Awa by Beloved

Awa by Beloved is the first virtual DEI assessment for the workplace with an emphasis on mutual accountability. Awa uses hundreds of indicators to assess DEI capacity at the individual and organizational level, develop personalized solutions and measurable plans, track progress, and ultimately operationalize equity in order to create real, actionable change. This is done through access and engagement with three Beloved Community tools: the Equity Audit (EA), Equity Lens Map (ELM), and Equity Work Plan (EWP). The EA is a free tool that helps organizations assess equity in their institutional practices and identify how they are performing on DEI. The ELM offers staff individual self-assessments to give organizations critical insights into their experiences and specific needed capacity-building supports. These provide data for institutional three-year EWPs to track each organization’s progress to their specific, quantifiable goals.

Awa by Beloved employs liberatory design - an approach that helps interrupt inequity and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression by addressing equity challenges and change efforts in complex systems. Awa is composed of a progressive web application that work on both desktop and mobile devices. The application allows organizations to perform the EA and the ELM, view reports, schedule debriefs, use the EWP, access Beloved Community resource library, and participate in cohort sessions. These tools are all designed to be done in community - human-centered design is at the core of the process, and is instrumental to creating learning opportunities across organizational units.

Using a progressive web application and liberatory design principles, Beloved Community created Awa by Beloved to turn an organization’s equity commitments into action. Awa (meaning “all of us”) is a technology solution for organizational teams to have clearer, more efficient access to data, tool administration, and aligned, recommended resources for their equity journey. Awa by Beloved is the first virtual tool suite designed to help organizations on their equity journeys develop measurable plans for sustainable, long-term change. 

An accessible technological solution for small businesses, Awa’s suite of tools, including the free Equity Audit, empowers organizations to create sustainable, personalized plans for racial and economic equity. In addition to the tool suite, Awa connects an organization with the Beloved Community team for guidance in conducting assessments and implementing measurable, systemic change.

In 2018, Beloved piloted the first tool with three target organizations (schools and nonprofits) and developed the tool standards and substandards.  We solicited beta feedback from 20 education leaders, researchers, and corporate advisory members that helped us refine indicators and constituency groups for their sectors. Since then, we have completed validation and standards-setting exercises with psychometricians, resulting in white papers confirming the validity of each tool.

The Awa application and the tools within it are intentionally designed to be leveraged for multiple entities or sectors to assess and address the same needs for their equity strategy, meaning it can be implemented at any organization. Awa by Beloved can be used for entire organizations and even single departments, teams, or programs. Together, teams of 5-10 can evaluate how diversity, equity, and inclusion are currently manifesting within their organization, and prioritize next steps that will result in long-term sustainable change.

The target population whose lives Beloved Community is working to directly and meaningfully improve are those of our most marginalized communities. Too often racial and economic inclusion interventions - at work, in school, and at home - are focused on changing individual behaviors, without addressing the racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness inherent in the systems that undergird our institutions. Awa by Beloved is ultimately a community-informed technology by design. The suite of tools within the app empower businesses and their staff and leadership to voice, understand and address their equity challenges, while also providing Beloved Community with insights and data that allow us to continue creating transformative solution for dismantling the systems upholding white supremacy.

Beloved Community is rooted in New Orleans, Louisiana, with programming in Memphis, Indianapolis, Kansas City, New England, Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Awa by Beloved platform engages different users – administrators, leaders, funders, and community leaders – in all sectors and communities that we serve. We have multiple versions of the equity audit in Awa – K-12, nonprofit, small business, higher education, B2B, POS - and will soon release a healthcare version. Demographics vary across these communities and sectors. Of the local education agencies (LEA) we serve, the majority are in urban communities and serve 85-100% Black and Brown youth. In New Orleans, our home base and a majority-minority city, we have experienced a boom in small businesses and entrepreneurship, with startup rates since 2005 more than doubling the national rate. This provides fertile ground for our goal of leveraging Awa’s automation features to increase the number of small business/org users with less program staff time.

Awa by Beloved is a simple solution for a complex question - how can organizations assess, prioritize, and operationalize diversity, equity, and inclusion for measurable, long-term change?

Incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion into an organization’s culture and practices is critical for any organization’s long-term success. This is especially true for small businesses who are trying to scale, attract and retain talent, and appeal to diverse customers. DEI is the foundation for how a company operates: who it hires, pay and benefits, how it defines success, how talent is identified and promoted, how and what data are collected and tracked, what vendors it works with, etc. Yet, for many small businesses, this sort of analysis and strategic planning - let alone parsing the various tools and vocabularies on the market - can feel daunting and overwhelming, even impossible, to achieve with limited time, capacity, and money. For those organizations who have made strides toward advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, they are left wondering if they’re actually moving the needle. Until now, there have been no reliable tools to evaluate success in achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Awa by Beloved fits neatly into the Challenge dimension of “Data and Impact.” It is a proven and easily-implementable technology that gives businesses the tools to capture, synthesize, and optimize individual-level equity data for improved DEI outcomes. In turn, small businesses can make informed decisions about culture, capacity, and resources that will enable them to remain resilient and sustainable.

Beloved’s theory of change calls for coalitions within and across sectors to create large-scale change, advocate for equitable policy, and achieve racial and economic equity in a given region. 

