Dear colleagues, friends and collaborators, I’d like to belatedly announce the launch of Tailwind Solutions, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit consulting firm that focuses on equitable talent management, leadership and organizational development in the Social Sector. In keeping with the innumerable urgencies of our current moment, Tailwind hit the ground running in January, 2021, immediately launching work with several exciting clients on projects ranging from organizational structure and succession planning to leadership development strategy and manager training, to executive coaching and equitable total rewards. Across our 10+ engagements to-date, we’ve been fortunate to engage several talented colleagues to co-lead the work on a project-to-project basis. Key collaborators thus far include (in alphabetical order) Mike Markovits, Emely Martinez, Angela Romans, Dax-Devlon Ross, and Allyson Yuen. We are grateful for their partnership and are actively working to expand Tailwind’s bench of affiliate talent for the upcoming year. I will provide more detailed information about the “what” of our client work and the “how” of our staffing model and methodologies in future messages; for now I’d like to share some context around Tailwind’s inception and launch.
Some background on Tailwind’s founding: I founded Tailwind Solutions almost exactly a year ago, in the throes of the U.S. Covid-19 pandemic and our most recent wave of racial justice uprisings. As police killings of black Americans (re)traumatized and galvanized a determined and righteous protest movement across the country, Covid-19 disproportionately devastated Native American and other BIPOC communities, and ash from the unprecedented forest fire season rained down on much of the western half of the U.S., I came to a decision point. With AchieveMission nearing the end of its organizational lifecycle, I faced the choice of how to write the next chapter of my social sector career journey. At the time, much of my day-to-day work -- still with AchieveMission at that point -- focused on co-leading diversity, equity and inclusion projects with my colleague and friend, Angela Romans. Partnering with high impact nonprofits across the country, Angela and I worked together as a mixed-race and mixed-gender team, exploring the opportunities and limitations of our identities as we sought to deploy ourselves as instruments of change in complex operating environments plagued by many of the same equity- and justice-related issues rocking America’s broader society and institutions. The work built on and deepened much of the equitable talent management and organizational development work I had been doing for several years with my AchieveMission colleagues. Now, as I co-led strategy sessions, focus groups, and listening meetings from my home office while co-parenting my toddler, the work ranged from inspiring to fascinating to heartbreaking to frustrating. As the months ticked by, one thing became increasingly clear: nonprofit leaders; including executives, middle managers and frontline workers; are feeling acute pain alongside a heightened responsibility to deliver on their social missions. As Dax-Devlon Ross so astutely summarizes in his recent Nonprofit Quarterly article, nonprofit staff are feeling pain around the day-to-day realities of their organizations, and much of this “distrust”, “disbelief”, and “despair” is deeply rooted in legacy organizational cultures and structures that perpetuate white dominant norms grounded in hierarchy and power hoarding. This distrust and pain interacts with, stems from, and is fueled by people management structures, systems and strategies. The challenge of getting the right people in the right roles and managing them in a way that motivates and engages them to do their best work is inextricably entwined with adaptive challenges that live in the gap between stated values and day-to-day realities at work. These complex and layered issues reside in culture and norms, and they also exist inside of hiring processes, professional development and performance management systems, rewards practices and succession approaches. Building and maintaining effective mission-driven organizations demands a “binocular” view of the technical and adaptive: one lens focused on values, culture and norms; the other on systems, structures and policies designed to drive strategy and goal achievement. The challenge is to seamlessly overlay these two lenses in order to gain a clear and complete view of the prevailing landscape. After years of working alongside and learning from countless inspiring leaders, I founded Tailwind Solutions with this binocular perspective in mind. Our work helps nonprofit leaders adapt to the challenges they encounter and (re)design their organizations to better reflect their values and cultures, and to better support their staff to grow, thrive, and do great mission-driven work in the midst of our current (chaotic) historical moment and context. We at Tailwind strongly believe that people systems and strategy cannot be divorced from an organization’s values, culture, and stance on justice, equity, and inclusion. And we believe that even the most technical solutions must acknowledge and attend to the adaptive challenges that exist in the system. These two core beliefs undergird all of our work. I look forward to sharing more about how they manifest in our approach and methodology in upcoming communications.
Our Founding Board: We’ve been incredibly fortunate to assemble a founding board of Ankita Jhaveri, David Garfunkel and Daniel Heller, all of whom bring an incredible depth of experience. I’ve been proud to call all three of them friends and colleagues for several years, and they have wowed me with their dedication to supporting innovative and impactful mission-driven work.They have already proven themselves to be important thought partners and collaborators in getting Tailwind off the ground, and I’m excited for the journey ahead. In the same breath, I’d be remiss not to thank the former AchieveMission Board, including but not limited to Crystal Sewell and Monisha Kapila, for their grace and wisdom in their approach to sunsetting AchieveMission, as well as their support of my decision to launch Tailwind Solutions.
Closing thoughts: I’ve recently found myself struggling to explain to my two-year-old why he can’t come inside the store with me as the Covid-19 pandemic resurges, why on certain days he can’t play outside on the playground because climate change-induced forest fires have created unsafe air quality, and why so many people in our city have to live outside all the time -- even on poor air quality days -- because they don’t have their own housing. These conversations hardly begin to scratch the surface of the entwined web of existential threats currently facing our communities, nations and planet. The work of justice and equity has never felt more urgent to me, and I know that the type of change we are seeking is hard-won over generations. I remain thankful and honored to be working alongside all of you to make this world more equitable, sane and humane, and I hope to continue our shared work for many years to come. Let’s be in touch. Sincerely, Patrick Garrity Founder & CEO Tailwind Solutions Pronouns: he/him/his
コメント