Around the world, 2025 was a year of unmistakable challenges. Cuts to foreign aid and development programs brought devastating human consequences. Wars and genocide continued, and governments used the most vulnerable at home and abroad as pawns in deadly political games. 

But amidst this darkness, we also witnessed meaningful progress. Across the social sector, partners, funders, and communities stepped up to fill gaps and adapt to uncertainty. At Camber, we found ways to meet the moment and drive impact for those most affected. 

In the spring, we launched a new strategy outlining our next chapter with a focus on field-building—a discipline aimed at breaking down siloes, cultivating shared agendas and collective action, and amplifying the impact organizations have across entire fields of practice. We also achieved B Corp recertification, executed our first Internal Equity Survey, welcomed six new colleagues, and celebrated nine promotions—including bringing our colleague and Shared Prosperity lead Marc Allen into the partnership.  

In 2025, we partnered with 27 organizations around the world on 42 projects. From women’s health innovation to climate resilience to income inequality, our work touched on some of the most important issues of our time. But don’t just take it from me. Below, we highlight work from across our sectors and the meaningful impacts each project has made. 

As a team, we found joy in personal accomplishments and milestones. We celebrated Camberians’ weddings and welcomed new Camber babies. We cheered on colleagues who became certified fitness instructors, one who earned a sommelier certification, many who ran full and half marathons, one who won a poker tournament, and several who completed new degrees. Our team also deepened their commitments to board and community service, volunteered locally, and directed $30,000 in nonprofit giving to make a difference. 

As we head into 2026, I’m holding the highs and lows with equal clarity and gratitude. The highs remind me of what we can build together, while the lows show me both why our work matters and why we must persevere. 

Read on for some of our most significant accomplishments from 2025. If you want to learn more about what we do and how we might work together, please reach out. 

With gratitude,  

Brian Leslie

Rethinking Resilience: Drawing Connections Between Climate and Health 

The Brief: Public health and climate change are inextricably linked—but too often addressed in isolation. In the fall, we partnered with Gavi and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to challenge this narrative through a novel report: Protecting Our Future: An Investment Framework for Quantifying the Climate Adaptation Benefits of Health and Immunisation Investments establishes a first-of-its-kind framework that quantifies the value of health investments for climate adaptation.  

The Solution: The report was released at COP30, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil, in November 2025. Our findings highlight the often-overlooked role that health systems play in helping communities adapt to climate change, particularly around immunization.  

The Impact: The report has sparked new conversations among multilateral development banks, donors, and country actors by bridging technical evidence with advocacy and policy potential. Stakeholders have been equipped with shared language and tools to advance long-term systems change in vulnerable communities around the world.  

Read the full report here or via AIIB’s website. Additional thanks to the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and our other collaborators for their support. 

Investing in Healthcare and Rural Economies: Strategic Planning for United Indian Health Services 

The Brief: Last year, we worked with the United Indian Health Services (UIHS) to help them chart a course for the organization’s future and determine how to make amplify their impact. UIHS is a coalition of nine American Indian tribes who focus on lifting up culture, community, health, and economic prosperity for their members—many of whom live in rural communities. 

The Solution: This was not a typical strategy project—it required careful and equitable systems thinking and expansive conversations across the region. We conducted research on comparable organizations, interviewed board members and community stakeholders, and laid out options to illustrate key trade-offs and strategic choices for UIHS. 

The Impact: After close collaboration, UIHS decided to establish a new foundation focused on investing in the healthcare workforce and care model innovation to improve tribal career opportunities in their rural communities. The result will go beyond healthcare—these investments will improve the health, economic opportunities, and quality of life for generations to come. 

Learn more about UIHS’s important work. 

Spotlighting Women’s Health Innovation: Pushing for Investments Around the World 

Photo Credit: Gates Foundation / Marlena Waldthausen

The Brief: For years, women’s health research and development (R&D) has been underinvested in and underrepresented, despite the $1 trillion opportunity that closing this gap represents. In 2023, we partnered with the Gates Foundation and National Institutes of Health to establish the Innovation Equity Forum (IEF), a group of more than 250 global experts in women’s health research and development. This diverse group is committed to advancing a more equitable, coordinated, and innovation-driven ecosystem for women’s health R&D. 

The Solution: We kicked off 2025 by publishing the 2024 Women’s Health Innovation Opportunity Map Progress Report, highlighting promising strides made in 2024 and areas for immediate action. In order to translate the data into action, we coordinated across the forum to develop actionable concepts to advance women’s health. Our efforts culminated in IEF’s global convening in October in advance of the World Health Summit in Berlin, bringing together more than 150 stakeholders to refine and align on these concepts and infuse them into the broader women’s health innovation ecosystem.  

The Impact: The Opportunity Map website, which launched in the fall, provides a new home for the IEF’s work and highlights tangible ways for stakeholders—from investors to policymakers—to drive meaningful advances in women’s health innovation over the next 15 years. These resources have strengthened awareness of critical R&D gaps across academia, philanthropy, the private sector, and policy circles. 

Learn more about the IEF and explore the Opportunity Map. 

Putting Data into Action: Informing Funding, Strategy, and Policy Development for Economic Mobility 

The Brief: Economic mobility is widely considered to be a cornerstone of American life – available to all who set their sights on it. But in reality, economic mobility has been declining steadily since the 1940s. Our Mobility Experiences initiative aims to support efforts across the country to ensure that future generations have the power to access opportunities that will advance prosperity and well-being for all.  

The Solution: In 2025, we converted our breakthrough Mobility Experiences research into action by equipping 15 place-based initiatives to apply the research in order to develop their strategies, mobilize capital, and improve their programs and services. We provided direct technical assistance to community organizations while also hosting broader public awareness events (like this one in Iowa). 

The Impact: Over time, our data reached more than 100,000+ people, helped inform several hundred million dollars in investments, and improved programs for tens of thousands of people. We supported 15 direct grantees to mobilize capital and improve programs improvement initiatives, and collaborated closely with key ecosystem actors like Harmony Labs and Fisher Strategy Partners to expand the reach and impact of our work. 

Explore the Mobility Experiences dashboard and this video unpacking the efforts. 

Scaling Up Health Campaigns: Improving Global Health & Wellbeing Through Collaboration 

Photo Credit: Federal Ministry of Health & Social Welfare, Nigeria / SWAp Office

The Brief: The Collaborative Action Strategy (CAS) on health campaign effectiveness is a first-of-its-kind commitment by the global health community to align in support of countries and their planning, implementing, evaluating, and financing of health campaigns in a more collaborative way. It is designed to bolster countries’ existing efforts while improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of campaigns for a range of public health issues. 

The Solution: In 2025, we helped the Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition put the CAS into action. We supported the implementation of CAS in two focus countries, Nigeria and Ethiopia. In Nigeria, we piloted efforts in three states to integrate malaria and neglected tropical disease campaigns into the largest measles and rubella vaccination campaign in the country’s history, which aims to reach over 100 million children. We developed a customized strategy and provided hands-on support through workshops, stakeholder engagement, and project management. Our efforts culminated in a major integrated campaign in October and the official adoption of the Nigerian CAS in December. These efforts united global, country, and local stakeholders, including the Gates Foundation, UNICEF, World Health Organization, Global Fund, CBM, and Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and National Primary Healthcare Development Agency. We also coordinated closely with the Measles & Rubella Partnership, where Camber colleagues serve as the Project Management Unit, to coordinate across initiatives.

The Impact: Health campaigns are a critical way that countries like Nigeria tackle a range of public health issues, from measles to nutrition. For too long, these issues have been siloed. Taking a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and integrated approach through CAS is more cost effective, efficient, and less burdensome on communities and health workers than running separate, siloed campaigns. This is a particularly critical need given recent cuts to global health infrastructure. Through our work in 2025, stakeholders in Nigeria showed that future campaigns will be more integrated through early planning, shared calendars, strong collaboration, robust and integrated data systems, harmonized payment structures, and improved advocacy and communications. They have committed to advancing these objectives as they scale up this work across the country in 2026.

Learn more about the CAS and explore its resources.

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As we celebrate Camber’s 15^th birthday, it is remarkable how much our nascent vision, team, and impact has evolved. Camber has grown from a small team supporting individual institutions to a collective that works across sectors, geographies, and stakeholders to help build the ecosystems that enable lasting change. We’ve had the privilege of partnering with over 110 organizations, across more than 400 projects. We’ve celebrated over 50 alumni who have grown to be social entrepreneurs, leaders, strategists, and contributors to making the world a better place. Through our work and network of partners and collaborators, we’ve seen what’s possible when insight, intention, and action align.

But we’ve also seen what stands in the way. Siloed efforts, ineffective translation of agenda to action, and structural inequities continue to limit progress across the social sector. And in a world facing compounding crises due to shifts in policy, funding, public discourse, and governance— the cost of inaction is growing.

We’ve taken this moment to reflect on our role and the needs of the sector — and to evolve with greater clarity and intention. We’ve refined our mission and strategy to meet what this moment demands: building the knowledge, infrastructure, and capacity of social and public sector institutions and fields.

This isn’t a departure. It’s a natural evolution — grounded in our history, shaped by what we’ve heard and experienced, and guided by what we know the moment demands.

At the center of this shift is the belief that institutions and fields must grow stronger together. That data and insights must be actionable. That shared agendas must lead to collective implementation. And that equity must move from intention to practice.

Our 2024 Impact Report showcases Camber’s new strategy in action —a collection of stories of insight, collaboration, and impact. They are proof points of what we believe: that when people, organizations, and partnerships are aligned, resourced, and supported, transformative change is not only possible — it’s inevitable.

Click here to read the full report

We’re deeply grateful to our funders, clients, partners, team, and alumni who continue to shape Camber’s path and impact. We’re excited for what comes next — and we look forward to building it together.

The post Evolving for Impact: A Look at 2024 and Beyond appeared first on Camber Collective.

Outset and Origin Story

The challenge Camber Collective faces, as a consultancy for an equitable and regenerative world, is how to build a project delivery model that reflects its equity-forward values. The firm’s journey began nearly a decade ago, when one of the founding Partners, Hope Neighbor, collaborated with the Hewlett Foundation to understand how women and families in Niger make decisions about, and access, family planning services and products.

Working with local partners, the Camber team interviewed local stakeholders: women, providers, and other community members to assemble a broad prism into 1) what was needed by the community and 2) how to design for holistic, sustainable, and community-relevant outcomes. This first-of-its-kind project led to a segmentation analysis and design of new programs enabling local community health workers and the Ministry of Health to better meet the needs of people and communities.

