DEI Consultant
Strategic Planning, Evaluation, & Storytelling
Our mission is to help social good organizations advance racial and economic justice in their work.
You represent a collective impact initiative, nonprofit, philanthropy, or social impact business committed to centering equity in your work.
You have done some pre-work - whether that includes conducting equity assessments with board and staff members, developing equity statements and policies, training your staff on implicit bias, or other accomplishments.
Yet, you still sense a gap between your desire to authentically practice equity & the way you work.
You can’t see your blind spots, but you know they’re there.
You’re committed to centering equity but need alignment on what that means and how it applies to your work.
You’re navigating unwillingness to adopt a bold change to inequitable systems.
You want to take the most effective next steps to advance your mission with an equity orientation.
Creating alignment and bold shifts to how you work is the first step toward changing culture…
and we all know that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
By tending to both cultural realities and questions of strategic design, Create Good helps organizations reveal the blind spots that keep them stuck in the status quo.
What We Do
FACILITATE
Facilitate groups toward a unified commitment to equity.
Identify where equity shows up in your initiative’s or organization’s identity - whether in your mission, vision, values, or policies.
EVALUATE
Build your team's muscle to center equity in using data for decision-making.
Understand the data, historical context, and root causes of the inequities you’re working to solve.
PLAN
Co-design strategies that bring your commitment to and vision for equity to life.
Build leadership among team members and partners on how to practice applying equity principles to reshape, reframe, and rebuild their work.
About Us
Speaker
Create Good is a BIPOC woman-owned business whose founder Naaima Khan has experienced the roadblocks to effectiveness that misalignment between equity values and action creates.
In over 15 years in the nonprofit sector, Naaima has seen how many of the current approaches to nonprofit and philanthropic work perpetuate inequitable systems.
As a person of color who was marginalized in the industry, she started Create Good to channel her energy into building more just alternatives with folks who are ready to put in the effort to get there.
The social good sector can and should do better.
Our Mission
To help social good organizations advance racial and economic justice in their work.
What Our Clients Say
“Naaima is an engaging and provocative presenter who encourages participants to be vulnerable.”
-The Open Door
“Naaima was kind, thoughtful, extremely prepared and a good facilitator, especially her willingness to be responsive to expressed needs of the group. I think we are in good hands with Create Good and I'm excited to continue this process!”
-826 MSP
“What I have enjoyed most about collaborating with Naaima is her gift of process facilitation. When we built our logic model, we had both ENFPs and ISTJs (Myers Briggs) on our planning team. Naaima facilitated a process that recognized, incorporated, and leveraged the divergent thinking and preferred communication styles of all our participants which led to an outcome that exceeded expectations.”
-Eric A., Stillwater Public Schools
“Naaima’s approach of helping us confront our feelings in the realm of diversity, equity, and inclusion resonated because we don’t acknowledge this within ourselves. The keynote she provided helped our group identify how we need to process the shame and guilt often tied to holding the white identity while giving us a method to move past it.”
-NAMI South Dakota
"Everything you have done has been extremely helpful in getting us to a place where we can honor and learn from the past to move forward together!"
-City of Plymouth
“Naaima built our team’s capacity to do and enjoy program evaluation. She was helpful in getting us clarity on what data we needed, a plan for how to collect it and a method for using it to improve our programs.”
-StoryArk
“During the retreat, I felt productive and that Naaima was keeping us on task and redirecting where necessary. I appreciated that we worked on strategic planning but also allowed for people to share experiences and feelings - it was a good balance.”
-Minnesota Alliance on Crime
"Energetically, I felt that you truly cared about our success. You came with questions, concerns, attunement to what was needed, and naming things that were issues."
-Brooklyn Bridge Alliance for Youth
“Naaima is amazing. Hands-down. We are so fortunate to have her help.”
-Minnesota Alliance on Crime
“Create Good did an amazing job translating our needs into an understandable, useful, racial equity-centered evaluation. The logic model and evaluation plan Create Good developed were straightforward and spot on. They constantly asked for feedback and made adjustments. Naaima was very easy to work with and was always prompt, forward thinking and reflective.”
-Center for Economic Inclusion
Our clients practice critical reflection on their assumptions and narratives to more deeply center equity.
Our work is hard and takes patience and true perseverance. Creating alignment between your equity values and your work will help you, your staff, and key partners gain clarity and a deepened sense of authenticity to propel your work forward.
Featured Clients
The Brooklyn Bridge Alliance for Youth (BBA) is a multi-sector collaborative committed to equity in positive youth development.
The Alliance includes the Cities of Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center in the Northwestern suburbs of Minneapolis, the school districts they encompass, two community colleges, Hennepin County, and youth in those communities. BBA undertook a strategic planning process to identify how they can more effectively advance equity while revitalizing their values.
826 MSP’s mission is to amplify the voices, stories, and power of K-12 BIPOC students through writing, publishing, and leadership programs. Its work is grounded in its community and specific schools.
Create Good worked with 826 staff and board members to conduct a community engagement process that helped them get input from their key constituents in their strategic planning process.
Three Rivers Fibershed (TRF) is the Minnesota affiliate of Fibershed which develops regional and regenerative fiber systems on behalf of independent working producers.
Specifically, they expand opportunities to implement carbon farming, forming catalytic foundations to rebuild regional manufacturing, and connecting end-users to farms and ranches through public education.
TRF partnered with Create Good to develop shared values that act as a catalyst for the organization’s work on equity.
The Open Door provides food support for low-income individuals and families across Dakota County.
Staff invited Create Good to annual board retreats to plan how the organization can further build authentic relationships with diverse communities. The Open Door is in the process of expanding its networks and thinking more broadly about the work it does at the systems level.
The Minnesota Alliance on Crime (MAC) connects systems, service providers, and victims to advance the response for victims of all crimes.
MAC is a membership coalition of more than 90 crime victim service organizations in Minnesota committed to supporting crime victims.
This alliance is working with Create Good to unify its membership under shared values clarify its vision and operationalize its commitment to equity.
StoryArk helps students in elementary school, middle school, and high school initiate creative teams in which they communicate, collaborate and connect to imagine and produce narrative podcasts, short films, and a literary magazine that publishes prose, poetry and visual arts.
StoryArk worked with Create Good to use a participatory process for building out its evaluation framework to assess program outcomes.
Our Service
There are a variety of ways that we can help you advance equity in your work.
Facilitating
Consulting
Speaking