Awa will accelerate our impact from serving hundreds of organizations to thousands of organizations. We are particularly interested in the outcomes when an entire sector, coalition, school district, grantee portfolio, or state department in a region commits to using Awa to assess and track their progress collectively. Based on our theory of change, the ultimate success will be when those coalitions are making sustainable changes in their communities – Awa is the tool that helps them remain accountable to their public. Because Awa has multiple versions of the equity audit for a diverse and growing number of sectors (schools, nonprofits, small business, corporations, etc.), it gives multiple sectors in a region a shared language around diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. This shared language creates an opportunity for leaders across a community to all commit to, assess, and advance similar needs.

This past year, 500 organizations signed up for our Equity Audit tool. Since launching Awa, we have increased the sign-up rate and completion rate.  This fiscal year 178 organizations signed up for Awa in a 6-month window. Awa users have an equity audit completion rate of 54.2%  and a conversion rate of 4.8%. 

With the introduction of Awa, we are able to track individual users for the first time. Since December, 476 users have logged into Awa for the team’s audit needs. 

In one year, Beloved’s goal is for 500 new organizational accounts to be created in Awa, with 200 annual subscriptions, and 3,000 employee accounts created. This is the minimum threshold we would expect for subsequent years.

Beloved Community centers our most marginalized populations. As such, Awa by Beloved aims to elevate those voices through the data sets built by our equity audits. These influence our organizational strategy, informing what supports are needed to advance our vision of the Beloved community. More broadly, our recent strategic planning process was intentional in bringing together community members and previous clients to influence organizational strategy. 

Beloved’s Board of Directors and Advisory Board are both regional representatives and sector leaders. For example, our Tech Advisory and Research Advisory boards were highly influential in the strategy around our tool and platform development for Awa. 

Beloved works across the U.S., with our main offices in New Orleans. We work at the nexus of schools, housing and the workplace. Because our approach is intersectional, so too are our stakeholders, as well as our solution, which is broadly applicable across these communities.

Beloved Community was founded in 2017 to develop sustainable regional solutions for racial and economic equity. Beloved Community envisions more than individuals or singular organizations working to advance equity – we seek to create communities of practice that share a commitment to transformation. This has been an integral part of our approach and our ability to build trust in our organization.

In our first five years, we have impacted 500,000+ individuals and 497 organizations. We are the backbone organization for local collaborative impact efforts, such as our NOLA C.A.R.E.S. cohort of 12 local nonprofits serving small business owners in early care and education. Beloved builds community truth by being invited in through existing relationships with our partner organizations, because we have a proven track record for implementing lasting change within the organizations and communities where we work.

Beloved Community recently completed a five-year strategic plan, with the goal of raising $30 million to enact it. Within that plan are four goals specific to this opportunity:

1. Capitalize on current strategic regions by developing deeper connections to key funders and organizations to become the preeminent provider of equity work. We will use our work in New Orleans to refine our process and build the in-house capacity to create the roadmap for success in other regions.

2. Expand suite of web-based measurement tools. Unlike other tools on the market, Awa can provide data and insights into what is fundamentally unique about particular industries/sectors and enable us to develop work plans accordingly. Our tools can be applied in global contexts, including flexibility to meet nuances of local culture and multilingual versions; these can be used in minoritized language communities in the U.S. as well as in global contexts.

3. Lead in the creation and measurement of DEI outcomes data. Companies want to know their investments are producing results. The ability to demonstrate which programs are most effective at creating change and implementing new ways to measure this progress over the long term provides us with a tremendous opportunity to secure funding and position Beloved as the leader in the DEI field. These data will also be instrumental in improving policy and practices and providing transparency to clients and communities. 

4. Benefitting 2 million people in five years: By the time we have fully implemented this plan in 2028, we will have impacted 2 million individuals as a result of our programming, research, and software development.

As noted above, one of Beloved’s strategic goals is that by 2028, we will launch an independent for-profit technology company offering award-winning tools. Partnership with the Truist Foundation and MIT Solve, as well as funding from the prize, would be enormously beneficial from both a funding and marketing standpoint.

As part of this strategy, we have an organizational goal of increasing the number of small businesses using Awa by Beloved. We know technology is a powerful tool for driving sustainable change in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion, not just for any one business, but for the entire small business ecosystem and the workers - particularly those from marginalized communities - within it.  We also realize that expanding into the surging small business ecosystem is key to our mission to Build Sustainable Change. 

Winning the Inspire Award Challenge would be further validation of our approach for providing equity solutions in an increasingly crowded field for equity consultants and audits. The award would also give us marketing credibility in the small business ecosystem in a time of somewhat waning interest in DEI solutions. The access to learning modules, workshops, and networks offered through the Finalist Support Program, as well as the funding support, would add diverse perspectives and helpful insights into how we could efficiently and effectively scale Awa by Beloved across various industries, while providing necessary capital for doing so.

Beloved Community is already a sustainable organization with operations in several communities across the United States. However, we have a goal of increasing our earned revenue to 50% of our operating costs over the next five years. We also know that for our work to have maximum ecosystem impact, we will need to expand the types of organizations and sectors who are using Awa by Beloved. The holistic supports offered by MIT Solve and the Truist Foundation would be incredibly beneficial in expanding our networks, refining our distribution model, and informing our plans to scale.