Depending on the size of your organization, a minimum initial project with us currently starts at around $20,000 to $30,000, with the expectation of an annual DEI budget of $100,000 or more.
We typically work with organizations of at least 30 employees or more. We have clients with 150, 300, 1200 employees or larger, mostly non-profit organizations or mission-driven companies. We have also been brought into global organizations to work with specific teams or departments.
Our most extensive work currently is with clients with 100-300 employees who are spending $400-$650K a year for 2-3 years, which might include culture assessments and discovery, employee surveys, workshop facilitation, DEI strategic planning, executive leadership coaching, DEI and performance coaching, restorative justice, and work with your Board.
Think of us as your DEI department as we work with you to build your internal DEI capacity and hire an internal DEI team. We also work to support already established internal DEI teams within organizations.
To truly integrate and operationalize DEI into every aspect of your organization, you will be best setting yourself up for success if you establish an appropriate budget now so the work is built into your business model and operations budget.
We believe that you will see the return on investment and in fact that there is no fulfilling your organization’s mission without it.
Building DEI into your budget means that you should not expect your annual DEI budget to decrease over time. You should also account for time for your staff (and not just those with DEI as part of their role) to spend on DEI workshops, coaching and other initiatives, and, thanks to feedback from past clients, we now include an estimate of staff time with our proposals where we can. As your budget for external DEI consultants decreases, your budget for internal resources should increase by at least as much, if not more, depending on the overall trajectory and growth of your organization.
An important note - we do not believe an organization is best served by having DEI report to HR, nor does it best serve the needs of HR either. DEI is of course critical to HR, and we work closely with HR departments. However, based on experience, we no longer take on work where we are managed by HR. We see DEI as a leadership responsibility and our most successful work has happened when we report directly to the CEO or Executive Director and work directly with the entire leadership team, or when we work with a DEI team that reports directly to leadership rather than to HR.
In our work with non-profit Boards, we also work directly with Board leadership to understand needs and co-create a scope of work.
What does it mean to work with a team of women, predominantly women and gender-expansive people of color?
Women, especially women and gender-expansive people of color, are not only systemically under-resourced but we disproportionately take on invisible and unpaid labor both within and outside of the workplace, whether it is caretaking, emotional labor, administrative work, relationship building or more.
This is sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, but either way, it is often the lived reality we face everyday doing the work of dismantling systems of oppression that were not of our creation and in fact were specifically designed to target us.
At the same time, it is exactly our lived experiences of those realities that enables us to build trust within organizations especially with those who are similarly impacted by systems of oppression, and to see the ways that organizations perpetuate harm, intentionally or not. Both are critical to co-creating the shift in culture towards equity and inclusion that benefits all of us, not just those who are disproportionately impacted.
Further, the part that is often not spoken aloud is that hiring a DEI consulting team of women and gender-expansive people of color, including Black women, can give your organization credibility both internally and externally.
Our fees reflect the multiple ways that we bring value to your organization, and our intention, still and always a work in progress, is that we not be complicit or enable you to be complicit in further under-resourcing your staff or ourselves in this work.
The beauty is that through interconnectedness and interdependence, in healing ourselves, we get to heal others, and in healing others, we get to heal ourselves.