In this installment in our blog series about Irvine’s work to advance racial equity, I’m excited to share some efforts and lessons learned as we put equity more at the center of our Talent function.  

From our compensation practices to professional development, we are critically examining our processes through an equity lens and making deliberate changes to foster an inclusive environment where all staff feel like they belong and can thrive.  

We’re focusing our efforts in areas where our Talent function has the opportunity to make the most impact: pay equity and providing a living wage, requiring racial equity learning and development as part of development, and addressing equity in our policies. 

We are proud of what we have committed to do and accomplished so far. I also acknowledge that becoming more equitable requires ongoing listening, reflection, honest conversations, and the willingness to change. So, I share the below with excitement but also humility in what else we can learn and do.   

Pay Equity Study  

We completed our first, formal Pay Equity study in 2019. Most employers do a straightforward analysis to ensure they’re in compliance with pay equity laws. That is critical, but we went beyond compliance and examined representation across the Foundation. The data we collected informs many of our equity-related discussions and efforts, including the decision to restructure and expand our Leadership Team to include broader representation and distribute leadership more widely across Irvine, and help ensure staff perspectives are considered in decisions.  

Irvine’s compensation practices, like most organizations, are market driven. But markets reflect and often exacerbate the inequities that are baked into broader society. We chose to base salaries on set competency levels for each position, rather than negotiate, to avoid carrying forward inequities stemming from gender, racial, disability or other forms of discrimination that are often built into an employee’s salary history — often starting with the first salary they negotiated in their career.  

Living-Wage Program  

While there are limitations to what we can do as a single employer, an important advancement was to implement our Living-Wage Program. Paying a living wage — which, unlike the minimum wage, is intended to provide enough to afford necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare — is a way that we, as an employer, can address inequities in the compensation market.   

We analyzed the cost of living in Los Angeles and San Francisco and found that the salaries for some of our staff failed to meet those costs. We raised their salaries to do so, and we review market compensation and our living wage every other year. 

When we rolled out our Living-Wage program in 2022, there were only a few examples of philanthropies that had implemented something similar. Today, I’m gratified to see a growing movement to do so. At the recent Society for Human Resource Management conference, I was on a panel with peers from the Ford Foundation and C3 Nonprofit Consulting Group to discuss our experiences implementing living-wage programs. This would not have happened just a few years ago. We also shared this toolkit to help others explore why and how to join the burgeoning living-wage movement.  

Equity Development Goal 

We cannot achieve racial equity through pay practices or any one HR policy alone. Equitable practices come from the day-to-day approach of how we do our work together —and should be a fundamental part of everyone’s job. And staff who manage people and work have a particular responsibility because we carry the most power and privilege within an organization.  

To that end, we are implementing an Equity Competency Development Goal (CDG) as part of our talent program. By the end of 2024, each staff member will have to set an individual learning goal, relevant to their job, as part of their professional development and ability to advance at Irvine. 

The Equity CDG is a tool for each of us to be accountable to and acknowledged for our individual learning and practices. Irvine is stating that our internal equity work is not separate from our roles but rather an integral part. There is a saying in performance management: What gets counted gets done. This is saying we’re counting.  

This equity competency work is new for Irvine. We have created a self-assessment tool to guide staff in developing their goal. While we are still adjusting the process based on staff input, we share the tool here in the hopes that it will help anyone wanting to take this step.  

Personally, I approach this work with humility and the best intentions, knowing we’ll use rigor, build sound processes and policy, and still stumble a bit. We’ll have to learn and adjust, particularly to avoid causing harm by unintentionally perpetuating or reinforcing biases or inequities. And, if we do, we must acknowledge and repair it.  

And we’re figuring out how to strike the right balance of time, effort, and priority. Our efforts may feel like not enough or fast enough for some and too much, too soon for others. Each time we take a new step, I ask myself, “Are we more equitable now than before?” If the answer is yes, we’re moving in the right direction.