do better—and we don’t want to hide behind them. And, we know we still have a long way to go, which was our intention at the start. Yet, now with this clearer map of what it might look like to progress further, we can more intentionally plan our journey.