Seed Collaborative is a Black-owned, women-led, Los Angeles-based consulting firm supporting organizations to operationalize visionary initiatives at the intersection of organizational development and diversity, justice, access, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
A close partner to the Othering & Belonging Institute out of UC Berkeley (run by john powell, founder of Targeted Universalism), Seed builds the equity capacity of institutions to reach just outcomes and evolve their organizational cultures towards belonging.
The Help Me Grow (HMG) National Center partnered with Seed Collaborative in 2024 to explore Targeted Universalism in the context of HMG, and is currently entering a partnership with Seed to provide structured training, coaching, and technical assistance to two HMG systems selected to participate in the Continuous System Improvement branch of the new HMG Incubator Hub Initiative.
Purpose
Seed believes organizations must create the internal conditions to achieve lasting equitable outcomes and an experience of belonging for those they serve.
To achieve and maintain equity and belonging for those you serve, they believe organizations must bring about equity and belonging internally in their structures, cultures, policies, and practices thereby creating the conditions for lasting change of equity and belonging.
Equity and belonging are reached and sustained internally when organizations:
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maintain ongoing journeys towards diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB);
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while also developing and applying data grounded strategies that work to achieve equitable outcomes for all, perused in ways that meet people where they are.
The approaches best positioned to support organizations in developing equitable and belonging based strategies and outcomes while advancing their internal DEIB journeys are Targeted Universalism and the belonging practices of co-owned and co-creative collaborative group process, bridging, and shared leadership. The Seed team approaches core service areas using a variety of methods and tools to reimagine how people-systems come together and cooperate in harmony.
Seed’s consulting teams deliver:
- Communities of Practice
- Strategic Plans
- Equity plans
- Coaching and guidance
- Strategic implementation support
- Culture repair
- Diversity, Justice, Access, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DJAEIB) training/planning
- Organizational restructure and sustainability planning
Targeted Universalism
Equity is often practiced as focusing on disparities, which can become a binary that looks at the most- and least-favored groups, ignoring other groups, and setting the goal as what the most favored group has rather than a universal, affirmative outcome. Disparity-focused or “closing the gap” strategies can lead to pitting groups against each other and creating competition for scarce resources. It can also fall into the trap of racial essentialism.
Targeted Universalism (TU), on the other hand, organizes around an outcomes-based, universal goal while developing strategies that look at structures, institutions, culture, and the situatedness of groups and individuals. TU focuses on the construction and situatedness of groups through data and disaggregated information and takes racially constructed outcomes and disparities seriously by looking at how they are constructed. Organizing around a universal goal can create common cause and social cohesion, while the targeted strategies recognize and address differences in situatedness, history, and opportunity. Importantly, TU thus accounts for issues affecting marginalized groups, including but not limited to race, gender, religion, and disability. TU is also valuable when there is broad consensus that there’s a problem but disagreement on solutions. At its best, TU can expand care, power, and promote real reform — which advances us towards a world of belonging. Often called equity 2.0, TU is particularly effective around policy, programs, process, and design. As an operations and communications strategy, it is a sophisticated and practical process and philosophy that can advance us towards bridging and belonging.
Objectives
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The TU CoP is designed to advance justice, equity, and belonging through realization of the following outcomes:
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Strengthen the application of TU among interested institutions focused on both internal and external functions
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Create broad understanding of the challenges and successes among institutions and places applying TU
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Create relationship among those working with TU to enable knowledge-spillover effects among community members
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Increase exposure to experts and experienced practitioners of TU
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Understand TU in the context of and in service to belonging and “bridging” as both a mechanism and outcome of TU that can drive transformation.
Over the last year, the Help Me Grow (HMG) National Center teamed up with Seed Collaborative to gain valuable insights into the experiences, preferences, and priorities of the HMG network as it relates to applying Targeted Universalism (TU) to our work in the early childhood system-building field. Through affiliate interviews, focus groups, and surveys, we aimed to better understand how TU is being implemented across the Network, and identify opportunities to promote equity by integrating TU into the HMG Model.