From this initial foray into equitable design, Camber’s approaches and methods have deepened. A central tenet of Camber’s evolving theory of impact is to build upon the opportunity — and indeed, necessity — to instill localization and co-creation while elevating the constituents and communities most impacted.

Key Principles and Considerations

Positioning constituents and communities as key thought partners and participants would allow Camber to engender deeper, more authentic, and sustainable practices, and further its progress towards key equity-forward principles first adopted by the firm in 2021.

Among these considerations were:

• What is Camber’s role, as change-agents, or at least indirect purveyors of social impact, in integrating equity into project delivery?
• What nuances or contexts regarding cultural, community, geographical, racial, or other differences and distinctions risk being overlooked or unconsidered?
• How could the firm, from its advisory role, continue to lift up the voices and ideas of those whom our clients and we intend to serve?
• In what ways could models for research, analysis, and project conceptualization and design be more inclusive of differences (culture, community, class, race, income, education, etc.)?

These were just a few of the top-line considerations that fueled a series of team-wide conversations that began in earnest in September, 2022.  Camber sought to consider how, as a consultancy, the firm could live up to its aspirations and effectively assess, catalogue, normalize, incorporate, and amplify equity in project design, delivery, and dissemination. In so doing, the firm also identified opportunities to continue its deeply collaborative, trust-based, and non-extractive partnership approach.

Applying the Model to the Consultancy Sector

As a B-Corp consultancy committed to continued internal growth and learning in anti-racist and equitable practices, Camber also sought to integrate equity into its business model. The team embraced the mission-alignment around addressing injustice and systemic oppression that is deeply ingrained across societies, while recognizing the importance of developing strong client delivery.

Successfully partnering with community stakeholders while delivering upon client requirements, Camber Collective was able to successfully insert these new organizing frameworks and methods and tools under the moniker of Equitable Project Design.

Basics of EPD

Equitable Project Design (EPD) has its basis in the concept of Liberatory Project Design, a concept of the National Equity Project which seeks to apply an equity-focused lens to traditional Design Thinking principles.

In contrast to the mission of product designers, social movement organizations, or community-based organizations working towards direct service goals, Camber embraced the opportunity to refine the lens to more closely adhere with its purview and impact theses as a strategic advisory firm.

Equitable Project Design has five concentric spheres of activation:

Camber’s role as a consultancy requires approaching client work with curiosity, and using the talented staff’s capabilities to influence how clients consider and integrate equity into their research, analysis, strategy formulation, decision-making, and partnerships. Camber’s Director of Impact and Equity, Rozella Kennedy wrote about this aspiration in late 2022, as EPD was taking shape as an organizing principle:

As in all facets of the world and life, a 100% purity attainment goal is unrealistic. Not all clients and contexts will align with Equitable Design principles in uniform ways, and the journey is also iterative. To keep us anchored in our own values and vision of social impact and systemic change, we are establishing a team playbook of considerations across the entire project cycle that will help us execute the work with honesty, confidence, and equitable influence.

The ”MVP” of EPD

Camber Collective’s full Equitable Project Design framework includes over 130 questions and considerations across a typical project lifecycle. Distilling them down to ten top tenets, or an “MVP,” (minimally viable project) reaped these considerations.

Understanding the equity context and project parameters

1. Do we understand the context and equity issues at play within their field or those faced by their constituents? What do we want to change? Who can help us? Who/what stands in the way?
2. How much can we really influence, where/when do we agree to ease up? How does this flow fit into our overarching or long-term theory of influence and impact?
3. What do we know about where the client is in their equity journey? How will we push them or how might they push us? What’s the “give and take” we need to map between immediate impact and long-term influence?

Preempting potential equity “blindspots”

1. How are we aware of and ensuring we do not perpetuate white saviordom and the white, colonial, or male gaze in this project? How can we proactively discuss, codify, and navigate scope boundaries so we avoid becoming “white saviors”—even if we are asked (directly or indirectly) to play that role?
2. How will we avoid forcing or assuming a Global North (Western/US/EU) mentality into the project? What local power systems, brokers, influencers, and situations must we learn?

Navigating power dynamics

1. What balance can we strike between “capacity building” (which implies we know everything already) and “collaborative convening and co-design” (which is less assumptive)?
2. Who holds power and should/can cede some? Who holds power and is not in the room, and how can we bring them in?

Continuous learning and sustainability planning

1. To what extent can we ensure the work and our learnings are most accessible to the field, including communities who will most benefit? (publications, budgets, conferences, etc.)
2. What tactics, resources, and connections can we put in place to ensure that the relationships and levers we build do not shut down forever once our project is complete? What’s the “sustainability” plan for the project and the partnership?
3. What will we learn/measure/report out to the team at the end of the project that furthers our learning and growth in equity, and how?

Progress at the End of Year One

Over the course of 2023, Camber Collective integrated many of these constucts into client work, and continues to leverage EPD as its value and brand differential. A lookback, as the firm approaches the two-year mark of this concerted phase of its equity project delivery plan, illuminates several high-water marks of success, with tangible organizational tools and resources that anchor this continued work:

• A curated set of over 130 equity considerations and markers, sorted project phase, that can be incorporated into the full project lifecycle, from scoping to delivery to closeout
• Revised set of internal project tools with a focused embedding of equity considerations into the work
• In-progress library of resources, frameworks, and learnings for all of client serving sectors that incorporate equitable principles overall, and by sector
• Application of EPD into the firm’s own internal ways of working: learning, celebrating, building belonging, and leadership at all levels

Next Priorities for Equitable Project Design

The work continues for Camber Collective, with an attenuated focus in 2024 on developing a deeper focus on factors, both personal, interpersonal, sectoral, and societal that impact how “equity” is, and at times, is not integral to project and program design. This builds upon the Equitable Project Design mindset the firm had already been utilizing unofficially since its formation a decade ago. Some of these factors include:

• Consideration of historical/colonial contexts
• Removing barriers that marginalize or de-center “the voice” of the affected
• Valuing and centering local experts for their participation, including through compensation
• Deepening the application of cross-sectoral/intersectional framing
• Employing equitable sampling and data analysis
• Continually relying on storytelling and visual narrative, to underscore that narrative is a key component of systems change and collaboration, particularly across cultural, geographical, and other divides.

Camber Collective’s broader goal is to see ongoing and future work leverage EPD in ways that encourage innovation, equity, and co-creation—such that Equitable Project outcomes becomes the norm. In the words of CEO Brian Leslie and Director of Impact and Equity, Rozella Kennedy:

“As our firm becomes more deeply adept at authentically and systematically embedding and delivering equitable strategies and solutions for our clients, we can collectively galvanize equitable, transformative outcomes in constituent communities our clients serve. In so doing, Camber can meaningfully contribute to redressing the systemic injustices and oppressions that are so deeply ingrained in our society. This is our Grand Vision, and we are grateful to our clients, partners, associates, friends, and even strangers with critical voice, who help us continue to advance in this direction.”

Read more about EPD in action in Camber Collective’s 2023 Impact Report, published in February, 2024.

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Introduction: Camber’s 2023 Impact Report

2023 was a year of growth, impact, and learnings at Camber. We’re excited to share this report as we look back on our work with clients and partner organizations around the world.

Our mission is to drive impact and develop talent in an economically sustainable model. In 2023, our first as a B-Corporation, we doubled the size of our organization with amazing new talent and seeded the social sector with Camber alumni taking on new roles in organizations driving equitable outcomes in health, prosperity, and climate. We worked closely with our clients and partner organizations to influence and amplify impact. This Impact Report highlights a select set of projects across our priority sectors and issues, and we welcome your feedback and input on how we can continue to improve our work and partnerships.

As we look to the future, we can all do more to drive equitable outcomes, processes, and policies. Camber is proud to launch Equitable Project Design and our Gender Equality Sector. Equitable Project Design integrates equity into every aspect of our work, from project scoping and design to methods and deliverables. Our Gender Equality Sector represents a formalization of over a decade of our work tackling the barriers to equality for women, girls, and sex and gender minorities.

Camber is a consultancy for an equitable and regenerative world. We are grateful for your partnership as we continue to grow, learn, and influence impactful programs globally and locally.

Wishing you an impactful and growth filled 2024.

Brian Leslie

CEO and Co-Founder

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Equitable Project Design Origin Story

The concept of Equitable Project Design was instigated from a puzzle: how could Camber Collective authentically elevate the voices, ideas, and power of those whom we mean to serve? A little over 10 years ago, one of our founding Partners, Hope Neighbor, worked with the Hewlett Foundation to design an effort to understand how women and families in Niger make decisions about, and access, family planning services and products. We worked with local partners, surveyed and interviewed women, providers, and local stakeholders. This first of its kind project led to a segmentation analysis and design of new programs to enable local community health workers and the Ministry of Health to better meet the needs of people and communities.

Our approaches and methods have evolved as we progressed on our equity journey. We saw an opportunity, and indeed, a necessity to instil localization and co-creation, elevating the constituents and communities most impacted as key thought partners and participants in strategy formation.

As professionals driven to advance the greater public good globally and locally across health, shared prosperity, gender equality, and climate, we wanted to push ourselves to a deeper, more authentic, and sustainable practice centering the equity promise that we had adopted as an organizing principle in 2021.

What was our role, as change-agents, or at least indirect purveyors of social impact, in integrating equity into our project delivery? What cultural relativisms were we overlooking? How could we, as the advisers and “helpers”, continue to lift up the voices and ideas of those we mean to serve in how we researched and analyzed, conceptualized and designed, and supported execution of  social impact programs?

Pondering answers to these existential considerations evolved into a series of team-wide conversations about our evolving approach to client engagements and delivery. What were our aspirations and values around racial, gender, and social equity, really? And how could we effectively assess, catalogue, normalize, incorporate, and amplify these in our project design, delivery, and dissemination? And if we succeeded at all that, how might it support both processes and outcomes that are more collaborative, trust-based, and non-extractive?

Whatever conveyances lay ahead for Camber, we determined, would be underlain by a commitment to continuing our growth and learning in anti-racist and equitable practices, and our collective agreement to address the injustice and systemic oppression deeply ingrained across societies. Our stance would need to incorporate ongoing, focused learning, and pinpoint a few key guideposts and deliverables. And as our efforts cannot succeed in isolation, we would have to identify ways to both guide and learn from our clients, project delivery partners, and community stakeholders along this journey toward elevated equity. We also knew that as consultants, we needed an organizing framework with supporting methods and tools, and we gave our framework a name: Equitable Project Design.

