Hear Us Now: Racial Equity in the Workplace

Hear Us Now: Racial Equity in the Workplace is a unique blend of entrepreneurship and niche-focused advice on how to successfully create more racially just workplaces. This topic has never been more timely, as individuals and organizations struggle with a growing national effort to eliminate racial equity practices in a range of institutions. This book provides both much needed hope and important practical advice.

Hear Us Now focuses on Dr. Keecha Harris’ personal and professional experience as a 25-year entrepreneur, sharing experiences and expertise to help women of color succeed while also expounding on her mission-driven passions and interests within the intersectionality of philanthropy, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and racial justice. Dr. Harris provides her provocative perspective and interviews leaders, partners, and organizers who, like herself, are taking much-needed action as transformational, anti-racist change agents. Her co-author, Dr. Ali Webb, brings a lifetime of experience leading teams in government and the nonprofit sector, with stints at the United States Department of Agriculture and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The book, drawn from Harris’ hour-long R.A.C. E. podcast interviews, focuses on change in the personal, behavior, and organizational spheres with the goal of racial equity transformation of the workplace. For her groundbreaking podcast, Dr. Harris interviewed leaders across sectors who honestly shared  their journeys of becoming transformational change agents, through leading change efforts within their organizations and shifting from allyship into accomplices when supporting people of color.

This book will help you discover what it takes to be courageous for change and to become an anti-racist leader in your organization, no matter what position you hold. Learn what you have in common with these leaders and what you can take away for your own journey.

Keecha Harris, DrPH, RD (Co-Author) is president and CEO of Keecha Harris and Associates, Inc (KHA), a US Small Business Administration 8(a) certified firm. KHA leads organizational development, project management, and evaluation projects for publicly and privately funded efforts. The firm has worked with grant-making organizations with assets exceeding $340 billion.

Among current efforts, Dr. Harris balances a portfolio that includes environmental, reproductive, economic mobility, and leadership development projects. Clients include the Robert Wood Johnson, AARP, William and Flora Hewlett, Schmidt Family, Bill and Melinda Gates, Open Society, and Energy foundations as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NorthFace and Wells Fargo. Her writing has been published in The Chronicle of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Quarterly. She is active on LinkedIn with nearly 4000 followers. Dr Harris is a distinguished alumna of both Iowa State University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, from which she was awarded each institution’s highest awards.  She serves on the board of directors of Orchid Capital Collective and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation.

Ali Webb, PH.D (Co-Author) Ali Webb’s first job out of college was as a reporter for a small newspaper in Texas. Her second job, however, was press secretary to the Mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, for seven years. Ali was the first female and youngest person to ever hold the position of press secretary in Los Angeles. She was subsequently appointed by President Bill Clinton to head Communications at the United States Department of Agriculture. Later, she served as Communications Director for The Nature Conservancy and as political director for the League of Conservation Voters.

For 19 years, she worked at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, one of the largest U.S. charitable foundations, where her last role was as Director of Michigan Programming, leading a team of 21 people and an annual grant-making budget of $75 million. She now heads Ali Webb Strategies, a consulting firm that advises leaders and advances strategies that help organizations bridge the gap between expectations and outcomes using a racial equity lens. One of her most recent clients was the Constitutional Court of Kosovo, where she assisted with their organizational development.
 
Dr. Webb received her BA in Journalism from Stanford University and her MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2005, she earned her Ph.D. in Mass Media from Michigan State University.

She is currently a lecturer at the Nonprofit Management program at the School of Professional Studies at Columbia University. She also teaches in a new PhD program at the Lilly Family Foundation School, Indiana University. She has multiple articles published in the Encyclopedia of Public Relations and is also published in NonProfit Quarterly with articles including: How to Conduct Racial Equity Audits, What’s Required to Diversify Big Green, and Strategic Philantropy Gets a Wakeup Call. She has also written on team building in philanthropy for The Foundation Review.

Bahni Turpin (Narrator) is a Los Angeles based actress and activist with many television, stage and film credits. She is an ensemble member of Cornerstone Theater Company, in addition to being the Founder and lead organizer of SoLA Food Co-op, an emerging grocery cooperative in South Los Angeles.