Pathways to Equity at East Fork

In 2018, we worked with a facilitator and commissioned our staff to help define our company’s core values. They are:

Naming equity as a core value for our company required us to take corrective actions for missteps that had already been made and to craft a new framework with intention.

We acknowledge that the realities of white supremacy, hetero/cis-normativity, and patriarchy, work in tandem to oppress both people and planet. Through proximity to power, we have benefitted from systemic inequity, but we will not allow stumbles to discourage us from continuing to confront and rectify our privilege. As we continue to build momentum within our anti-racist work we pledge to be intentional in crafting actions that support equity, diversity, and inclusion in our framework.

As a business we have the potential to synchronize the efforts of all our employees, customers, and investors towards a collective pursuit of our future liberation. Utilizing our most readily available platform we advocate for those who follow our brand to examine the economic structure that affects all aspects of our lives. We commit to struggling with the conflicts inherent to what we do, openly and transparently, with the hopes that by doing so the solutions can have a ripple effect far beyond our company’s boundaries.

We are committed to building an equitable workplace—a space where people can show up authentically in mind, body, and spirit. We honor the collective sum rather than a monolithic experience to reveal a path of excellency, yours and ours. Our dedication to achieving greater inclusivity is not a goal related to merit or morale, it is our guiding ethos.

Below we have outlined how anti-racism work manifests in our workplace, as well as identified emergent strategies and opportunities for growth.

The East Fork factory, office, fulfillment center, and flagship store are located in Asheville, North Carolina. While there is a perception of Asheville as a happy-go-lucky, progressive, “hippy” town, the city has a long-standing legacy and history of racist housing restrictions dating back to the early 1900’s, before doubling down in the middle of the century with some of the most aggressive redlining in the country. The forms of institutional racism have only continued to manifest in Asheville to current day: de facto segregation, along with some of the worst racial disparities and inequities in our education system, policing, and other sectors have only widened the gap between people of color in Asheville—especially for Black people.

For all its good intentions, systemic racism in Asheville continues to marginalize and disenfranchise the Black community, and perpetuate the erasure of the Black people who were born and raised here. Furthermore, Asheville has become an undesirable location for BlPOC professionals to relocate as dominant culture shifts lack the ability to welcome those who are unable to fit the paradigm. Usher in the less than competitive wages offered from many businesses in Asheville and the lack affordable housing and we continually lose those community gems to larger surrounding cities such as Atlanta and Charlotte.

In their 2001 work, “Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups,” Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun name “a sense of urgency” as a characteristic of white supremacist culture within white institutions. From early 2017 to late 2018, East Fork experienced 3x growth in manufacturing capacity and revenue and expanded from 10 to 48 team members. Insufficiently anticipating hiring needs in that growth period led us to revert to that “sense of urgency” often ingrained in many of us to recruit from a small, homogenous hiring pool—mostly leaning on our preexisting networks of calling in friends of existing employees and posting to our social media platforms, where most followers were white.

In an effort to overcorrect and make our workplace look more diverse, we rushed into recruiting from an organization that provides job and life skills training to people from marginalized communities who previously have had difficulty finding and sustaining employment. This process of integrating our staff brought to light the need to commit to and center equity and inclusion work. For us to truly build a company culture that allowed all team members to show up authentically, we would need to acknowledge and account for the differences in lived experience, proximity to power, and privilege between us; while holding accountability and space for the lessons learned and knowledge gained.

Strategies for more equitable hiring include:

• Budgeting more time and space into the recruiting process

• Posting all job listings internally to promote career advancement and provide growth opportunities within the company

• Prioritize hiring locally in the Asheville community to provide growth and career opportunities for life-long Asheville residents and combat gentrification

• Listing jobs through the Office of Career Services in historically Black, Southern colleges with a special interest in those in North Carolina and Georgia.

• Building authentic relationships with Black and NBPOC leaders and professionals in Asheville

• Networking in local professional meetup groups that value diversity, equity, and inclusion.

• Listing salaries and wages on all publicly posted job listings to avoid wage negotiations

• Working in partnership with Phillip Cooper to recruit and retain justice-involved community members transitioning from incarceration.*

* We work to interrupt the cycle of poverty by hiring people who had previously experienced barriers to employment, specifically those who have been incarcerated. We are committed to inviting justice-involved members of our community to find fulfilling, sustainable, well-paying employment. We take our role as a second-chance employer seriously and are realistic about the challenges and rewards that come with that commitment. We prioritize education around personal finance, as we know that personal financial security contributes directly to self-actualization. One of our core measures of business success is how well we steward each other to personal success.

East Fork writes workplace and job policies that take into consideration the inevitable socio-economic imbalances that exist in our workforce. We do what we can to write policies that center and support the health and wellness of our team members. Our workplace policies have been reviewed by our DEI coach to ensure that they provide an effective framework upon which to build a safe and equitable workplace, where all employees feel valued, respected, and heard.

Examples include:

• 4 weeks of Paid Medical Leave

• 16 hours of Parental School Leave

• Up to 5 paid days of Bereavement Leave for family members or affinity whose close association is the equivalent of a family relationship, miscarriage or loss of a pet.