Refining and Defining Our Concept

Equitable Project Design (EPD) has its basis in the concept of Liberatory Project Design, a concept of the National Equity Project which seeks to apply an equity-focused lens to traditional Design Thinking principles. In contrast to the mission of product designers, social movement organizations, or community-based organizations working towards direct service goals, we embraced the opportunity to refine the lens to more closely adhere with our purview and impact theses as a strategic advisory firm.

Emanating outward, from the existentially essential level of personal bias, mindset, and growth, all the way to systemic change, our theory of impact around Equitable Project Design has five concentric spheres of activation:

As visionary as this concept is, we enshrined a realistic mindset into EPD from the start. As we said in our November, 2022 article:

As in all facets of the world and life, a 100% purity attainment goal is unrealistic. Not

all clients and contexts will align with Equitable Design principles in uniform ways,

and the journey is also iterative. To keep us anchored in our own values and vision

of social impact and systemic change, we are establishing a team playbook of

considerations across the entire project cycle that will help us execute the work with

honesty, confidence, and equitable influence.

With determination, we envision that employing this lens and approach will allow the firm to grow and evolve to a place where all team members will have the tools and competency to guide our teams and clients through issues of equity that affect their organizations, industries, and stakeholders. Ultimately, we aspire that our equity lens becomes a key aspect of our brand promise as well as a touchstone for client confidence and trust, centered on values alignment.

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EPD MVP: Key Tenets of Equitable Project Design

A year and a half after our initial conversations, we can celebrate some of the many important marks we’ve made along this journey, with tangible organizational tools and resources that anchor this continued work:

• We have built curated set of equity considerations by project phase, over 130 questions and markers we can incorporate into the full project lifecycle, from scoping to delivery to closeout
• We have built and revised our internal project tools with a focused embedding of equity considerations into our work
• We have begun building a library of resources, frameworks, and learnings for all of our client serving sectors that incorporate equitable principles overall, and by sector
• Having socialized the framework and elements with the team, we are now applying EPD into our own internal ways of working: learning, celebrating, building belonging, and leadership at all levels

Having a definitional framework has provided an anchor and organizing principle to scale the implementation and impact. This trajectory was already evident in a 2022 blog post in which we said:

As we build out this values alignment in our practice and demonstrate a deeper focus on equity and sustainability, we are even finding that new partners who were skeptical of the consulting sector writ large are eager to engage with our services. We are gratified to see this development, for we do believe that, by integrating equity into our theories of influence and client work, Camber Collective can help disrupt and dismantle the collective history of racist, exclusive, extractive, and colonial practices in the humanitarian and philanthropic sectors.

This report highlights some of the project work and sector impact that we are pleased to have driven in 2023. In addition to the client work, of which just a few illustrative examples are included, we also have leveraged this framework for how we define and position our internal progress and brand promise. Some of our major considerations include:

Please peruse some of the highlights from 2023 that incorporate Equitable Project Design principles. (Full report pdf is here.) Equitable Project Design-inspired elements are bolded in the below case studies.

• Gender Equality: The Women’s Health Innovation Opportunity Map
• US Health: Including Fathers in Family Care: WA Fatherhood Council         
• US Health: Broadening Access to Crucial Health Care
• Global Health: Task Force for Global Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition       
• Climate: Building Bridges Across Intersections         
• Shared Prosperity: Finding Prosperity for More: What Contributes to Lifetime Income?    

Priorities for Further Expansion

Building upon not only these project outcomes, but our EPD approaches that were “hiding in plain sight,” we recognize a few key deliverables that will help us scale and broaden this approach. Above, we share our in-progress “EPD MVP” (minimally viable product) universal guidelines for our projects, determining, when possible, how to incorporate key equitable practices (many of which we had been employing for quite some time) such as:

• Application of historical/colonial context
• Centering the voice of the affected, and compensating our local experts for their participation
• Applying cross-sectoral/intersectional framing
• Employing equitable sampling and data analysis
• Continually relying on storytelling and visual narrative (as you will read in this report)

This report serves both as a sample lookback to some of our progress in EPD work, but it also helps pave the way that we wish to continue evolving the practice. It is our hope that our ongoing and future work will leverage EPD to encourage innovation, equity, co-creation, and norm-shifting. We want Equitable Project outcomes to become the norm.

As our firm becomes more deeply adept at authentically and systematically embedding and delivering equitable strategies and solutions for our clients, we can collectively galvanize equitable, transformative outcomes in constituent communities our clients serve. In so doing, Camber can meaningfully contribute to redressing the systemic injustices and oppressions that are so deeply ingrained in our society. This is our Grand Vision, and we are grateful to our clients, partners, associates, friends, and even strangers with critical voice, who help us continue to advance in this direction.

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Part Two: The Basics, and the Basic Problem

This is Part Two of a conversation between our Director of Impact and Equity Rozella Kennedy and our Director of US Health Kim Langenhahn on US healthcare in our “post-pandemic” moment: the legacy challenges, the current tragic clashes around untreated mental health episodes in public spaces, as well as the current wave of innovation and opportunity that might, if leveraged and supported, help us move towards equitable, quality healthcare more broadly for more people living in the United States.

Part One of this conversation serves as a wide-ranging exploration of the overarching impact that the mixed nature of the US health insurance system, which is comprised of a combination of private, public, nonprofit, and for-profit entities, has on our society and overall well-being. This rather fragmented approach to health insurance, and subsequently to the provision of care, combined with the fact that the profit motive is woven into most aspects of the US system, means that people—especially the most vulnerable—are often left behind. For example, the recent expiration of protections put in place during the pandemic public health emergency means that millions of people may lose Medicaid coverage, either due to administrative reasons or because they no longer qualify for the program—and this anticipated loss of coverage will disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic beneficiaries. Click here to read Part One.

Unfairness At a Breaking Point

Rozella Kennedy: We took a break in the conversation at a point where I was feeling very heated about what almost feels like a “gotcha” for some folks to access healthcare entitlements like Medicaid. I hate to realize it really comes down to the ability to correctly execute paperwork!

Kim Langenhahn: It does become largely an issue of time, paperwork, and resource and knowledge constraints for far too many people. Just imagine if the next time they show up at a doctor’s office they risk being told, “You actually can’t see the doctor today because you didn’t fill out this form or you didn’t fill it out appropriately or in the right time frame.”

RK: Goodness! The NY Times recently ran a long feature article about the treacherous tangle of paperwork and poor public health outcomes. It depicted the healthcare access challenges of indigenous people in Colombia, South America. But we literally are not much better off, for some communities!

KL: I want to say to the healthcare conglomerates and the government: I understand you’re running a large system. But at the end of the day, someone’s access to care should not depend on filling out a form properly.

RK: Doctors take a Hippocratic Oath, for heaven’s sake! This is actually just heartbreaking to consider. And since we are in this very honest and stark phase of our conversation, let’s add one more tragic health equity factor: the dearth of provision and stigma around mental health.

Two incidents made the national news about the deadly clash of mentally instable people and so-called vigilante citizens. One was the street performer in the New York subway Jordan Neeley, and the other that has haunted me is the death of Banco Brown, trans activist who went into a San Francisco Walgreens attempting to steal food and was shot to death by a private security guard.

Now, I’m going to connect the dots here, from the point of view of equity and justice. These two Black men were hungry, they were desperate, they were distressed, they seemingly were having a psychotic breakdown moment. And they are now dead. Ours should not be a society that punishes our most desolate.

I hate to think of young Black bodies once again becoming martyrs for a cause, but maybe public awareness is starting to shift, because this is just so never-ending and sorrowful and wrong.

There has been so much outrage and compassion for these two people in society. It felt to me like finally more of the public are saying, “wait, this system isn’t serving people, and our mental health crisis should be treated as a health issue, not one of criminality.”

KL: Public health absolutely encompasses mental health, yes.

RK: And if we talk about narrative for a moment, it’s not just the “homelessness” story we have become used to: say, the returning veteran suffering with PTSD and falling into despair, or someone who escaped a violent situation and can’t get into Section 8 housing, or a person who lost everything due to illness or divorce or a death, or a SGM (sexual and gender minority) youth whose family kicked them out of the house—you know, these are the stories we’ve somewhat gotten used to hearing about homelessness and particularly episodes of people suffering mental health breakdowns in plain view. That’s horrendous enough in our society.

But in some circles, there is a growing awareness that people become marginalized and imperiled not only because of circumstances (usually beyond their control), but also because of systems. Folks are saying, “You know, we’re going to acknowledge how epigenetic trauma creates depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental illness. We’re going to see that centuries of actions have led to deep, deep despair and the need for repair…

“We’re gonna amplify the connections between limited or poor healthcare; the built environment and heat islands; historic redlining and Jim Crow-era economic immobility; the war on drugs and how AIDS, the pandemic, and fentanyl have disproportionately targeted ‘the wretched’ of our earth,” to reference Frantz Fanon, if I may!

It’s encouraging to see people taking a bolder attitude towards acknowledging that mental health and machismo are not the same thing, and that the stigma needs to be eradicated. Folks need help. People are demanding better.

A Few Ways Out of the Morass

RK: So, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, what should be do? What can we, as people do, to help fix this broken healthcare system?

KL: I would truly say at the individual level the most powerful thing we can do is educate, advocate, and vote. We all have a voice, and we need to use ours to make sure we have people in office who support the idea that quality healthcare is a human right. I mean this not only at the federal level by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

To be honest, the right political leadership is even more significant at the municipal level and the state level because that’s where Medicaid policy is being set for the most part—these are the entities that are actually administering the state Medicaid programs. And as individuals, we need to advocate for the causes and the politicians that represent what we believe in. We have to do all we can to get them in office.

RK: Oftentimes even people who are relatively politically engaged don’t vote in all their local council elections…

KL: … and that’s where many of the most significant policies for people’s lived experience, from healthcare to schools to trash collection and local taxes are being implemented.

Another thing: the local forum is an important laboratory or testing ground for politicians, PACs (Political Action Committees) and major campaign donors, and advocacy groups. By this I mean, these stakeholders often have eyes on state-level offices, so to get a sense of how they act locally is very important in this two-way street of electoral politics; how do they intend to move “upstream” as it were?

