Career
Kaytee Ray-Riek
Philadelphia, PA
Growing up Kaytee didn’t learn how to talk about racism. Now she uses her voice as a powerful tool to help teams grappling with diversity and equity. Successfully self-employed Kaytee works with organizations that want to build strong internal cultures to support their staff to do their best work. Passionate and talented she helps teams and people talk about culture and be proactive about making changes to be more inclusive. I Admire U Kaytee for being a leader of change and impacting the lives of others by supporting people of color in activist work.
Interview by: Kristina Lilleberg
Growing up Kaytee didn’t learn how to talk about racism. Now she uses her voice as a powerful tool to help teams grappling with diversity and equity. Successfully self-employed Kaytee works with organizations that want to build strong internal cultures to support their staff to do their best work. Passionate and talented she helps teams and people talk about culture and be proactive about making changes to be more inclusive. I Admire U Kaytee for being a leader of change and impacting the lives of others by supporting people of color in activist work.
Interview by: Kristina Lilleberg
Kaytee in her own words...
1. You help build teams where everyone feels welcome and included, so that staff can focus on their crucial work fighting for justice. Can you describe your role and what motivated you to become a self-employed organizational development consultant?
I work with organizations -- particularly on the left -- that want to have inclusive, equitable cultures but aren’t sure how to go about that. That includes looking at hiring and HR practices, using retreats and in-person meetings to unearth challenges, working with managers to fix those challenges, and training staff on equity.
I got interested because at SumOfUs I was the first paid staff person, and Taren, the founder, and I were building the culture from scratch. We wanted to build a great place to work, and we knew that in the US especially, but also abroad, organizations had done an abysmal job of building organizations that are welcoming to all kinds of people.
The main thing we found is that organizations have to talk about culture, and be proactive about making changes to be more inclusive. If you don’t talk about culture and stay on top of people’s concerns, problems can crop up later on, sometimes at the most inopportune moments.
There were specific things we did at SumOfUs to make our team culture work, and I want to bring those tools and practices to other organizations that are grappling with diversity and equity. I want to make sure we have teams that are resilient and can talk about and take on hard issues.
2. You grew up in Charlotte, NC, and stated that it was a city full of racism that you were not fully aware of until you were older. When and how did you gain your awareness and how has it motivated your career?
I went to white schools, in mostly white neighborhoods. I had mostly white friends, and mostly white co-workers. Growing up, I’d learned that racism is the Klan, and police officers shooting water cannons at Civil Rights activists, and that you don’t talk about race or racism because pointing out difference is itself racist.
When I moved to Philadelphia, I was working with ACT UP, a multiracial group committed to ending AIDS through direct action. For the first time – because remember, I grew up in a very white neighborhood and vast majority of my friends were white -- I was working closely with people of color who weren’t going to put up with my bullshit.
After six months of micro-aggressions and a lack of awareness of my own privilege, a group of people of color in the group got together and asked me to take a break. It was one of the hardest days for me, but thankfully I was able to listen to them because I wanted to stay a member of ACT UP, I respected the people making the request, and I had white people around me that helped me make sense of what I was being told. I went to a training called Whites Confronting Racism, and had my eyes opened to the long history of racism in the United States. I started to understand why people were so upset with me!
I work with organizations -- particularly on the left -- that want to have inclusive, equitable cultures but aren’t sure how to go about that. That includes looking at hiring and HR practices, using retreats and in-person meetings to unearth challenges, working with managers to fix those challenges, and training staff on equity.
I got interested because at SumOfUs I was the first paid staff person, and Taren, the founder, and I were building the culture from scratch. We wanted to build a great place to work, and we knew that in the US especially, but also abroad, organizations had done an abysmal job of building organizations that are welcoming to all kinds of people.
The main thing we found is that organizations have to talk about culture, and be proactive about making changes to be more inclusive. If you don’t talk about culture and stay on top of people’s concerns, problems can crop up later on, sometimes at the most inopportune moments.
There were specific things we did at SumOfUs to make our team culture work, and I want to bring those tools and practices to other organizations that are grappling with diversity and equity. I want to make sure we have teams that are resilient and can talk about and take on hard issues.
2. You grew up in Charlotte, NC, and stated that it was a city full of racism that you were not fully aware of until you were older. When and how did you gain your awareness and how has it motivated your career?