• Inclement Weather Policy

• Flexible Holiday pay that decouples our company holidays from the national holiday calendar.

We take employee feedback seriously and encourage a feedback culture year-round. We create both structured and informal opportunities for team members to have their voices heard.

• 1:1’s with team leaders and Director of Culture & People

• 30-60-90 Day Culture Check-Ins

• 30-60-90 Manager Check-Ins

• Annual Development Reviews

• 6-Month Check-Ins

• Annual Employee Surveys

• Open-Door Feedback Policy

• CEO Open Office Hours

Staff-wide trainings provide team members with a shared framework of understanding and language that can be used to more effectively communicate with each other around issues of equity, personal boundaries, cultural differences, and more. Below are examples of trainings we have offered to staff:

Tepeyac Consulting: In early 2019, we solicited the services of Marisol Jimenez at Tepeyac Consulting to onboard the team to a shared language around social justice. Together we explored how inequality is perpetuated in our own company and co-created a list of what we wanted to keep doing, what we wanted to start doing, and what we wanted to stop doing in service of equity in our workplace and community. You can see a report prepared by Marisol here. This workshop and follow-up support served as a jumping point from which our efforts began to take clearer shape.

Our Voice: In fall of 2019, Our Voice provided an anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training and policy review. Together we created a framework for all new hires to receive training quarterly moving forward and all employees to receive refreshers on both anti-harassment / anti-discrimination trainings and bystander training annually.

Whiteness at Work: This summer, 10 members of East Fork’s leadership team, across all departments, are taking The Adaway Group’s “Whiteness at Work” summer series.

East Fork engages in year-round fundraising for regional, secular*, justice-minded organizations working day in and day out to contribute to a more joyful and just Western North Carolina. As East Fork is not yet profitable (working toward it!), we’ve developed creative ways to raise funds while not putting untenable pressure on our production team.

Fundraising has taken many forms, including raffling off one-of-a-kind pieces or experiences, the sale of event tickets, or direct donation of portions of proceeds. We’re proud to provide our community with accessible ways to redistribute wealth to good work being done in our town. While our growth deepens and complicates our complicity within an economy so in need of reimagining, it also allows us to put more money in the hands of educators, leaders, and organizers for justice.

From January 2019 to now we have raised:

East Fork hosts events in our community that amplify the voices of POC, especially queer and gender-nonconforming POC. We are diligent in offering fair pay to speakers and contributors and, whenever possible, offer a sliding scale ticking model that allows us to extend discounted or free tickets to community members with less disposable income.

Examples of past programming include:

Our pottery is expensive because it costs a lot of money to make it. Our pottery is not for “everyone” in that many—or most—do not have the disposable income to spend on non-essential dinnerware. While income levels will continue to be a barrier that prevents many from making purchases with our company, race, ethnicity, age, and body type, should not. In making marketing materials, we invite our employees, friends, and neighbors to model our products. The line between tokenism and representation is a fine one to walk, but we believe it is worth the risk to increase visibility for faces historically left out of advertising. Cheesefest for a second—there are so many ways to be human, and beauty is everywhere.

When you set out to build a garden you must make a plan, nourish the soil, plant the seeds, water, nurture—and still, no matter how vigilant you are, there will be weeds to pull. We want to be clear that we are not blameless and that we are still actively working to build an equitable workplace. Every day provides an opportunity for reflection, action, and growth. This work is iterative, and it is lifelong. Part of doing this work has been acknowledging and accepting that things take time and that time and money are limited. Below are a few strategies we’ve been developing this year that are still in the planning phase.

• Most BIPOC and non-Black POC at East Fork are currently employed in entry-level positions; while we believe wholeheartedly that we can create jobs that are personally and professionally fulfilling on the factory floor, we look forward to being able to make available more director and manager-level positions as our company grows, as well as continuing to create clear pathways to leadership within the company for entry-level employees.

• We recognize the connection between environmental and racial justice. Beginning in 2020, we will be charging ourselves a carbon tax. We are currently working with soil scientists and carbon sequestration experts to develop an initiative that reinvests our carbon tax into land trusts that secure property for Black farmers and fund regenerative implementation on Black-owned farms. We are in early development stages of this initiative—more to come!

• As a not-yet-profitable company, we’re thinking of ways we can make available our non-monetary resources to support a more equitable economy. We are working towards getting our factory-kitchen fully certified by the health department so that we can offer it as a community resource for POC-owned food businesses to utilize during non-office hours.

• In efforts to create a pipeline to employment and leadership for young people in the community, East Fork will look to partner with mentorship programs such as City of Asheville Youth Leadership Academy to bring opportunities for growth and learning to middle and high schoolers.

• As our company grows, so too does our capacity to fundraise at a meaningful scale. We will need to develop needs assessment tools, more thoroughly vet community partners, and calendar fundraising events with non-profit partners farther in advance to allow partners to account for our fundraisers in their yearly financial planning. Setting ambitious yearly fundraising goals will help keep us on track.