Join us on our journey toward more fully realized equity efforts
March 3, 2025
In the summer of 2024, the Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger conducted an internal equity assessment to evaluate its practices and identify opportunities for growth in achieving equity. It’s our intention that this work underscores the organization’s commitment to dismantling systemic barriers and fostering a food system that is just, responsive, and sustainable for all Coloradans.
To support our efforts in making an unflinching assessment of both our successes as well as ongoing challenges, we enlisted the help of Vaishnavi Hariprasad, an equity consultant and the Blueprint’s former Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Manager. She supported our efforts to perform a complete internal equity assessment.
We have prioritized making this process transparent and accessible to everyone to inspire other organizations to undertake similar equity assessments. By sharing the tools, principles, and findings openly, we invite others to follow along in real-time and adapt our approaches to their own contexts. This commitment reflects our belief in collective progress and the value of shared learning.
In short, we found that we were largely living up to our goals for transparency, bilingualism, and community-centered decision-making. But there was work we could and should do around data collection, human resources policies, clarity on internal decision-making processes, and a deeper integration of community feedback into organizational policies and strategies.
Each team within the Blueprint structure, as well as our team as a whole, focused effort on evaluating progress on practices and procedures, community engagement, anti-racists institutional policies, human resources practices, language justice, and data and evaluation. We then generated equity action plans for each of these focus areas within our teams. In areas where we found gaps, staff engaged in proposing how we would address those gaps and how we would monitor and measure progress going forward.
To underpin all of this work, we created an internal equity policy that dictates how we approach equity as an organization internally and externally. We have adopted the shared commitment to revisit these organizational assessments every two years, with the off-year reserved for implementing changes to policy, process, or practice that we identified.