This past week at City Year Columbus, I had the opportunity to meet with several staff at City Year to better understand the organizational structure, get a feel for my role, and prepare for the upcoming staff retreat. 

On Monday I met with Zandra Casto who acts as Impact Director. As impact director Zandra works directly with AmeriCorps members in ensuring they get all the necessary training required to become student success coaches and work as near-peer mentors to underserved students. Zandra explained the tools they use to measure student growth such as Iready tests for academics and a Holistic Student Assessment (HSA) used for social/emotional skills. 

Later I met with Tiffani Gottlieb who is Managing Director of Impact. Tiffani’s role includes interpreting all the data collected on students’ growth from schools and transforming that into an Annual Impact Report, one-pagers for fundraising events, statistics for prospective donors, etc. She shared with me areas for improvement to progress towards goals. Some of these include strengthening the partnership with the school district and AmeriCorps members as well as having more consistency with data sharing between the school and City Year Columbus. 

However, the most impactful event I attended during the week was our annual staff retreat. This year it was hosted at the Worthington Hills Country Club. Besides the delectable poke bowl I had for lunch, there was a lot of new information to digest. The workshop topic this year was microaggressions. As a woman of color, I have faced microaggressions my entire life but was unaware of my unintentional bias or possible slights against others. The workshop called for us to reevaluate some of the common phrases or terms we use in our daily lives to be more sensitive to the affected communities. 

One tactic I am planning on using in my daily life is calling in/out. Oftentimes when I am being disrespected I tend to disengage from the conversation. Calling in requires the offender to reflect on their actions and the deeper implications. While more passive this can create room for challenging conversations which can hopefully educate people on their ignorance. On the other hand, calling out is when the offender needs to know their behavior will not be tolerated. 

There is a time and place for each response and in certain contexts one might be favorable over the others but it’s up to you to make the best judgment to promote equity and further professional development.