Reminding us all to stay engaged, especially locally, is good advice because so much of electoral politics and voting at the state and certainly federal level has also devolved into a popularity contest or beauty pageant. It’s off-putting, and we are all so tired of so much of it. But we have to stay focused, right? An informed and engaged populace has a lot of power to shift many kinds of inequities.

KL: If we stay attentive and active.

RK: I am reminded of the shock many of us felt when Roe was struck down last year. Mostly to steel myself, I jumped on a Zoom with two of our colleagues and we held a video chat in which we were able to share our feelings and recall many of the positive reproductive health work Camber has helped shore up for our clients over the years, but also we cited a bunch of resources: nonprofits and other groups that people could get involved in and support as donors, volunteers, advocates. Are there some innovative organizations you’d like our readers to know about that are advocating for access to quality, equitable healthcare?

KL: Yes, let’s share a few here. (See “resources” at bottom of this post.)

Facing Facts and Keeping Faith

RK: Thank you! I think it’s wonderful that Camber can be this bridge between thought-leadership and strategy and encouragement for the people.

Because these issues of health equity are so all-encompassing, they touch upon everything, and it gets overwhelming and can almost feel debilitating. But speaking of encouragement, let me ask you from a policy or thought leadership perspective, what do you see that is encouraging in this moment, if anything at all?

KL: Yes, I do think there are things to be encouraged by. Over the last couple of years, a tiny silver lining that came out of the pandemic is that you had more and more people really start to authentically grapple with, and truly acknowledge, just how many existing systems in our country prevent people from living full lives.

RK: Can you say more?

KL: It used to feel much more like lip service. But I think there is a core group of people that are more empowered to try and upend some of these inequitable systems and there are more people who are just now coming to terms with the reality of how skewed and broken so much of this is.

I’m seeing a greater recognition of the power structures and the racist histories and how those factors conjoin to impact people, historically as well as right now.

RK: This hearkens back to what we were saying about health inequity not being entirely a Black/white issue…

KL: This is true—though we cannot deny that redlining and workforce discrimination have played enormous roles in economic inequity and health outcomes disparity, over generations.

RK: Enslaved Black people were legally not allowed to learn to read, marry whom they wanted, and in many instances, didn’t even have a “real” name. We cannot of course, discount the enormous historic harms done to Asian people through legislated discrimination and internment, or to our Indigenous brothers and sisters, whose lands and lives were literally stolen by colonialism. It’s a very bad legacy.

KL: When you look at the data around health outcomes, the throughlines are clear. The neighborhoods and zip codes with the worse health outcomes have a higher propensity to be non-white, but sadly, there are also some universal constants that transcend racial lines and just simply come back to poverty. Fewer economic resources, larger proportions of major chronic health issues.

RK: A generalized need for a social safety net.

KL: And because some elected officials are finally recognizing that their constituents’ needs are not being met, there is a glimmer of good news. In the last couple of years, more states have begun to expand or consider expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

RK: Thank God(dess)!

KL: We now have 40 states plus DC with expanded Medicaid coverage. So yes, there are still ten states that need to do so. But there is a little more momentum.

RK: Expanding Medicaid is not a panacea, but it is a huge step in the right direction.

KL: I was looking at some of the recent reporting around maternal health and especially mortality rates for Black mothers, and it found that there are some genetic drivers for the high Black maternal mortality rates, but at the end of the day a lot of that excessive mortality results from lack of insurance and lack of access to care.

There Really is No “Us” and “Them”

RK: I often say if Serena Williams and Beyoncé could not access considerate healthcare during their pregnancies, what hope do the rest of us have?

KL: Again, this is all part of the structural problem we’ve been discussing. While maternal mortality rates have increased pretty steadily over the last two decades, those increases have been smaller in states that have expanded Medicaid, with greatest impact being on Black mothers. It largely comes down to simply having access to better care, or care at all.

RK: I don’t like to put it in these terms exactly, but one could zoom way out, with a historical lens, and surmise one of the positive outcomes of the George Floyd moment is the awakening around racism and normalizing white comfort and prosperity to the detriment of people of color, just across so many systems. The situation may not be as stark as outright “white supremacy,” but it was a sense of erasure, ignoring, making people feel like they are “less,” and expecting even less than that.

And we are shaking off this general sense of “laissez faire” among the populace, writ large. I often say that we have been lulled into consumerist complacency over the past six or seven decades: If you could eat a fun dinner and your favorite show is on TV, you’re good—and there’s nothing else in the world you need to worry about. That became sort of the prevailing way of American life in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s early aughts, right? And now people are saying “no, I don’t want to live in a society where so many of my sisters and brothers are suffering.”

The journalist and social commentator Annie Lowrey speaks of something she calls “the time tax,” this fact that if you’re a privileged person, you can hire a PA or pay for an app to take care of all your nonsense paperwork, but for most of the people, and it gets worse the less economic agency you have, it’s a nightmare.

KL: Not to mention if you’re higher up the privilege ladder, your paperwork is sometimes less complicated, which is a bit counterintuitive.

RK: How about that? Look at something as essential as signing up for food stamps. In some states it’s an obstacle course. Hunger and food are health issues too.

KL: They really are.

RK: And people who are outside of the sphere of high privilege, who, as you said, don’t have autonomy over their day, it can be a struggle to even access these benefits, one of which almost everyone in the country agrees is important and positive—food assistance.

Food is Healthcare

RK: Kim, can you talk a little bit about food and hunger and how they correlate to the health crisis in this country at the systemic level?

KL: Isn’t it interesting how many tentacles there are to what constitutes “health”? Yes, absolutely, let’s talk about food and hunger to wrap up our conversation.

Let’s start with young children and health and social outcomes related to food and nutrition. So many young kids are hungry, either because they don’t have access to as much food as they need, or the food they have access to is calorie dense but nutrient poor. These young people face so many challenges as a result of malnutrition—they have a harder time paying attention in school and greater difficulty understanding the material, they have more behavioral issues in school, they are more likely to be pulled out of class or get a detention. They may not even have the energy to play, which is an important part of childhood development.

RK: A stunning book about this I read described how much bias there is against Black girls in this particular area. It’s striking.

KL:  Yes, it’s disgraceful. And you know, Rozie, no matter who the kid is, they end up propelled into a negative spiral. They miss learning time because they are being subjected to carceral treatment. Or even if they are in still in the classroom, they are diminished: when you’re hungry, you can’t pay attention, especially as a child.

RK: Even at very young ages, the hungry kid is already disadvantaged compared to the well-fed one.

KL: And those discrepancies and disadvantages persist throughout the rest of that child’s life. It will be nearly impossible for them to catch up academically to their well-fed peers.

They are generally always going to be behind, less likely to graduate high school, less likely to pursue college. Also, they are less likely to receive technical training if they want to go the trades route. This leads to a population that is less likely to attain solid employment, less likely to access stable housing.

RK: If this child grows to adulthood and remains in a position where it is difficult to feed themselves well, what happens when they have children? The cycle repeats itself for another generation.

KL: Glance away from children for a minute and think about adults in general in our society. We have so many food deserts and food swamps: where there is a lack of access to healthy, fresh, nutrient dense food. Or for some, there is not the time to go and purchase healthy food and prepare a meal at home.  

RK: Yes, those food-box apps are so alluring—and very few people I know, including myself, would fit that in their budget, even if they could. Not as a sustainable solution, maybe a novelty.

KL: So, when you don’t have the time and the resources, you know what? You’re eating fast food. And this leads to so much of the population dealing with the lifestyle diseases: higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, all of these comorbidities that then make it nearly impossible for them to live healthy lives.

RK: It starts to feel pre-destined.

Connecting the Dots and Finding Hope

KL: As we’ve said, more and more people are connecting the dots.

RK: Back in the mid-aughts, I served as the coordinator of the New Mexico Hunger Task Force when I was living in Santa Fe. And at the time, New Mexico was the Number Two state in the nation in terms of food insecurity. Our goal was to get to #5, and I think they did do it.

Be that as it may, during that time, I worked with several people in public health as well as agriculture and education. And the effort was intersectional before that was a common term, and it was grassroots and communal. One friend who is at UNM School of Medicine as an anthropologist, actually, is engaging foodways and culture, to excite Hispanic (in that region, many people prefer this term to Latino) women—some immigrant or recent arrivals, others going back ten generations to when New Mexico was old Mexico—around food, health, resilience, and pride. They are using sisterhood and mutual aid as interesting ways to weave it together. Cultural pride in eating the food of their ancestors.

KL: That’s absolutely a positive approach.

RK: Can I say one more thing? I see this progressive attitude playing out in the Black community too with this neo-vegan hipster moment.

I think pop culture can be such a mover; I’m thinking of people like Stephen Satterfield and his Whetstone publishing entity and streaming show “High on the Hog,” I see it a lot with Black Veganism too. It’s interesting because they are connecting food to health as well; getting away from sodium, fried food, processed “foodstuffs.”

We are seeing this cultural shift in the Latinx and Asian communities too, as well as in African and Caribbean food culture: after generations of high-sodium spices and “flavor enhancers” marketed as culturally relevant, folks are looking at the health outcomes and saying “enough.” Give us healthy food, pure food, stop selling us poison. It’s related to climate and environment as well, of course.

I know that was quite a side-road I took us on there! But it feels related. That’s one thing I love about working at Camber, we really lean into the sectoral interconnections when it comes to equity and well-being.

KL: It is something to be proud of. I’d say a good thing that came out of the pandemic was that more people began to understand how interrelated everything is. You cannot be a healthy person if you don’t have access to food and safe affordable housing and a minimum standard of living. You just can’t.  But you also can’t excel in school or life if you don’t have access to healthcare. So, it’s all related.

And you most certainly cannot be your healthiest self when living within social and healthcare systems built around bias and discrimination. For example, the telomeres that cap the ends of chromosomes and help protect the genome from degradation are shorter in marginalized populations, leading to premature biological aging and the early onset of many chronic diseases.

In fact, Rozie, if we just focus on the medical side of healthcare, we are missing the majority of the drivers that actually dictate whether you are able to lead a healthy, fulfilled life—those so-called external social determinants of health often impact one’s overall state much more than the classic medical treatments and doctor’s visits we associated with “healthcare”.

More and more people and organizations are recognizing this. Even at governmental levels.

I’ll leave you with this, which is also encouraging: CMS, or the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has created some new coding opportunities within Medicare and Medicaid to try to help provide guidance and reimbursement for access to things like transportation to the grocery store.

