A comprehensive new model for creating inclusive organizations, illuminating the vital role that inclusion plays in developing solutions to the critical social, environmental, and leadership challenges we face.

Most organizational DE&I efforts are focused on changing individual behaviors. But unless you change the organizational structures-the practices, processes, and systems that surround and support individual behaviors-your change efforts will not take root. Structural inclusion makes behavioral inclusion stick.

Andrés Tapia and Fayruz Kirtzman have found that five disciplines encompass the structures, mindsets, behaviors, and accountabilities required for creating inclusive organizations that will have transformational impact not only on their culture and people but also on society and the planet:

1: Manage the Risk: know how to deal with the legal, reputational, and cultural risks of either doing the wrong thing, or not doing the right thing.
2: Explode the Awareness: make sure leaders and employees are deeply informed about, and publicly committed to, the value of DE&I.
3: Maximize the Talent Systems: ensure that leaders and managers display inclusive behaviors when they manage and optimize talent.
4: Master the Logistics: integrate DE&I into operations in ways that lead to improved efficiencies.
5: See the Marketplace: expand to new consumer market segments, enhance cross culturally competent customer service, and form effective partnerships with overlooked communities.

The authors provide assessment tools and case studies of organizations that have implemented each discipline, highlighting what worked and what tripped them up. And they take a wider view, showing how inclusive organizations practicing the five disciplines can address what they call society's four vital tasks: diversify leadership, eradicate polarization, achieve justice, and save the planet. This is a complete guide to how to make your organization a systematic, process-oriented engineer of change for the full range of your stakeholders.

2023 Axiom Business Books Award Silver Medalist (Business Commentary)
2023 Nautilus Book Award Silver Medalist (Social Change & Social Justice)

This is the first in-depth examination of the important ongoing fusion of activism, capitalism, and social change masterfully told through a compelling narrative filled with vivid stories and striking studies.

Corporations and their executives are at the forefront of some of the most contentious and important social issues of our time. Through pronouncements, policies, boycotts, sponsorships, lobbying, and fundraising, corporations are actively engaged in issues like immigration reform, gun regulation, racial justice, gender equality, and religious freedom.

Despite corporate social activism being everywhere these days-witness how quickly companies and progressives united to oppose North Carolina's “bathroom bill” or support the Black Lives Matter movement-there has been no in-depth examination of the far-reaching consequences of this movement. What first principles should guide businesses' approaches? How should activists engage with businesses in a way that is most beneficial to their causes? What are potential pitfalls and risks associated with corporate social activism for activists, businesses, and society at large? Weaving studies and stories, Temple University professor of law, Tom C. W. Lin offers a road map for how we got here and a compass for where we are going as a nation of capitalists and activists seeking profit and progress.

Conversations about social change devolve quickly into conflict when participants don't agree. Experienced practitioners Jason Jay and Gabriel Grant offer advocates and aspiring change agents six easy steps for opening the lines of communication when conversations get stuck.

The tough problems in the world are made harder when we can't even talk about them. We try to address issues that matter, but conversations break down because they become emotionally charged and we lose sight of our common goals. Scarred from these breakdowns with coworkers, family, and friends, we find it easier and safer to stick with people who already agree with us.

Getting unstuck requires the courage to confront our own inner contradictions and then to re-engage with people in a newly authentic way. This book invites readers to join in a spirit of serious play, laughing at ourselves as we take on the important work of self-reflection and renewing our conversations. Breaking through Gridlock includes six steps and a series of proven exercises to help readers along the way. We encourage readers to invite a friend to join them on the journey.

For too long, women have been told to confine themselves-physically, socially, and emotionally. Eliza VanCort says now is the time for women to stand tall, raise their voices, and claim their space.

Women fight the pressure to make themselves small in private, professional, and public spaces. VanCort, a teacher, consultant, and speaker, provides the necessary tools for women to rewrite the rules and create the stories of their choosing safely and without apology.

VanCort identifies the five key behaviors of all “Space-Claiming Queens”: use your voice and posture to project confidence and power, end self-sabotage, forge connections, neutralize unsafe spaces, and unite across differences. Through personal narrative, research, and actionable strategies, VanCort provides how-tos on combating challenges, such as antimentors and microaggressions, and gives advice for building up your “old girls” club, asking for what you're worth, and owning your space without apology.

Bold, fun, and enlightening, this book is birthed from VanCort's incredible story. Having a mother with schizophrenia forced VanCort to learn to be small and invisible at an early age, and suffering a traumatic brain injury as an adult required her to rethink communication from the ground up. Drawing on these experiences, and those of real women everywhere, VanCort empowers women to claim space for themselves and for their sisters with courage, empathy, and conviction because “when we rise together, we rise so much higher.”

Once vilified by pro-life and pro-choice supporters alike, Aspen Baker has now shown that “pro-voice” might be the best method to move past conflict and hatred around abortion. With her nonprofit, Exhale, she has demonstrated that it's possible to get people talking respectfully even about the most polarizing topics.

