Leveling the Playing Field: Interrupting Patterns of Power and Privilege
Presented by: Debby Irving, Racial Justice Educator and Writer 

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Using a series of pointed questions, Debby works with participants to build a graphic map of the groups people belong to because of social locations and historical roles in U.S. society. Participants will explore the social beliefs, attitudes, and dynamics that can perpetuate patterns of power and privilege. Understanding that the more versed we become in the ways of whiteness, the more able we are to set our individual and institutional intentions to actively counter it.

This seminar offers a reframing of DEI work to shift current power and privilege dynamics to equitable shared problem solving, envisioning, and co-creating. Participants will leave with powerful tools to analyze power dynamics and cultivate transformative cultures in their circles of influence.
• Understand the dynamics of power and privilege, particularly with regard to race and ethnicity
• Build the skills necessary to disrupt power and privilege and instead cultivate resilient and transformational cultural attitudes and behaviors
• Monitor your own personal and institutionalized tendencies to think and act in ways that reproduce power and privilege dynamics

Debby Irving brings to racial justice the perspective of working as a community organizer and classroom teacher for 25 years without understanding racism as a systemic issue or her own whiteness as an obstacle to grappling with it. As general manager of Boston’s Dance Umbrella and First Night, and later as a classroom teacher, she struggled to make sense of tensions she could feel but not explain in racially mixed settings. In 2009, a graduate school course gave her the answers she’d been looking for and launched her on a journey of discovery. Debby now devotes herself to working with white people exploring the impact white skin can have on perception, problemsolving, and engaging in racial justice work.

Series Partners: Enterprise Bank in partnership with the Greater Lowell Chamber of Commerce, Greater Lowell Community Foundation, Lowell Development & Financial Corporation, The Lowell Plan, Lawrence Partnership, Essex County Community Foundation, Non-Profit Alliance of Greater Lowell and The Theodore Edson Parker Foundation