RK: Kim, that’s really great! The old hunger coordinator in me is cheering this! In New Mexico, some folks had to go sixty miles just to get to the big box store, so they got most of their “food” at convenience stores and gas stations…

KL: Another exciting possibility around innovation is the fact that entrepreneurs can often work faster than government policy can be designed and implemented, so we are seeing innovative entrepreneurs and nonprofits trying to address things like food scarcity and other social determinants of health.

They’re asking questions like: “How do you innovate the care model to make it more equitable to increase access and help to address some of those disparities that are baked into the system?”

RK: Woah, they might actually be making capitalism work for the betterment of the populace, and not just the financial elite!

KL: That’s right. Capitalism is still today’s system, but if used effectively, it can be part of the solution.

RK: Basically, it’s just a question of “don’t be greedy.”

KL: Basically, yes.

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Resources

• United States of Care – Building a Better Health Care System
• Alliance for Health Policy – Join the Conversation (allhealthpolicy.org)
• CityHealth – Every person, in every city, deserves a healthy life
• Trust for America’s Health (tfah.org)
• Home – HealthTech 4 Medicaid (ht4m.org)
• Grantmakers In Health – Better health for all through better philanthropy (gih.org)
• Lutheran Services in America
• Health Care Access Maryland – Making Maryland a Better Place to Live

Kim Langenhahn draws on more than 15 years of consulting, operational, and startup experience in the domestic and international health and nonprofit sectors to help organizations navigate complex issues, operate more effectively, and deliver greater impact. During the course of her career, Kim has helped numerous healthcare organizations tackle a variety of strategic challenges such as scaling Terrapin Pharmacy’s remote medication adherence system, launching a MENA-focused healthcare incubator, devising system-wide strategy for the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health as part of PwC’s consulting practice, and developing a market forecast for a pharmaceutical company alongside her L.E.K. Consulting colleagues.  She is also the Cofounder of a small social enterprise that she runs with her family

Kim earned a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago as well as a Master of Science in Quantitative Management and a Bachelor of Arts from Duke University.  An avid traveler, reader, bread baker, ice cream churner, and (aspiring) cheese maker, she also enjoys helping her husband tend to their rooftop garden and vermiculture operation.  She currently resides in Washington, D.C.

As Camber Collective’s Director of Impact and Equity Rozella Kennedy helps direct the firm’s internal Impact, Equity, and Belonging work as well as the external practice. Her theory of impact seeks to leverage equitable values to influence and impact the humanitarian, development, philanthropic, and social impact sectors. The long focus is to expand awareness and practice in local and global post-colonial contexts. Rozella is also the creator of Brave Sis Project, a lifestyle brand using narrative and social engagement to uplift BIPOC women in U.S. history as a tool for learning, growth, celebration, and equity allyship; her book “Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History” was published by Workman Press in Spring, 2023.

The post Healthcare x Equity: Paperwork, Pain, Panaceas, and Progress appeared first on Camber Collective.

Part One: The Basics, and the Basic Problem

With the recent Congressional and Presidential declaration that the Covid emergency “has ended,” there remain a lot of questions and confusion about what Americans can expect, and about how our healthcare system operates in general. Our Director of Impact and Equity Rozella Kennedy sat down with our Director of US Health Kim Langenhahn for a far-reaching conversation about US healthcare and its many facets, angles, deficits—but also opportunities and bright spots in the quest to provide equitable, quality healthcare more broadly to people living in the United States. This is a jam-packed conversation, so we will parse it into two parts. Enjoy Part One, where we look at the “end of the pandemic,” and some general facts, figures, and frustrations about US healthcare as it currently is delivered. Part Two will dive more into issues around (in)equity and how societal shifts are pointing towards some possible encouragements.

US Healthcare 101

Rozella Kennedy: So, to start off this conversation Kim, can you provide a high-level description of what healthcare access actually is in our country?

Kim Langenhahn: Sure. Knowing that no national healthcare system is perfect, we could start with a comparison and contrast. When you think about a place such as the United Kingdom, they have a single-payer system, with care provided through government-based providers. That leads to one holistic system that ostensibly covers everyone’s healthcare needs in the country.

RK: Ostensibly.

KL: Right. While some people may fall through the cracks, the structure lends itself to greater simplification and less of that kind of risk.

Now on the other hand, when you think of the US, it’s really a mixed system. We have a combination of private insurance, with some of those insurers being nonprofit, and others for-profit. Add to that the government, which covers some forms of public insurance, it’s quite complex.

When it comes to private insurance, a majority of the people in the US—I’ve seen data that says at least half of the people—get their coverage through an employer-based insurance program.

And there are even more layers of complexity to contend with. Small businesses often do not, or cannot, offer insurance. Many employers provide coverage that does not meaningfully meet the actual needs of the employees at all.

RK: Entrepreneurs have to cover themselves, which makes it extremely difficult to launch a successful business or start-up.

KL: That’s right. And even among the half of insured people who receive coverage through their employer, there are so many people who do not have access to those types of jobs. The fortunate among them may find they can be covered through a government program like Medicare or Medicaid.

RK: Oh, so there is a safety net!

KL: Not so fast. Those systems are really fragmented, particularly Medicaid. The money for this entitlement comes from the federal government, but each state creates its own laws and policies and regulations, and each state runs its own Medicaid systems.

Let’s Get into Dollars and Sense

RK: States’ rights. The lottery of location.

KL: Compounded with the market-based core of the American society, we are left with a system that has lots of gaps and leaves lots of people behind.

RK: Connecting healthcare to money and maximizing profit seems to invite cost-cutting, price gouging, and other practices—all on the backs of healthcare patients.

KL: This is a sad fact. And we live in a nation whose organizing economic principle is capitalism. I am not saying capitalism is inherently evil, but the way we give it primacy and the way that we do not do a good job of regulating and putting in guardrails from government, that’s where things get problematic.

RK: I’m old enough now to remember when there was a safety net, flawed or not, in the tradition of FDR’s Great Society, fortified by LBJ—and decimated, by design, during the Reagan years. I personally heard the stump speeches where he said the nine most terrifying words in the English language were: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”Many of us are aware that it has been a decades-long plan to diminish federal government services. The outcome is this fragmentation, complexity and too many people falling between the gaps. Many of the people working in health equity arena say this is deliberate.

Let’s talk about the “gaps” for a minute and who falls between them. We can start with the more privileged strata of society. I have good insurance coverage, but the system is so complex, because of a new doctor’s appointment I had two days before the end of the calendar year, and how my provider coded the visit, I was on the hook for some $600 and could not apply my HSA to it. I should have waited a week. I was furious!

KL: Yeah, it’s a mind game trying to navigate it all. Even if you do have the information and the resources.

RK: Paying it was an annoyance but not a catastrophe. But I couldn’t help but think about people with less-good care, or no care at all. Or who, for a variety of reasons—not just money or coverage but also negative personal or family experiences with inferior care discrimination, bias, and harm, or don’t trust the healthcare system and don’t engage in preventative care … every time there is a cold, they are in the ER.

Because they don’t have a general care provider, they don’t get checkups. I have relatives who live this way, so this is not some theoretical.

KL: There are so many ways people can be alienated from care and healthcare awareness. Not least of which from the very poorest or unhoused people, but there are also the folks who work two and three jobs, or who don’t have control over their work schedules. They have enormous constraints on their time.

So even if they do have employer-based insurance and, presumably, access to “quality care,” they’re not going to be able to just go in and see a doctor, right?

RK: And if they get to the point where they are sick enough, they go through the ER. This exacerbates this ethos of scarcity and inconvenience and panic for people who are already struggling. Emergency rooms are traumatic places! The lights, the cacophony, the long, long waits. It’s demeaning.

I really think we’re in a societal spiral of stress and sadness and lacking. It’s a tragedy, from an equity standpoint, and actually, from a humanity standpoint.

KL: Even if I could set aside the morality of ensuring people have access to those things they need to live full, healthy lives—which is not something I can actually do—there is still the economic fact that many hospitals are nonprofits operating under charity status, meaning they have to provide a certain amount of care to people who show up whether they’re insured or not.

And if the patient cannot pay, that cost is eventually paid by us, the taxpayers.

RK: It’s nonsensical. Non-cents-ical, if I could make a terrible pun.

KL: Indeed. Just consider the economic impact in terms of the increased cost and lost productivity, again, it should not pass anyone’s capitalist-efficiency standard.

The Pandemic Temporarily Tightened the Safety Net

RK: (Deep sigh.) And so, we had the pandemic, during which many healthcare protections were put into place.

There was more access to telehealth, it became easier to get prescriptions through a video call, and other benefits. And as they say, once the public has been given a benefit or entitlement, it is extremely difficult to take it away. But away some of it has gone…. Seriously, we had something close to guaranteed income for a minute, right? And as far as I know, there were no statues of Karl Marx erected anywhere…. We did not devolve into a Communist dictatorship.Can you provide for the layperson, the landscape of some of the protections that were put in place during the pandemic that are now gone?

KL: Certainly. Throughout the course of the pandemic, there were a lot of moving parts, with a lot of different legislation put in place relating to the overall well-being of the population and specifically in the health sphere. To elaborate fully would require at least a few more interviews, but one of the most notable pieces of legislation was implemented in the very beginning of the pandemic: “The Families First Coronavirus Response Act.”

This legislation provided increased federal Medicaid funding for all states, provided they followed some rules. One of these rules was a requirement to maintain continuous coverage for people within the Medicaid system.

RK: Guaranteed Medicaid?

KL: Yes. Pre-pandemic, it was up to each state to annually re-evaluate whether a beneficiary would be eligible to receive continued Medicaid benefits, a process called redetermination.

People could, and did, (and will) fall off the rolls for a variety of reasons: their contact information is no longer up to date, or they no longer meet the income thresholds, and other factors.

During the pandemic, the federal government declared: “We’re going to scrap the redetermination process. For the duration of this public health emergency, people will remain enrolled in Medicaid, no matter what.”

RK: That sounds good, making sure people don’t get kicked off healthcare because maybe they are going through other tough situations, like eviction, illness, divorce, or any other reason that might lead to contact information going awry. On top of a global pandemic that caused more than 1.1 million fatalities in the United States between 2020 and today.

KL: It was a humane response to an unfathomably frightening and chaotic public health crisis. And so, we had this moment in time over the last couple of years where people were not getting bumped off Medicaid.

