eXd Team-Based Community of Practice
Our signature equity design capacity-building offering in a team-based format.
Wait, what's this?
Join us for a year-long professional development experience that will take your team (up to 6 people, ideally from the same organization) through a series of 5 "design cycles." You'll engage in the work of each design cycle with your team and expand and deepen your learning and reflections alongside individuals and teams from other organizations 🙌🏽.
Why are y'all offering this?
EMD was designed to answer the fundamental question, "How do you do equity?" Our answer: think of yourself as a designer, think of your work as design work, and use an equityXdesign approach to do that work.
Over the last 5 years, we've focused on building capacity in whole organizations or whole teams in organizations in order to fundamentally shift the way they do their work towards an equityXdesign approach. While we believe that whole-org or whole-team work is the best way to achieve sustainable change, not all organizations are able to engage in this work, and we've had smaller teams and departments or even just a handful of individuals from organizations reach out wanting to engage in deeper capacity building work, but without the org-wide commitment. To that end, we're offering this Community of Practice 🎉.
What will we do together?
In five "design cycles," folks work on redesigning their team's ways of working and products to be more equitable, all while building their capacity to apply an equityXdesign lens to their work moving forward – both as a team and as individuals.
These design cycles are the most comprehensive and hands-on way we work with folks and are deeply grounded in the day-to-day work of your team. This offering calls for a meaningful time-and-energy commitment, and in turn drives the most foundational changes to your team's systems, processes, relationships, and communication patterns in order to increasingly center (and propagate) equity, justice, belonging, and liberation.
Who is this for?
All are invited into this work with us, but particularly we'd love to have teams from:
-Design and Consulting Firms
-Foundations and Philanthropy
-Orgs with a Social Justice Mission
Teams that have really benefited from this work include:
-Teams that are committed to equity, but don't know how to get started
-Teams that are taking a real look at their work through an equity lens and are open to change
-Teams that use traditional design thinking but want to more deeply center equity in their work
-Teams that have already invested in being more "equitable," but need a way to actually codify that in how they work
-Teams that are tackling a deeply entrenched problem but have seen only limited success with past approaches, and are ready for a different way of working
-Teams about to launch a new project or product and want set themselves up for a greater chance of success
Sounds good, but what does the process actually look like?
The two videos below walk you through what this "DC5 experience" actually looks like. Start with the one on the left – it's the shorter, more "brass tacks" version. If you like what you hear and want to learn more, check out the video on the right – it goes into more detail about the learning arc and why we've designed it as so.
The Schedule:
Fall 2023
DC1: Oct 10-11, 2023
DC2: Nov 28-29, 2023
Spring 2024
(Specific dates to be decided Fall 2023 to take into account participant availability)
DC3: January - March (3 sets of 2 full-day sessions; 6 full days total)
DC4: April-June (2 full-day sessions)
Fall 2024
(Specific dates to be decided Spring 2024 to take into account participant availability)
DC5: August - Oct (2 full-day sessions)
The Investment:
The total investment for the experience is $35,500 for a team of up to 6 participants, coming out to $6K/person or $500/person/month for a full year of professional development that is grounded in and focused on the problems your team is tackling in your day-to-day work.
Register at the button below to hold your spot – the $500 registration fee is nonrefundable, but is applied to the total investment.
We will reach out later to gather your team members' information, finalize invoicing options, and complete any contracting processes if necessary.
The Process for Registration & Payments:
- Register on this page by hitting the button below. It's $500 to hold your team's spot (nonrefundable, but applied to total amount).
- The first payment of 17,500 will be due when we contact you after you register on this page – at that point, we'll also gather your team members' information, finalize invoicing options, and complete any contracting processes if necessary.
- 8,750 due in November 2023.
- 8,750 due in October 2023.
Can't we just talk, can't we just talk, talk about where we're goinnnnnn'?!
Want to talk to someone from our team before you commit? We get it! Schedule time with our founder, CEO, and the facilitator of this offering, Dr. Christine Marie Ortiz Guzman here.
If you prefer email, you can reach us at [email protected] and we'll get back to you soon 😘.
Your Instructor
Dr. Christine Ortiz Guzman is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for innovation through equity-centered design. Her current venture is Equity Meets Design, a think & do tank that builds capacity in folks to use an equity-centered design process to answer the question "How do I do equity?" Their equity by design process supports individuals and organizations to intentionally design their interventions, interactions and institutions for equity and justice.
Christine spent her teenage years creating the national Truth tobacco prevention campaign and launched her first consulting firm at 17, supporting states and other countries interested in implementing the Truth model. She has launched k-12 microschools, consulted for schools in the US and internationally, designed and coached entrepreneurs, coordinated a national competition for innovative school models, and designed and taught graduate-level courses on redesigning schools at the Stanford d.School and Harvard University.
The first in her family to have a college degree, Christine has a BS from MIT, Masters in Education and Non-Profit Management, and a Doctorate in Education Leadership from Harvard University. In all her endeavors, she has been motivated to address the barriers innovators face when tackling complex equity-based social issues, leveraging and accounting for the entirety of who she is, especially her experience being a Latina and a mother from the south. She lives in Orlando, Florida with her teenage and toddler daughters.