Part of our systems change work includes supporting our partners in addressing and dismantling structural racism in their organisational systems. Through this work, as well as our own internal organisational change work at Reos Partners, we are learning about the complexity of these efforts.

In this article, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of structural racism in organisations, share our learnings, and propose some practical approaches to address and dismantle structural racism.

Much of our learning has been from trial and error. There is no fixed recipe; each context requires different approaches. These approaches aim to create the conditions and spark the deep awareness needed to collectively wrestle with and pull apart the foundations of structural racism.

This is messy work. There will be failures. These call for humility and a commitment to ongoing learning. Sometimes, failure is exactly what is needed to crack things open, including ourselves.

Before we explore the approaches, let’s start with some definitions.