And at the same time—no surprise—we had record numbers of people signing up for Medicaid. Between the beginning of the pandemic and toward the end of 2022, we had almost 21 million additional people enrolled in Medicaid. This is a very significant number.

RK: You told me at the peak, there were over 90 million Americans covered by Medicaid.

KL: Correct. Now, to be clear, some of those numbers included children who are covered by CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. But nonetheless, you saw enormous numbers of previously uninsured people getting access to healthcare coverage. This was, I think, America’s biggest step toward universal coverage.

RK: And it was good, right?

KL: So it was. It was an interesting social experiment.

RK: And we didn’t send anyone to a Gulag.

KL: No, as you said, we did not devolve into a socialist state by providing some folks additional coverage. It was, on the whole, a good thing—especially for people who are typically left out of that patchwork American system that we talked about earlier.

There Really is No “Us” and “Them”

RK: There is a subset of our population that is historically always on the losing equation of anything approaching prosperity or dignity, or even minimal service to live and thrive. We address this discrepancy in a lot of our Economic Mobility work. And when we are discussing healthcare, I think it’s important to say that this is not entirely racial. It’s not just Black people. It’s not just Brown people. I read something there are more poor white people in the United States than any other racial group.

KL: Yes, the number of white people living in poverty greatly outstrips the number of impoverished Black people. However, the percentage of Black people living below the poverty line is twice that of whites. So yes, this goes beyond the color of your skin.

RK: And it’s older people. It’s rural people, it’s disabled people. Can you give us a lens into some of the groups and untold stories that people need to be thinking about when they think about health equity in the big picture.

KL: This is an enormous topic, Rozie, but let me share at least that there is such a convergence of -isms and deficits at play.

A whole host of people are being imperiled when they don’t have access to care. The causes for this lack of access range from structural racism to lack of economic mobility to the affordable housing crisis to the expensive education system which creates a lack of access to quality education, especially when you consider the importance of early education.

We don’t have enough kids in quality early education programs and at the end of the day this creates the system where you have a group of people who are more likely to experience employment volatility or unable to get a job, among many other adverse outcomes.

RK: This relates to what we were discussing regarding people falling off the Medicare rolls for reasons that are not necessarily their ‘fault.”

KL: Correct. We have a large group of people who have trouble securing safe, affordable housing and maintaining that housing. And they are prone to have a harder time keeping their contact information up to date with government agencies, and they’re the ones that have a harder time verifying their employment and income stats.

Additionally, because of time commitments, resource constraints, even lack of access to reliable transportation, they often don’t have the time or wherewithal to fill out the paperwork or answer the necessary questions.

KL: Further, as we said, the system is full of complexity. There is certainly a good portion of this population that don’t even understand how the process works and what they should be doing to make sure that they maintain the Medicaid benefits.

RK: On a bad-attitude day, I’d almost say it is deliberate punishment of the poor.

KL: This falling off the registry is called “administrative churn,” and there’s some pretty distressing statistics related to this. When you consider that the public health emergency has been sunsetted, and that the redetermination process is once again happening, it is estimated that upwards of 18 million people could lose Medicaid coverage due to this administrative churn or no longer meeting the Medicaid requirements. 

There will likely be a differential racial impact here.  Almost half of the 18 million people projected to lose Medicaid will be Black or Hispanic, despite the fact that when combined, they comprise approximately 33% of the overall population.  And when we are talking about those most likely to lose Medicaid due solely to administrative reasons, Hispanic beneficiaries will be disproportionately impacted.

RK: It’s shocking to think we are going backwards.

KL: A number of those people will be able to secure alternate insurance through an exchange or potentially through a new employment situation. But four million or so could become fully uninsured.

Within that group of 18 million that are projected to lose Medicaid coverage, there are seven million that they are thinking will lose it purely due to this administrative churn that we just talked about. 

RK: That is not great in any way, America! Let’s take a breath here and continue this conversation next week.

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Kim Langenhahn draws on more than 15 years of consulting, operational, and startup experience in the domestic and international health and nonprofit sectors to help organizations navigate complex issues, operate more effectively, and deliver greater impact. During the course of her career, Kim has helped numerous healthcare organizations tackle a variety of strategic challenges such as scaling Terrapin Pharmacy’s remote medication adherence system, launching a MENA-focused healthcare incubator, devising system-wide strategy for the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health as part of PwC’s consulting practice, and developing a market forecast for a pharmaceutical company alongside her L.E.K. Consulting colleagues.  She is also the Cofounder of a small social enterprise that she runs with her family

Kim earned a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago as well as a Master of Science in Quantitative Management and a Bachelor of Arts from Duke University.  An avid traveler, reader, bread baker, ice cream churner, and (aspiring) cheese maker, she also enjoys helping her husband tend to their rooftop garden and vermiculture operation.  She currently resides in Washington, D.C.

As Camber Collective’s Director of Impact and Equity Rozella Kennedy helps direct the firm’s internal Impact, Equity, and Belonging work as well as the external practice. Her theory of impact seeks to leverage equitable values to influence and impact the humanitarian, development, philanthropic, and social impact sectors. The long focus is to expand awareness and practice in local and global post-colonial contexts. Rozella is also the creator of Brave Sis Project, a lifestyle brand using narrative and social engagement to uplift BIPOC women in U.S. history as a tool for learning, growth, celebration, and equity allyship; her book “Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History” was published by Workman Press in Spring, 2023.

The post Healthcare x Equity: Mission Possible? Pt. One appeared first on Camber Collective.

As one can intuit from the principles above, we found in our internal and external analysis that our current model for leadership and management lacked clarity in decision-making and budgets, members of our Management Team were all doing a little bit of everything, and despite best intentions for this not to be the case, we were both inefficiently managing by consensus while too many decisions were concentrated and centralized with the Managing Partners. We also found that we were under-investing in organization infrastructure and finance and operational capacity as well as in professional development for leadership and our team, which was limiting our potential impact and the pathways for leadership growth.  

We evaluated multiple structure options and permutations, and as we often advise our clients, we recognized that while structure is important, the values, culture, role definition, decision-rights model, and individual people in each role will drive success and impact.  

Restructuring Our Business Units

At the beginning of 2023 we shifted to a business unit structure for Camber, and created a number of new leadership roles and pathways. Camber will operate with 5 business units (BUs): 

• Executive Office, which is accountable for the overall vision and management of the organization, and will steward of our mission, values, and external communications 
• US Consulting, which is accountable for the impact and economic performance of our US client portfolio 
• Global Consulting, which is accountable for the impact and economic performance of our Global client portfolio
• People, which is accountable for developing Camber’s talent and our internal Belonging work 
• Finance and Operations, which is accountable for building the enabling infrastructure that allows the Camber team to do its best work 

Brian will split his time serving as CEO and US Consulting Managing Director. Brian will work closely with Rozella Kennedy, our Director of Impact and Equity, who will now sit in our Executive Office.  

Ted will split his time serving as CFO/COO and Global Consulting Managing Director. Ted will work closely with Eileen Harrity, our Director of Finance and Operations.  

Sakina Zaidi, whom we are excited to announce has been promoted to Partner/Owner at Camber, will serve as the organization’s first ever Chief People Officer (CPO). Sakina has demonstrated incredible leadership and impact over the last few years. We are thrilled to welcome her to the ownership group, and our clients and team will benefit from her focus on talent development and Belonging in the CPO role. The role was designed to be different than similarly titled roles at other organizations in that it is NOT a Human Resources role.  

Each of these BUs will work closely and collaboratively with important new functional, sectoral, and geographic roles that will shape how we serve our clients and create impact, and how we enable belonging and connection throughout our organization. 

Bethanie Thomas will serve as our Global Functions Leader, and she will be accountable for codifying our world class functional methods and tools and service innovation. Bethanie will serve in this role part-time, and will continue to work with clients to create impact in gender equality and global health. 

Camber will have Sector Leaders for each of the 5 sectors in which we focus. Jessica Vandermark and Ben Jenson will co-lead Global Health, Matt Holman will lead US Health, Dr. Chidiebere E.X. Ikejemba will lead Climate & Environment, Marc Allen, whom we are excited to announce has been promoted to Director, will lead Shared Prosperity, and Ted will serve as interim lead for Democracy & Governance while we search for a Director to lead this work in 2023. Each of our Sector Leaders will serve in their roles part-time and will continue to lead client engagements and field-building efforts and eminence.  

We are also thrilled to announce that Kate Thorson has been promoted to Director, and Kim Langenhahn has joined Camber as a Director. Kate will continue to lead a cross-cutting portfolio of work in health equity and gender equity within global and US contexts. Kim will work closely with Matt to grow our US Health portfolio and impact. 

Both Rozie and Sakina will work closely with newly created Office Lead roles, who will be responsible for local Belonging and connection in our geographic hubs. These leaders are Sarah Burgess (Washington, D.C.), Abdel Agadazi (Paris, France), Bethany Wylie (Seattle, WA), and Joseph Zhang (SF Bay Area, CA). These leaders will continue to serve clients day-to-day. 

The changes and change management of the new roles and structure are significant, and we are giving our leaders and team grace and time to adapt, and we will continue to ask for feedback and ways to improve how we work. We also recognize that our new roles will mean a shift in our working relationship – our incredible friendship and shared vision for Camber will endure, and we are excited to learn and grow and serve our team, our clients and partners in different capacities in 2023. We are also buoyed by the incredible leadership and talent we have at Camber, by the organization’s values and our commitment to Equity and Belonging, and by the incredible partners and clients with whom we work across the globe. We are grateful for a 2022 filled with countless good days and we are filled with hope, optimism, and determination for an impactful and joy filled 2023.  

Best, 

Brian and Ted 

Brian Leslie, Co-Founder, CEO, and US Managing Director. Brian is a Co-Founder and CEO of Camber Collective and manages Camber’s US Consulting practice. He works closely with Camber’s leadership to define the organization’s vision and strategic direction and is responsible for Camber’s impact, equity and belonging, and communications in partnership with the Chief People Officer and Director of Impact & Equity. Brian has over 20 years of experience in strategy consulting, advising  foundations, individual philanthropists and nonprofits on strategy, organization design, partnerships and operating models. Brian has experience working on a range of social sector issues and geographies, and brings specific expertise working with clients with clients that focus on policy, advocacy, and communications as their primary lever for impact. Prior to Camber, Brian worked at Deloitte Consulting, where he advised clients on corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions across multiple industries, as well as at Stockamp & Associates (now Huron Consulting) where he advised large health care organizations on finance and operations. Brian earned an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and received an undergraduate degree in Economics with honors from Pomona College. Brian is based in Seattle, and spends his free time running, playing soccer, skiing, and enjoying adventures with his wife Anna, who teaches Physiology and Biomedical Science as a local High School, two teenage boys, and his two dogs, Roscoe and Chicken.

