By Amy Rabideau Silvers
 
Monique Liston's four-part Dignity Capacity Building workshop series starts Thursday, November 3, 2016, 8–10AM. Learn more and register here.
 
People and organizations can have the best of intentions, but creating equity requires something more deliberate, says Monique Liston.
 
It’s really all about treating people with dignity and making that treatment a priority.
 
Monique has developed a workshop series that focuses on increasing the capacity of organizations to put dignity at the center. The series will be presented in its entirety for the first time at NPC, with the first of four Thursday sessions set for Nov. 3. The series is offered as part of NPC’s Boys and Men of Color Initiative. It’s also in keeping with the My Brother’s Keeper initiative launched by President Obama.
 
“This is my research,” says Monique, now a Ph.D. candidate with the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “I developed the series to help organizations understand the concept of dignity and the process of achieving it, and I place a lot of emphasis on black males in particular,” she says. Born and raised in Milwaukee, she earlier earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a master’s in public administration from the University of Delaware.
 
The four two-hour sessions for nonprofit leaders will focus on:

• Understanding their organization’s “social and political space” and how to shape the context for success.
• Developing shared language and concepts on how dignity relates to a person’s sense of worth “among the worthiness of others.”
• How to conduct a Dignity Audit to review how the organization functions and the ways dignity “may be affirmed or denied by clients or program participants.”
• How to reflect on racial equity issues and create “a dignity-based strategy to improve the organization’s work to address racial equity.”

 
One of the most important aspects of all this is having a shared framework to talk about dignity means—and how to challenge situations in which people are not being treated with dignity. Throughout her research, Monique has found that people working within the sector understand how others treat clients with dignity through the use of language.
 
“I call that Dignity Talk,” Monique says.
 
“It resonates,” she says. “I continue to get people who say how much this resonates with their personal experiences. They say, ‘You’re giving me language for something I didn’t have the words to talk about.’ ”
 
Some of the moments aren’t about their experiences but a realization of how words or actions have impacted others.
 
“The people who work with youth have so much to consider in caring for young people, including in school experiences,” she says. “We need to think about how young people’s dignity is diminished in everyday life. It can make a real difference to a person of color, a girl or a boy, to feel that they are not as capable.”
 
Monique offers one example from her own experience. It happened in graduate school as she was considering whether to do the traditional paper or try the more challenging route of producing a thesis.
 
“I really wanted to do a thesis,” she remembers.
 
Instead, a professor told her that probably wasn’t a good idea.
 
“I think that might be a little bit outside your reach,” he said.
 
“He barely knew me and said that,” she says.
 
The words shook her confidence and prompted her to take the safer, traditional route, something that still stings in memory.
 
“Are we saying these things to young fathers? To formerly incarcerated people? To young people whose grades aren’t on track? How important are the words that we say? Do they limit someone’s potential or are they helpful?” she asks. “I talk about the dignity of the pursuit of excellence.”
 
She hopes the workshops give people and organizations a framework for both equity and excellence.
 
“People should walk away feeling challenged,” Monique says. “It’s in our everyday conversations inside and outside of the workplace that we see if we are really doing the work of understanding dignity.”

by Nicole Groshek, National Business Furniture

At National Business Furniture, our efforts to give back to Milwaukee started three years ago when we made the decision to start an official NBF volunteer program for employees to take part in on behalf of our company.

​Deciding to start the program was the easy part. We’d been calling Milwaukee our home for nearly 40 years, and most of our employees were eager to have the opportunity to give a little back to a community that we’d all grown to love. The hard part? Knowing where to begin. With so many Milwaukee nonprofit organizations in need of help and with so many NBF employees to organize, the task of starting up our volunteer program was daunting to say the least. In the end, a little hard work and a lot of helping hands made it happen, and this is how.  
 
Put together a committee
When the decision was made to start a volunteer program at NBF, we immediately assembled a volunteer leadership council that would be responsible for organizing events and getting employees involved. One person from each department of our company volunteered to be a member of the council, which ensured that every department would have a go-to person to talk to when questions and concerns arose. Planning our committee in this way also ensured that the entire company would stay in the loop above and beyond the company-wide emails that were sent detailing each volunteer event.  
 
Find the right nonprofits to work with
Getting a committee together at NBF was one thing, but figuring out what charities and nonprofit organizations to work with was another matter entirely. With all of the nonprofits occupying the Milwaukee area, where do you start? Fortunately, we had the opportunity to team up with the Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee to streamline the process. Because they organize a Business Volunteer Council of approximately 50 companies from around Milwaukee that also have volunteer programs, NPC was able to introduce us to the right organizations that were in need of the type of help we were able to offer. NPC also gave NBF key decision makers advice as to how to gain exposure and how to most adequately utilize our budget.
 
Develop a plan of action
Once we had a list of volunteer opportunities, it was time to make a plan of attack. The first thing we did was survey our employees. It’s the employees who would be doing the volunteering, so we knew they should have a say in what they'd be doing. The survey asked employees basic questions related to their level of interest in volunteering as well as what types of volunteer events they would be interested in participating in.

Once the survey results were in, the NBF volunteer leadership committee met to decide on what the first-ever NBF volunteer event would be. In the end, it was decided that our first event would be planting trees for the Urban Ecology Center at Washington Park. It was something fun, something employees had shown interest in, and the Urban Ecology Center really needed our help! We had a good size turnout, and since that first volunteer event the number of employees attending our other volunteer events has grown steadily.
 
Make it fun
If there’s anything we’ve learned over our three years of volunteering, it’s that volunteering is about so much more than helping the community in Milwaukee. It’s also about helping the community within our own company. Attending volunteer events has given NBF employees a chance to get to know their co-workers in a setting outside of the office, which we’ve found has boosted our overall employee morale and satisfaction rate. Due to the mutual benefit of our company and our community, it’s always our goal to get as many NBF employees out to our volunteer events as possible. How do we do that? By making it fun, of course!

It’s easy to make volunteering events fun for everyone involved, even if the event is a task as unappealing as cleaning up the Milwaukee River. We’ve done things like purchasing team NBF t-shirts and offering free snacks. We even implemented a paid time off program wherein each NBF employee is allotted eight hours of time off for volunteering. Employees may use those hours to volunteer anywhere they want during the week, or they can redeem the hours at a later date should they choose to participate in a weekend company volunteer event. The time-off incentive has certainly seemed to increase the number of employees we see participating.

With the help of our volunteer leadership committee, the Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee and our own employees, the National Business Furniture volunteer program has gotten off to a great start. Although volunteering has been a ton of fun these last few years, the real joy comes from seeing the fruits of our labors. The peaches of our labors, to be exact! Three years following the very first NBF volunteer event, the Urban Ecology Center at Washington Park reported that the peach trees NBF employees planted have borne fruit for the first time. Well done, volunteers!