Reflecting on 2019: A Special Year of Celebrating 25 Years of IISC Love

February 5, 2020 Leave a comment

IISC excels at many things, but one of the things we don’t do as often as we might is to share our accomplishments and toot our own horn. In the spirit of collaboration, we rarely take credit; however, I do want to elevate and celebrate the special contributions IISC has made this year.                                    

As challenging as it was, 2019 was a successful year at IISC. We served over 70 client organizations and networks and trained over 700 leaders in the skills of collaboration and racial equity. We published sixteen blogs to influence our field and share learnings on the deep importance of empathy, equity, daring leadership, and networks.

We have shaped the field of racial equity and justice by combining our knowledge, experience, and skills with the likes of great organizations working for change like Race Forward, Building Movement Project, and Change Elemental.

We built tool kits for racial equity for United Way Worldwide and campaigns such as the 21 Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge used by networks all over the world! We started building a workshop curriculum for the breakthrough book Decolonizing Wealth by author Edgar Villanueva, which is shaking the philanthropic field to its core. We offered two well-attended webinars for current and aspiring IISC staff and affiliates on network practice and racial equity consulting at IISC.              

We celebrated our 25th anniversary with over 200 old and new friends and raised over $170,000 to fund our work, innovations to our products, and a video that displays IISC’s rich history.

Our team has been on the move upgrading the Facilitative Leadership for Social Change curriculum with a racial equity lens and frameworks. Advancing Racial Justice in Organizations (ARJ), our signature workshop to help leaders implement racial justice in day-to-day organizational life, will now be offered to cohorts of leaders seeking deep change for racial justice. Due to its popularity, we have also piloted an advanced ARJ workshop to take learning to the next level. We are developing a new concept for a workshop designed for people of color to support their leadership as they traverse the challenges of change in deeply racialized contexts. Freedom is calling!

Financially speaking, IISC ended 2019 in the positive. That’s IISC’s third year in a row of sustaining a healthy financial surplus; an accomplishment never seen in our 25 years. We are starting a reserve fund to help us through future difficult times and unanticipated needs.           

It has been a remarkable year with impact, learning, and growth all the way through.

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