Ted Schneider is Camber Collective’s COO and CFO, focusing on managing the firm’s performance and operations, and advises clients on aligning organizational strategy, organization, and business model towards optimal impact. Prior to Camber, Ted worked at Deloitte Consulting, where he advised clients on corporate strategy across many industry sectors. Ted was recognized as one of the Puget Sound Business Journal’s “Top 40 Under 40” in 2012. Ted earned an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan with Highest Honors and received an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech. Ted loves playing tennis, skiing with friends and family and encouraging his two teenage boys to use both the left and right halves of their developing brains.

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It truly is better to give than to receive: among the many grateful messages shared with us for the year-end donation was one ED who wrote that our gift “really helps… and even more it gives the team the feeling that they have support out there. My programs manager actually cried when I just told her… I can’t tell you how much this means for all of us.”

We’re so happy to be able to make a difference to so many important groups and causes, both in the cities and regions where we have offices, but also in places as far away as South Sudan, Myanmar, and Haiti. As a firm committed to helping address today’s most urgent challenges—systemically, sustainably, and equitably—this is a reminder of why we are galvanized in our work.

Please enjoy learning a bit about the organizations we supported in 2022—and a reminder, it’s not only year-end giving that makes a difference. If any of these missions inspire you, we’re sure your support will always be welcomed!

Groups We Supported in 2022

Anacostia Riverkeeper works to protect and restore the Anacostia River in the Washington, D.C. area, where we opened our 4^th Camber office in Fall, 2022. Their focus areas range from water quality monitoring to advocacy work to ensure a swimmable and fishable Anacostia.

Ben’s Fund partners with the Seattle Foundation to provide financial support to children and young adults with autism along with guidance and support as they continue their journey.

Black Women for Wellness is committed to the health and well-being of Black women and girls through health education, empowerment and advocacy. Black Women for Wellness started as a group of women concerned with the health and well-being of black babies. Teaming up with the Birthing Project, they implemented the Shangazi Program, a grassroots initiative matching pregnant women to mentors who coached parents from pregnancy until at least the child’s first birthday.

Over 11,000 homeless individuals are cared for by Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program each year. Each individual gains access to comprehensive health care, from preventative dental care to cancer treatment, across more than 35 locations reaching some of the community’s most vulnerable.

Chief Seattle Club is dedicated to physically and spiritually supporting American Indian and Alaska Native people in downtown Seattle. Its Day Center in the Pioneer Square district provides food, primary health care, housing assistance, legal services, a Native art job training program, and opportunities for members to engage in cultural community-building.

Childhaven is a nonprofit organization that serves children and their families experiencing adversity and trauma in King County, Washington. The agency runs Early Learning, Counseling Services, Developmental Therapies, and Wraparound Support programs.

The Children’s Alliance is Washington’s statewide, nonpartisan child advocacy organization, changing kids’ lives through effecting positive changes in public policies, priorities, and programs.

Karen Department of Health and Welfare is a field medics and ethnic health organization operating in Southeast Myanmar. It provides trauma care and medical first response to more than 75,0000 people in over 200 villages affected by conflict and displacement.

The Mae Tao Clinic, also known as Dr. Cynthia’s clinic after its founder Dr. Cynthia Maung, is a community based organization that has provided primary healthcare service and protection to community from Burma/Myanmar in Western Thailand since 1989.

FareStart transforms lives, disrupts poverty and nourishes communities through food, life skills and job training. This agency has been helping people transform their lives through food for 30 years—one person, one job and one community at a time.

The Green String Network is a regional organization based in Kenya supporting healing-centered peacebuilding local organizations to develop and design trauma-informed programing across the region, including neighboring countries of Somalia, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. Through storytelling, watercolor illustrations, and embodied practices they help people attain healing-centered peacebuilding.

iMentor matches every student in our high schools with a committed college-educated mentor, equipped to guide that young person on their journey to college graduation.

La Maison des Femmes de Saint-Denis Est serves women in domestic violence situations through a multidisciplinary suite of services. Their geographical focus is the Parisian suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis, dans le Val d’Oise, les Hauts-de-Seine et à Paris.

Mamatoto Village is devoted to serving Black women through the creation of career pathways in maternal health; and providing accessible perinatal support services designed to equip women with the necessary tools to make the most informed decisions in their maternity care, parenting, and lives.

Miracle Messages rebuilds social support systems for unhoused neighbors, primarily through family reunifications, a phone-based buddy system, and $500/month direct cash transfers. They seek to end relational poverty on the streets, and in the process, inspire people to embrace their unhoused neighbors not as problems to be solved, but as people to be loved.

The Northwest Community Bail Fund advocates for bail reform and works to minimize the harm of the cash bail system by paying bail for people who would otherwise spend the pretrial time in jail while awaiting routine court appearances. They operate King, Snohomish, and Pierce Counties in Washington State.

Oasis for Girls partners with young women of color, aged 14-18, from under-resourced communities in San Francisco to cultivate the skills, knowledge, and confidence to discover their dreams and build strong futures, using culturally relevant and gender-specific programs to empower girls and build sisterhood through shared experiences.

Olivewood Gardens and Learning Center’s historic 7.85-acre property in National City, California serves as an interactive, indoor-outdoor classroom for children and adults from around San Diego County, helping build healthy families and a healthy environment.

Omar’s Dream Foundation enables hospitalized and medically-supervised children to remotely attend school allowing them to stay connected to their teachers and classmates. The program is provided free of cost to qualified students and their educators.

Pathways Development Initiative Uganda (PDI) is a non-governmental organization that exists to mobilize and empower individuals and communities to improve their livelihoods and to understand the role of education as a means to fighting poverty and transforming their lives.

Rainier Scholars cultivates the academic potential and leadership skills of hard-working, underrepresented students of color. By creating access to transformative educational and career opportunities and providing comprehensive support to scholars and families, they help increase college graduation rates and empower new generations of leaders.

Reading Partners is a children’s literacy organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area with programs in over 40 school districts throughout California, New York, Washington DC, and eight other states. In the 2016-17 school year, Reading Partners delivered individualized reading tutoring to more than 11,200 students in 225 elementary schools.

REES Africa (Renewable Energy & Environmental Sustainability for Africa Initiative) is a youth-led NGO working to redefine the lifestyle of vulnerable and marginalized African communities, providing renewable energy access and promote environmental sustainability through advocacy & actionable projects in Africa.

RepresentUs brings together conservatives, progressives, and everyone in between to pass powerful laws that fix the U.S.’s broken elections and stop political bribery.

ROOTS Young Adult Shelter builds community and fosters dignity through access to essential services and a safe sleeping places for young adults (aged 18-15) experiencing homelessness.

The Secours Populaire Français, or French Popular Relief, is a French non-profit organization founded in 1945, dedicated to fighting poverty and discrimination in public life.

Share and Care Foundation believes it is our social responsibility to work towards creating a more equal world, where everyone has access to gender equality, healthcare, and education. They provide middle school dropouts with the support to reenroll and complete their education, among other supports.

She Should Run provides women who are curious about public office with a starting place to explore their options. They help ensure everyone can find a role in transforming the face of government, local to national.

SisterWeb Doulas avails Black, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, and Latinx birthing families in San Francisco with community doulas and high-quality, culturally congruent doula care at no cost.

Solidarité Femmes provides women and their children who are victims of domestic violence with emergency aid and ongoing assistance including connection to wraparound services.

As a non-governmental search and rescue organization, SOS Humanity stands for humanity at sea and on land, committed to ensuring no person drowns while fleeing at sea and that everyone is treated with dignity. They operate a life-saving mission in the central Mediterranean, and seek to rescue people from distress, protect and assist them, document their stories, and highlight the consequences of the EU´s inhumane migration policy.

Technology Access Foundation (TAF) is a Seattle-based nonprofit redefining K-12 public education throughout Washington State for all students and teachers, particularly those who identify as a person of color and are from traditionally underserved communities. They utilize an equity lens and STEM teaching to provide opportunity, undo systemic oppression, and make education a place where everyone wins.

The Tubman Center for Health & Freedom is committed to the principles of healing and people’s liberation from systems that make us unwell. Their focus areas include health justice, culturally appropriate care and integrative medicine.

With a vision of equity for all, the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle (ULMS) provides programming and services designed to support and encourage self-sufficiency in all aspects of life, particularly across five focus areas: advocacy & civic engagement, education, housing, public health and workforce development.

Water for South Sudan was founded by “Lost Boy” Selva Dut and supporters to “deliver sustainable quality-of-life services to the people of South Sudan by efficiently providing access to clean, safe water, and improving hygiene and sanitation practices in areas of great need.” They seek to water the seeds of change in South Sudan by drilling wells, delivering hygiene education, and providing sanitation services.

The What If Foundation invests in the future of Haitian children living in poverty. They work in close partnership with the grassroots local organization​ Na Rive to deliver food, education, and community support programs that are transforming lives in the Ti Plas Kazo community of Port-au-Prince, and beyond. This is an in memoriam gift honoring Lavarice Ti Plas’ amazing leader, Lavarice Gaudin.

Wild Montana works from the ground up bringing people and communities together around policies, proposals, and legislation that protect wild public lands and waters in the Big Sky Country state from degradation and irresponsible development. Its work safeguards wildlands, secures wildlife habitat and migration corridors, and keeps headwaters and streams running cold, clear, and connected.

YouthCare works to end youth homelessness and to ensure that young people are valued for who they are and empowered to achieve their potential.

As Camber Collective’s Director of Impact and Equity Rozella Kennedy helps direct the firm’s internal Impact, Equity, and Belonging work as well as the external practice. Her theory of impact seeks to leverage equitable values to influence and impact the humanitarian, development, philanthropic, and social impact sectors. The long focus is to expand awareness and practice in local and global post-colonial contexts. Rozella is also the creator of Brave Sis Project, a lifestyle brand using narrative and social engagement to uplift BIPOC women in U.S. history as a tool for learning, growth, celebration, and equity allyship; her book “Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History” was published by Workman Press in Spring, 2023.