I went to white schools, in mostly white neighborhoods. I had mostly white friends, and mostly white co-workers. Growing up, I’d learned that racism is the Klan, and police officers shooting water cannons at Civil Rights activists, and that you don’t talk about race or racism because pointing out difference is itself racist.
When I moved to Philadelphia, I was working with ACT UP, a multiracial group committed to ending AIDS through direct action. For the first time – because remember, I grew up in a very white neighborhood and vast majority of my friends were white -- I was working closely with people of color who weren’t going to put up with my bullshit.
After six months of micro-aggressions and a lack of awareness of my own privilege, a group of people of color in the group got together and asked me to take a break. It was one of the hardest days for me, but thankfully I was able to listen to them because I wanted to stay a member of ACT UP, I respected the people making the request, and I had white people around me that helped me make sense of what I was being told. I went to a training called Whites Confronting Racism, and had my eyes opened to the long history of racism in the United States. I started to understand why people were so upset with me!
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"There were specific things we did at SumOfUs to make our team culture work, and I want to bring those tools and practices to other organizations that are grappling with diversity and equity. I want to make sure we have teams that are resilient and can talk about and take on hard issues."
3. Your website describes your experience when a group of ACT UP members of color asked you to take a break from the group. How did this experience change you, how did you overcome it, and how has it impacted your career?
Since then, I’ve learned how to think about my own behavior in groups, and am learning every day how to better support people of color in activist work. Some people call this “being an ally,” but lately I’ve seen people talking about co-conspirators – someone who works with people of color to conspire against racist systems.
Fast forward to my time at SumOfUs, where we were creating this new culture from scratch, I knew that anti-racism had to be baked into the culture from day 1. So we created hiring and promotion policies that didn’t let subjective judgments get in the way, and we sponsored a paid fellowship program to train people of color in digital campaigning. Most importantly, we talked about race, how we were falling short, and what we wanted to do next to keep making the organization a more inclusive workplace.
4. As a senior leader, you’ve worked to build trust and safety for staff to feel like they could speak up when they are frustrated. What are some of your strategies for building trust, safety, and diversity?
First, building deep relationships with people is one of the most important things. You want a relationship where you’re both learning from and pushing each other to be as good as you can be.
Second, when people raise concerns about what needs to change, take that very seriously. So often, managers try to explain things away. For example, when a woman of color notices her ideas are not heard until someone else says them, don’t jump right to “oh, but I’m sure the person didn’t mean it” or “maybe you could have been more clear.” Instead, take a moment to realize there’s a pattern in society where the ideas of women of color are often ignored until someone else says them – and that it’s not out of the question that that pattern may be showing up in your organization too.
Finally -- and this is the part that I think organizations miss the most -- actually change things that need to change. Look at your HR policies, your external communication, etc. Not only are you helping fix the one challenge in front of you, but you’re building up your organization’s muscle at changing culture, and creating a pattern where people know things will change if they speak up. That way, later on when people have bigger or more challenging concerns that could make or break their success in the organization, they know they can raise those and that they’ll be taken seriously and addressed.
"So often, managers try to explain things away. For example, when a woman of color notices her ideas are not heard until someone else says them, don’t jump right to “oh, but I’m sure the person didn’t mean it” or “maybe you could have been more clear.” Instead, take a moment to realize there’s a pattern in society where the ideas of women of color are often ignored until someone else says them – and that it’s not out of the question that that pattern may be showing up in your organization too."
5. You stated that with diversity come challenges. What are the challenges you believe that we face with diversity and what are some ways we can help overcome them?
Because everyone has a different background, what you think of as “normal” and what I think of as “normal” are not the same – and those differences are often unspoken. This creates friction at work, especially when you factor in hierarchy. For example, if senior leadership expects that employees very rarely take vacation except one big deal thing every couple years, but others in the organization come from a background where if you’re offered time off you take it, then someone who takes frequent, offered vacations may be penalized at work without the boss even realizing this is happening. And the staff person may just see that they’re never getting promoted because they “need to be more committed” but nowhere did anyone say that you’re not actually supposed to take the vacation you’re offered. That’s unspoken cultural friction.
We fix this by talking as a team about how people are frustrated at work. We make it safe to share concerns, and make changes based on what we’re hearing. And you also make the organization’s cultural norms clear and explicit. One easy way to do this is to write cultural norms down, so that when something in the culture feels unusual to a staff person or they’re not sure how to act, they at least can see what’s expected. But then you have to regularly check in on those cultural norms. If everything feels normal to cisgender white American men with college degrees, and most of the staff culture feels weird to the women or trans people or people of color or non-Americans, that’s when you need to make some changes to your culture.
