Putting Equity at the Heart of Our Mission at Planned Parenthood of Greater New York: A Snapshot of Our Journey

by Fiona Kanagasingam, Chief Equity & Learning Officer, PPGNY

As a newly merged organization drawing on a 106-year-old history, the past year has been a difficult but critical time for Planned Parenthood of Greater New York to engage in an intentional equity transformation process. We have faced challenges wrought by a devastating pandemic with unequal, unjust racial impacts; trauma, conflict, and transition caused by years of systemic racism boiling over outside and within our institution; and questions about our culture and values as a newly merged organization.

This moment also gifts us an opportunity to chart a brave course as a new institution that aligns with our shared values that everyone deserves to live in a world where people are protected, have the freedom to make decisions about their body without judgment or persecution, and have the resources they need to be healthy and safe.

Our mission and vision necessarily commit us to actively working toward being a multicultural, inclusive, and anti-racist organization where all community and staff thrive. Five goals animate this ongoing commitment as outlined in our Equity Action Plan, adopted in January 2020:

• Ensure PPGNY workforce, leadership, and Board reflect and respond to marginalized communities
• Commit to organizational standards and practices centered on intersectional race equity
• Provide equitable and inclusive health care to all
• Build accountable relationships with communities of color
• Use data to measure and drive progress on equity commitments

As an organization whose primary business is to provide health care, as well as education and advocacy to secure access to care, we know that racism is a public health crisis. This country’s historical legacy and contemporary reality of systemic and medical racism has meant that communities of color, particularly Black women, are more likely to have poorer sexual and reproductive health outcomes; have lower access to health care services; and experience racism and discrimination by a health care provider, which not only exacerbates barriers to health, but also adds stresses that take a toll on patients’ health.

PPGNY’s work is not immune to these barriers and biases, and our legacy as a historically white-led organization with complicity in reproductive harm requires us to turn our lens inward to create a deep shift in our organizational composition, skills, practices, systems and norms. Our journey into this transformation process has been non-linear, with starts and stops, building on the vision, efforts, and labor of multiple stakeholders. We share our early, imperfect, and continuing journey here for collective learning and accountability.

PPGNY’s equity journey

Foundational approaches to and lessons gleaned from our journey include the following:

• Assess organizational dynamics: We have sought to leverage quantitative data, disaggregated by race, to illuminate how white-dominant culture creates racial disparities and disparate realities, and engage in regular dialogues to identify how various levels of racism and other inequities show up in our work.
• Reckon with history and legacy: Acknowledging that the past is alive in the present, we launched Reviving Radical, an initiative to reckon with our legacy and founder Margaret Sanger’s support for eugenics and the harmful impact of that decision on women of color, people with disabilities, and poor communities at the dawn of the birth control movement.
• “Name it and frame it” with a race-explicit analysis: We have sought to build a shared language that distinguishes between “diversity”, “inclusion” and “equity” and that elevates our focus on “equity”; centers race and racism explicitly but not exclusively; and engages directly with key concepts that accurately describe the problem we are trying to solve. For example, our Equity School curriculum includes the impact of medical racism on the reproductive rights movement and our organization, as well as a discussion on how white dominant culture shows up at PPGNY.
• Expand our focus from implicit bias to systemic racism: We have prioritized rebuilding systems, as a complement to anti-racist training to operationalize equity across the organization. As a result, various structures, policies and protocols have been created across clinical care, hiring, talent management, compensation, financial decision-making, vendor management, external partnerships, communications, and development to gradually increase accountability for equity.
• Structure and resource for results: Equity transformation work is led by a Chief Equity and Learning Officer with a seat at the Senior Leadership Team and reporting to the CEO. This leader also manages an Equity & Learning department, which is separate from Human Resources (HR) and from Equity & Engagement, an external-facing department focused on community engagement and education, enabling a dedicated, cross-functional approach to equity that is not limited to HR.

In July this year, we achieved a milestone as part of PPGNY’s Reviving Radical initiative when we announced the removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from the Manhattan Health Center as a public commitment to reckon with our founder’s harmful connections to the eugenics movement. This announcement is one of many shifts for holding overdue dialogues and uplifting a vision for repair and transformation that communities of color and reproductive justice leaders have been calling on for decades.

It is still early in our journey. Harms and ruptures have happened and require healing, conflict may increase in the short term as we lift the lid on long-standing inequities, and we continue to learn from and iterate on the strategies deployed to advance transformation.

Each day is an opportunity to reconnect to the purpose of this work. It takes courage to call out and dismantle systems that don’t serve us, and even more vision, discipline, rigor, compassion, and fortitude to build an organization we have few models for. This means holding complexity and multiple truths in several important ways:

• Simultaneously disrupting old practices while iterating on new ones within an existing institutional infrastructure — our community cannot afford for us to tear things down without also building up;
• Engaging in generative conflict without shaming one another — in particular, we must resist simplistic narratives of heroes, villains and victims;
• Facing and transforming harm through systems of accountability that include restorative practice, while doing our own intra-personal work to create appropriate boundaries for navigating institutional and individual trauma; and
• Promoting accountable relationships with communities of color that transform traditional charity mindsets to abundance frameworks of reciprocity.

It’s a monumental time at PPGNY and we are deeply grateful to the many colleagues, supporters, and community members who remind us of why we exist, and to whom we are accountable.

You can read the full report on our Equity Transformation Journey here