The thought of working virtually had never occurred to April Grayson. As director of community and capacity building at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, she was so steeped in the group’s longstanding in-person approach to its workshops that she had never considered doing things differently — until March 2020.
“I was a deep skeptic,” she says. “It felt like the physical interaction with each other, being in the room together, was a really crucial component of that work.”
The Jackson, Miss., nonprofit conducts small group discussions about race, mostly in the Deep South — places a few hours’ drive away. The local governments and small organizations that bring in the group often lack the resources to pay for participants to travel. It also works with the Equal Justice Initiative to help groups discuss their experiences at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Ala., which examines slavery, racial terrorism, and the Jim Crow South. And it runs a summer youth program.
Being in person, sitting in a circle next to someone describing often painful experiences, seeing how others act and react, holding another person’s hand — these have been the foundation of the work the Winter Institute does, says Portia Ballard Espy, who was the group’s executive director until last month. And yet the once unimaginable changes forced on the organization by the Covid lockdown have helped it expand and are likely to transform the way the group works in the years to come.
Zoom as a Bridge
When Covid forced people into their homes last March, the group invested in Zoom licenses, and staff started to think about how it could do its work remotely. The sessions were different, for sure, but that wasn’t necessarily bad.
With Zoom, Grayson says, people’s faces are actually closer to each other than they would be in real life. It’s easier to see emotions on someone’s face on the screen than from 15 feet away in a room. People were still connecting with each other.
Even the problems that many people have experienced over the past year as families were forced into lockdown together are not always problematic. Children and pets making cameo appearances on Zoom calls and untidy backgrounds all give participants a better understanding of the people they are speaking with. They see that they share the same challenges. That brings them closer and can help them open up, she says.
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The shift to virtual sessions came at a time when many staff were already feeling overwhelmed, Grayson says. For example, she often had to drive five hours round trip to lead a workshop for the day — and she’d sometimes do that three times a week. Working from home freed up a lot of time and budget money, which allowed the group to facilitate discussions for more clients.
For the young people in the organization’s youth program, the shift was less jarring, says Von Gordon, the youth engagement manager. They are very comfortable using phones and computers.
“For young folks, it’s just been a matter of taking the tools that they were used to using in one area of their lives and adjusting to using it in another,” he says.
But the youth program had to forgo team-building exercises such as obstacle courses that could not be done online. The organization couldn’t take young people to the sites of racial violence that it usually does. Instead, they watched documentaries and listened to speakers talk about important events linked to the places they would have gone.
Even with those changes, it was important to keep the program going, Gordon says. “I am a 40-year-old Black man born in the Mississippi Delta. Racism is an existential threat to me,” he says. “My doing this work is as much about survival as it is a profession.”
New Possibilities
The Winter Institute is thinking about how to incorporate many of the changes it’s made into its work as pandemic restrictions lift.
Last summer’s protests against police violence and racial injustice caused a swift increase in demand for the group’s services. It was able to meet much of that demand because of its use of virtual platforms. While its work was once geographically restricted, over the past year it has worked with organizations across the country and even some overseas. The group may offer its services in many forms in the future, Espy says — fully in person, fully virtually, or in some hybrid model.
We’re no longer going to consider anything business as usual. We’re going to always explore options A, B, and C.
She says that the group will continue to do virtual training sessions for people who want to use its approach in their own community. It is also considering hiring a full-time person to produce its Zoom meetings as it expects to have so many more in the future. In the past, the organization has always hired locally, but, Grayson says, now it might be able to hire someone outside of the South. That person could do Zoom workshops and in-person sessions in another part of the country, helping to expand the organization’s reach.
Gordon says he thinks the youth program might take advantage of online technology to help give young people a better understanding of the things they are going to see in person. They could watch movies, have discussions, or listen to speakers virtually before visiting sites like Neshoba County, Miss., where three civil-rights workers were murdered in 1964.
But Gordon is wary of trying to do too much through online platforms — he’s already seen some Zoom fatigue among some participants. “There is a point at which I believe human beings must be connected with each other,” he says.
The most important — and lasting — lesson of the past year is bigger than virtual platforms and Covid restrictions, Espy says. It gets to the heart of how groups think about their futures. She says the pandemic pushed the organization to abandon rigid ways of thinking and working.
“We’re no longer going to consider anything business as usual,” Espy says. “We’re going to always explore options A, B, and C. We don’t want to be caught off-guard because the work that we do is so important.”