6. You have so much experience organizing direct action protests and fundraising. What advice do you have for others wanting to get involved in volunteerism and what are some resources?
I think there’s a difference between volunteering (as people usually think of it) and wanting to change the way the world works. There’s the axiom: “If you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself.” But I actually prefer where the artist Ricardo Levin Morales took it: “If you give me a fish, you have fed me for a day. If you teach me to fish, then you have fed me until the river is contaminated or the shoreline seized for development. But if you teach me how to organize, then whatever the challenge I can join together with my peers and we will fashion our own solution.”
Volunteering allows you to remain separate from the problem. You work at a food bank, then you leave and go back to your life. What I want to challenge people to do is look deeper – what is causing problems in the world, and how are you working to tackle those problems at the root -- in a way that’s led by the people most affected by those problems?
There are great organizations to join to help with this. You could get started by creating a petition through SumOfUs or MoveOn about an issue that matters to you. You could join any number of local or national groups, like Showing Up for Racial Justice (for white people), Black Youth Project 100 (for young Black people), one of the affiliates of National People’s Action, Grassroots Global Justice, Right to the City, or PICO National Network, or national groups like GetEQUAL, Jobs With Justice, United We Dream and more. If you’re not sure where to start, google an issue you care about and the word “activism” and see what you find.
I always find this quote, from Aboriginal activists in Australia, to help me think about the work I’m doing: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
7. When you aren’t busy running your own consulting company, you train future service dogs with an organization called Canine Companions for Independence. How long have you been doing this and what does training CCI puppies entail?
Ah, the puppies! My husband Max and I have been fostering future service dogs for 5 years. We have raised 3 dogs and are currently raising our 4th. It entails getting unbelievably cute 2-month old puppies who don’t know anything except how to pee on everything, and then caring for them for a year and a half. We teach them about 20 different commands and socialize them to lots of experiences, like airplanes and movie theaters. Everyone always asks, and yes, it is so hard to give them back – but it’s the right thing to do, because these dogs are going to change someone’s life. After 6 months of professional training, about half of the dogs graduate to be service dogs (we get to meet the people they are paired with) and about half are released to be very well trained pets.
8. I’m curious Kaytee, what’s next?
Succeeding at being self-employed. Looking for organizations that want to build strong internal cultures that support all staff to do their best work.
"You work at a food bank, then you leave and go back to your life. What I want to challenge people to do is look deeper – what is causing problems in the world, and how are you working to tackle those problems at the root -- in a way that’s led by the people most affected by those problems?"
9. I Admire U for using your talents and skills to impact diversity challenges for others, whom do you admire?
There are so many people, but I’ll highlight two: First, my husband Max. He works with math teachers to help them listen to their students and help their students really learn. But lately he’s been speaking out in to math teachers about hard things like race. And it’s having an impact: One of his talks went a little bit viral in the teacher community recently! Oh, and he’s supported me to go on this self-employed adventure, and has gotten quite good at giving me pep talks when I’m freaking out.
The other person I really admire is Sudha Nandagopal, who works in the Seattle Mayor’s office creating genuine avenues for people of color to be involved in crafting the city’s environmental policies so that they protect and center those communities. This has never been done in a major US city before, and it’s really inspiring to watch the work that she’s doing. She’s also an aspiring food blogger, sharing healthy Indian recipes. And she has one of the cutest dogs I’ve ever met (that I swear I’ve forgiven for eating my Nanaimo bar that one time).
There are so many people, but I’ll highlight two: First, my husband Max. He works with math teachers to help them listen to their students and help their students really learn. But lately he’s been speaking out in to math teachers about hard things like race. And it’s having an impact: One of his talks went a little bit viral in the teacher community recently! Oh, and he’s supported me to go on this self-employed adventure, and has gotten quite good at giving me pep talks when I’m freaking out.
The other person I really admire is Sudha Nandagopal, who works in the Seattle Mayor’s office creating genuine avenues for people of color to be involved in crafting the city’s environmental policies so that they protect and center those communities. This has never been done in a major US city before, and it’s really inspiring to watch the work that she’s doing. She’s also an aspiring food blogger, sharing healthy Indian recipes. And she has one of the cutest dogs I’ve ever met (that I swear I’ve forgiven for eating my Nanaimo bar that one time).
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