When Aspen Baker had an abortion at the age of twenty-four, she felt caught between the warring pro-life and pro-choice factions, with no safe space to share her conflicted feelings, which didn't fit into either side's party line. In this hopeful and moving book, Baker shows how she and Exhale, the organization she cofounded, developed a philosophy and a set of tools that enables anyone to have respectful, compassionate exchanges about even the most divisive topics. Initially distrusted by both sides, Exhale now receives post-abortion referrals from pro-life and pro-choice organizations and has become a leader and innovator by pioneering a more respectful, supportive dialogue about this highly emotional issue.

Baker examines the history of the abortion debate, identifying the mistakes and misunderstandings on both sides that have led us to the current painful divide. She shares how Exhale discovered creative ways to build a caring, nonjudgmental space for women and men to share their feelings about abortion, such as starting a post-abortion telephone service and piloting a nationwide story-sharing tour led by women who'd had abortion experiences. They call their approach “pro-voice.”

This book shows how pro-voice can be adopted by anyone interested in dialogue rather than dogma. Peace, in this perspective, isn't a world without fighting or conflict but one where conflict can be engaged in-fiercely and directly-without dehumanizing ourselves or our opponents. Our world is full of gray areas. It's vital we learn practices like pro-voice to help us move from paralysis to progress.

"What is impressive is not only how Winters builds a case for the urgency and need for bold, inclusive conversations but that she also gives specific strategies and competencies to turn her theory into practice.”
-Dr. Sheila Robinson, publisher and CEO, Diversity Woman Media

Effective dialogue across different dimensions of diversity, such as race, gender, age, religion, or sexual orientation, fosters a sense of belonging and inclusion, which in turn leads to greater productivity, performance, and innovation. Whether in the workplace, faith communities, or educational settings, our differences can tear us apart rather than bring us together if we do not know how to communicate. Recognizing our collective responsibility to earnestly address our differences and increase understanding and empathy will not only enhance organizational goals but will also lead to a healthier, kinder, and more compassionate world.

Award-winning diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant Mary-Frances Winters has been leading workshops on what she calls Bold, Inclusive Conversations for years. In this book she offers specific dialogue strategies to foster greater understanding on the following topics:
• Recognizing the importance of creating equity and sharing power
• Dealing with the "fragility" of dominant groups--their discomfort in engaging with historically subordinated groups
• Addressing the exhaustion historically marginalized groups feel from constantly explaining their different lived experience
• Exploring how to build trust and create psychologically safe spaces for dialogue
This guide is comprehensive for anyone who wants to break down the barriers that separate us and facilitate discussions on potentially polarizing topics.

The Lean Startup concept has revolutionized the way businesses are developed. Now Michel Gelobter applies this powerful concept to the social sector.

In business, the lean start-up movement is turning the traditional approach to innovation on its head. Rather than developing an elaborate plan, raising money to fund it, and then following it to its uncertain conclusion-a process that can take years-entrepreneurs in companies new and old are launching small inexpensive initiatives to test ideas, quickly learning from failures and successes, and using that data to further refine the ideas and test them again. Social entrepreneur Michel Gelobter says there's no reason the social sector can't do the same.

Gelobter goes through the lean startup process step by step, showing exactly how nonprofits and advocacy organizations can adapt it to increase their impact. He uses dozens of real-world examples: a homelessness group that discovered the one metric they needed to improve to get more people off the streets; a technology-based literacy startup that was able to reach two million children in two years, when it took a more traditionally-oriented program fifteen; and many others. From the glimmer of an idea to make the world a better place to deep reform in the heart of the world's largest government and non-profit bureaucracies, Michel Gelobter shows how the lean start-up can drive a revolution in policy and social change.

Based on the New York Times bestseller The Body Is Not an Apology, this is an action guide to help readers practice the art of radical self-love both for themselves and to transform our society.



Readers of The Body Is Not an Apology have been clamoring for guidance on how to do the work of radical self-love. After crowdsourcing her community, Sonya Renee Taylor found her readers wanted more concrete ideas on how to apply this work in a larger social and structural context. Your Body Is Not an Apology is the action guide that gives them just that-tools and structured frameworks they can apply immediately to start changing the world. Taylor guides readers with concrete ideas and, as always, practical applications that move us beyond theory and into doing and being radical self-love change agents in the world. This workbook, along with the new edition of the book, will put people in action in their organizations, in politics, in their doctor's offices, and at their jobs.

YES! Magazine cofounder Sarah van Gelder sends dispatches from an eighteen-state journey across America, describing how people abandoned by big national institutions are developing creative community-based solutions to environmental and social problems.


YES! Magazine cofounder Sarah van Gelder was worried about the current state of American society. Environmental destruction, growing poverty, urban decay, rural decline-it's a long list. Can we turn this around, she wondered? Are there answers we haven't found yet? She confided her fears to a friend, who said to her, “If the universe could deploy the one small person that is you, what would it have you do?” Her answer surprised them both: “I'd go out traveling and see for myself.”