The post The Joy of Giving, 2022 appeared first on Camber Collective.

It’s human nature to wish for linear and rapid progress, but as we know, most meaningful advances—and certainly the journey towards authentic racial equity—are, at best, spirals. This work is complicated and filled with challenges, false starts, hurdles, missteps (and hopefully, minimal) crashes. Neither a sailor nor a rower, I’m still attracted to a few boating metaphors to help chart our present course.

In coming in as Camber’s first Director of Impact and Equity in late 2021, I was able to supplement my personal career and workplace experience with insights from our team, input from clients and partners, and continual study of the DEI and culture-building sectors beyond our company. Again, I am grateful to Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones for their “Dismantling White Supremacy” framework, as well as many other practitioners in the equity, belonging, and social justice space who keep us focused on our own potential blind spots as well as enduring systemic gaps to confront and shift.

As consultants, we want to measure and map everything. And yet, neither Camber nor I are “DEI practitioners” in the strict sense. Further, one of the key takeaways from the field of practice around diversity, equity, and inclusion is that there are no fixed and firm ways to define DEI success. Certainly, “checkbox outcomes,” such as the number of hires or retentions, diversity of candidate pools, etc., can spur helpful initiatives and practices, but over-relying on these indicators can be shallow and performative—and worse. This is why we prefer belonging: do team members feel Seen, Connected, Supported, Galvanized?

Steering The Ship Towards the North Star** of Equitable Impact

Steering towards considerations of authentic equity may involve navigating around shoals of uncomfortable truth. One reality check is that practices of overt anti-racism often run counter to many traditional mores of the business world. Honestly facing this fact creates a tension that many corporate and cultural entities would prefer to hush or ignore, but Camber is seeking to lean in and name it. Facing such hard truths assists us in refining the role that we, as a consulting firm, can viably bring to the equity space.

We also recognize that each of our clients—and even our own people—is on an individual journey of equity and belonging. Our job is to keep the ship sailing and point the direction for others, and to do so requires dexterity and determination. We neither want to get too far ahead in the lane and potentially lose or alienate some collaborators or partners, nor do we wish to drop a complacent anchor in our current societal spot—so doing would not only disappoint our more activist-inspired collaborators, sticking with the status quo actually risks inadvertently perpetuating the very harmful systems and urgent challenges that we week to help solve: systemically, sustainably, and equitably.  

Camber Collective is first and foremost an advisor, and increasingly we see our role as that of a convenor, influencer and activator: embracing, stretching, and encouraging our clients and partners to expand their mindsets towards deeper empathy, humility, and courage.

But now, let’s be clear: many proponents in the DEI and justice spaces are responding to urgent, compelling, and sometimes life-or-death issues around discrimination and even danger. We learn from and are galvanized by their fire. And with this, for us as a consulting firm, it has proven appropriate to utilize what john. a. powell and others call a “bridging” approach. We try to utilize facts (data), humanized storytelling, and collegial “calling in” in order to steer the prow.

We choose this equitable and inclusive path fully aware that incorporating localized agency and value, and shifting norms around power require attenuated resources of time, resources, and patience. We are not expert practitioners yet, for as our best teachers in equity and justice spaces inform us, perfection itself is a false dichotomy. (Whose perfection is a question that can often be mishandled and muddled by power dynamics.) Yet unlearning bias and unliving privilege is everybody’s work, and to foster change, we must stay connected and activated. 

Everyone Must Grab an Oar

I’d like to “be real” about some of the dynamics that sometimes undermine equity and impact work. Let’s start with acknowledging that some degree of engagement attrition may be inevitable. As we move further away from the social and racial justice awakenings and uprisings of 2020, we must not take our foot off the collective gas pedal; for we who are BIPOC* people, know that there is no magical “over,” and indeed far too little lasting racial justice has ever arrived. Therefore, a big part of our collective work is reminding us all that change is not an overnight occurrence. Centuries of habit must be unraveled, unlearned, and disrupted.

This is a laborious calling, particularly for some BIPOC and other systemically excluded or discriminated staff who grow weary from carrying a disproportionate part of the effort. And again, “keeping it real,” across both U.S. society and in some global circles, we have already seen the swing back, with some people in dominant (white, western, male) culture growing tired or disengaged—or equally unhelpful, overwhelmed by paralyzing guilt and sorrow over the sobering entrenchment of racism and systemic discrimination. (The SCOTUS affirmative action ruling of 2023 only further soured the landscape.)

We have, at Camber, found that our belonging framework—especially the Seen and Connected levers—keeps us in honest, courageous dialogue about race, equity and inclusion, and other essential topics, and I recommend that anyone in the position of real or aspirational “ally” continue to stay focused on these necessary shifts. Equity cannot be a flash in the pan or a symbolic, short-lived reaction to a news cycle. May I point out that stepping away from ‘isms’ is a privilege that people of color, women, LGBTQIA+, differently abled, and other groups who are typically harmed or excluded do not generally get to select. This fact alone should keep all our arms flexing and paddling.

To anyone who has been feeling overcome or discouraged by the endurance of inequity, the strokes must continue, focused and on course. The call of a trusted coxswain can keep us rowing as one. Humanitarian, development, social impact, government, and philanthropy work are exhausting. But listing about in a conceit of pain and apology diverts essential energy and motivation that could better be used to activate change. These negative/scarcity drivers also keep us collectively stuck in a cycle of anger, regret, fear, distrust, and other deleterious factors that make social impact and change all but impossible.

One more point: centering misery over hope inadvertently and disproportionately centers dominant culture/whiteness/patriarchy as the prime activator of social change, leaving those who would most benefit sidelined as token accessories or passive recipients of change, rather than co-architects. This is one reason why we continue to explore constructs of “White Saviordom” as a team and ways to avoid and dismantle these mindsets and practices. This is ongoing, endless, but as I’ve said before galvanizing work, and it’s one of the reasons that people choose to work at and with Camber Collective.

Making Space for Joy

All of what I’ve described above is complicated, delicate, sensitive, sometimes even holy, but always difficult work. As a result, we introduce joy and celebration whenever possible to support each other on our collective equity journey. Tools, resources, and events that insert celebration and appreciation allow us to fortify the team’s sense of mutuality, admiration, and trust.

Our 2022 team convening, which brought the nearly 40 team members from around the globe together after nearly three years of separation, involved activities that helped us bond and renew our resolve. They were all themed around the four tenets of belonging (being Seen, Connected, Supported, and Galvanized). Fun, gratitude, celebration, friendly competition, breaking bread, and vision-mapping ignited us all.

To support internal culture building and collaborating, we also are also co-designing new ways to gather in groupings of team member choice around equity learning, advisory, or task groups. This flexibility not only provides multiple layers of opportunities for team members to engage deeply in the work that most interests them, it provides safe spaces for in-group sharing and solidarity, and cross-group gatherings for learning, sharing, and mutual coaching.

We continue to explore groups that advise on equity and client influence; efforts to humanize data in storytelling; and impromptu, informal staff gatherings based on geographic region, faith practice, and other elements of our shared human experience. As we dive deeper into our efforts, we look forward to sharing more information about our experiences.  

Humanizing, Honesty, and Hope

Shifting our mindsets and developing comfort with emotional vulnerability and individual discovery are indispensable ways of activating social impact. They are also stances that are seldom seen in management consulting. In our initial stages of this work, unclear communication around our organizational norms and practices contributed to discord and frustration among some staff members. In checking our own awareness and blind spots, we have been able to start making structural and policy changes to improve communications between staff and clients—policies that will continue to evolve as we move further along this equity journey.  

Connection, along with being seen and supported (three of the tenets of belonging) allows us to stay galvanized (the fourth). Our belonging framework helps involve all members of the Camber team—from management down to the newest hire—keep equitable impact afloat.

Focusing on “connection,” through humanized storytelling and relationship-building, has allowed us to interrogate legacy “professional” postures in our consulting sector, such as seriousness, rigidity, and over-reliance on jargon. Focusing on people: our collaborators, the people they ultimately serve, and ourselves as a team also gives us the resolve to soldier on through the complex yet generally behind-the-scenes work of coalition building, systems design, and community strengthening.

Putting our Values into our Business

To put a fine point on it, equity and belonging are not the primary work of Camber Collective—consulting is. As I pointed out in the second post in this series, we strive to integrate these attributes into our client work, even if equity and belonging are not the primary focus of a project. Further, our firm’s expectation that each team member invests individual time and focus in equity learning is one of our differentiating factors compared to some other consultancies in our industry. Referring again to my first post in this series, we strive to be exemplars in the consulting industry in our rejection of agnosticism in “social good consulting.” Clients and projects whose goals run afoul of our social good values won’t pass our engagement test.

As we build out this values alignment in our practice and demonstrate a deeper focus on equity and sustainability, we are even finding that new partners who were skeptical of the consulting sector writ large are eager to engage with our services. We are gratified to see this development, for we do believe that, by integrating equity into our theories of influence and client work, Camber Collective can help disrupt and dismantle the collective history of racist, exclusive, extractive, and colonial practices in the humanitarian and philanthropic sectors.  

It is good work. We enjoy celebrating each other and commemorating key cultural and personal events. While acknowledging the inevitable mistakes we will make along the way, we hope to move forward with grace and resolve. The ship sails forth!

As Camber Collective’s Director of Impact and Equity Rozella Kennedy helps direct the firm’s internal Impact, Equity, and Belonging work as well as the external practice. Her theory of impact seeks to leverage equitable values to influence and impact the humanitarian, development, philanthropic, and social impact sectors. The long focus is to expand awareness and practice in local and global post-colonial contexts. Rozella is also the creator of Brave Sis Project, a lifestyle brand using narrative and social engagement to uplift BIPOC women in U.S. history as a tool for learning, growth, celebration, and equity allyship; her book “Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History” was published by Workman Press in Spring, 2023.

Notes

* BIPOC refers to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Camber Collective recognizes that this term, like many others in this dynamic and rapidly changing nomenclature context, does not fully serve all communities or contexts, but we will use it here for the sake of brevity and uniformity.

** Similarly, many practitioners in equity spaces suggest not using the term “North Star” and instead using “guiding star,” to dissuade us from default Global-North location bias. While I agree with this sentiment, at this point, in the nautical field, “guiding star” has not yet caught on as a navigational term. I advise the reader to approach language with the fluidity that human interaction and progressing ideas invite.

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