So driving a twelve-year-old Toyota pickup truck with a tiny camper hand-painted by a Suquamish artist, van Gelder visited eighteen states and five Indian reservations, big cities and small towns. She wanted to meet people at the margins of society who were the least embedded in the big institutions that reward status quo thinking.

She came away believing that a profound change is sweeping the country. She went to all kinds of places and met all kinds of people who were dealing with very different problems, but what united them all was best summed up by a phrase she saw on a mural in Newark: “We the People LOVE This Place.” Through the connection we each have to place-our physical and ecological place and also the human community-we are creating a new America.

All humans have bias, and as a result, so do the institutions we build. Internationally sought after diversity consultant Tiffany Jana offers concrete ways for anyone to work against institutional bias no matter what their position is in an organization.



While it is easy to identify intentionally built systems of oppression like Jim Crow or the paralysis caused by the glass ceiling for women in the workplace, confronting systems that perpetuate subtle, unconscious bias is much harder. Erasing Institutional Bias will help people tackle structural bias regardless of their positional power. Eliminating systemic bias can seem an insurmountable task from the vantage point of an ordinary individual, yet Jana and Mejias empower readers to recognize that each of us has the ability to affect systemic bias through a deliberate, coordinated effort. Institutional bias afflicts all industries -including business, education, health care, government, tech, the arts, nonprofits, and finance and banking. Among the types of institutional bias addressed are hiring bias, gender bias, racial bias, occupational bias, and customer bias. Jana and Mejias focus their attention on bias in the workplace and give readers practices and activities to create organizational trust to challenge these implicit biases. Erasing Institutional Bias will help people recognize that each of us has the power to affect systemic bias. Each of us can evaluate our own current role in perpetuating systemic bias and define our new role in breaking down systemic bias.

In a time of increasing disconnection and uncertainty, Leading with Joy shows how leaders can reclaim their purpose and embrace joy in service of social transformation.


Leadership that connects people and centers compassion and trust instead of competition and disconnection is needed more than ever before. There are plenty of manuals that show people how to manage organizations, but what is really needed in this moment is a book that shows us how to include kindness and inspiration within leadership. Leading with Joy promotes a courageous and compassionate approach to leadership that can sustain purposeful action and social change.

This book takes the form of a series of vignettes about the authors' insights and stories, with reflection questions at the end of each one. Through these stories-which address topics such as workplace triumphs and lessons, family relationships, and even near-death experiences- Akaya Windwood and Rajasvini Bhansali illuminate different aspects of leadership, such as humility, forgiveness, and kindness, and invite leaders to respond to the current moment.

The book draws on the authors' lived experiences as leaders, including their encounters with oppression, and their wisdom in principled leadership. They demonstrate how leaders can create conditions of abundance and well-being, which are necessary for long-term social transformation.

In a time where the fight for social justice can feel overwhelming, Gordon Whitman empowers readers to stand up with a purpose-driven mindset and effective strategy.

Stand Up! is an antidote to the cynicism that keeps so many people on the sidelines. It's both an argument about how to solve the biggest problems facing our society, and a guide to engaging with others to change the world. People don't need more information about what's going wrong. They need to know that change is possible and that they have a meaningful role to play. They need to know that they can transform themselves from passive observers of politics and civic life to public leaders who can stare down bank presidents and politicians.

The book provides a coherent framework, a set of principles and practices for confronting global issues like climate change as well as local ones like making our schools better and our streets safer. Stand Up! uses stories to cover everything from helping readers find their purpose, building teams with focused goals, and envisioning a world that is truly guided by self-governance. Based on nearly 20 years of community organizing, and tapping into nonpartisan PICO's network of 1000 member institutions including churches, state and municipal organizations, and professional community organizers, Gordon Whitman provides a blueprint for every concerned individual to fight for social justice.

Why are we so divided today? Paradoxically, Howard Ross, author of Everyday Bias, says it's our compulsion to belong to a group--something hardwired into us-- that ends up making us deeply connected with some, yet deeply divided from others. Ross shows how we can overcome this growing tribalism.

We are living in a world of almost unparalleled separation. People are no longer disagreeing, but are instead disavowing each other's rights to an opinion. What is driving this polarization, and how can we overcome it? Howard Ross says that ironically it's our profound need to belong. He delves deeply into the powerful psychological, neurological, and biological forces that drive us to want to identify so strongly with a group we're sometimes even willing to sacrifice our individual identity.
Drawing on his decades of leadership in the diversity and inclusion field, Ross probes the depth and impact of this growing tribalism, the role social media plays in exacerbating it, the ways it impacts every aspect of the daily lives, and how to combat it. Readers will gain tools for exploring contentious dialogue in healthier ways and guidelines for breaking down barriers and building bridges across difference, and organizations and institutions will be able to develop approaches that can open dialogue and encourage mutual understanding.