Beyond Rhetoric: Civil Servants Pilot Equitable Innovation at the City of L.A.
By Suhlle Ahn
I recently chatted with Tanya Pineda (she/her) of the City of L.A. She works for the Office of Workplace Equity under L.A.'s new Mayor, Karen Bass.
Tanya Pineda (she/her) and Suhlle Ahn (she/her)
Tanya took part in an L.A. City Equity Sequence® pilot launch in spring, 2023. And already she’s seeing positive effects from use of the practice. Specifically, she's noticing some “bottom-up” changes.
For Tanya, Equity Sequence® is unlocking a puzzle she's sometimes faced in her equity work:
How do you equip people with tool(s) to advance equity, while letting them lead as experts in their field? How do you truly empower others? How do you let them design their own equity interventions, without somehow taking over the reins?
It was a Gordian knot that Tanya was never quite sure she and her team were cutting through. Yet within weeks of the initial Sequence® pilot, Tanya was hearing positive feedback from her colleagues. And she was sensing a shift.
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Long before joining the City administration, Tanya was motivated by gender equity as a cause. She worked previously at a socially-innovative toy company dedicated to the empowerment of young girls. But she also had a passion for the idea of working in local government. So when the opportunity arose in 2015 to join the previous (Garcetti) administration, she took it.
As a gender equity lead, Tanya worked closely with departments as varied as Housing, Sanitation, Recreation & Parks, the Office of the City Administrative Officer, and the L.A. Public Library. In all, some 40+ departments report to the Mayor’s Office. And she worked with each to craft gender equity action plans and set equity goals.
But at the time, it wasn’t clear exactly what expanding gender equity meant for each department across the City.
Passionate as colleagues were about advancing gender equity, the “how” could be a challenge. There were few guidelines on how to translate intention to action.
Part of the difficulty was structural. Each department runs differently. Each has its own culture; its own ways of working; its own role and mandate within the larger whole. As part of a central management hub, Tanya was both connected to—yet at a remove from—all. From where she stood, there was no way to know the ins and outs of each department.
It sometimes left her wondering how fully her team’s recommendations were reflecting the needs of each group.
"At the end of the day," she explained, "they’re the only ones who really know what their work entails, right?” Somehow, it didn’t feel authentic to advise them on how to design interventions.”
Even as she and her team began working with each department to develop action plans and set goals, there was something missing. They lacked a shared framework or set of tools. They needed a methodology to unite all departments, but with enough flexibility to let each carry out its work.
That’s the difference she feels Equity Sequence® is making. It’s why she was eager to share her observations of impact with me. She put it this way:
“I think Equity Sequence® has empowered the people at the department level doing D&I work. It's taking power and giving it to the people in departments who are passionate about it. But it's also giving them the tools to set comprehensive equity goals that are specific to their department. It’s allowing them to take matters into their own hands to really create more thoughtful equity goals. Because, ultimately, they're the experts in their own respective fields.”
An example from the Housing Department
As an example, a team working with the Housing Department is creating a marketing program for affordable housing units in market-rate buildings. Using Equity Sequence®, they realized they had designed the program for property owners and managers, without enough input from those in their local communities most likely to need affordable housing. They now want to create a stakeholder group that might provide insights on what kinds of outreach would best help engage those local community members.
And the Sanitation Department
Similarly, a team from the Sanitation Department working to reduce illegal dumping had a realization upon applying Equity Sequence® to their work: although their project was data-driven, it was still possible for inequities to result from the types of data collected and the methods used to collect them. One data source, for instance, came from reports phoned in by constituents. But those who have the time to call and the knowledge of whom to call are not necessarily the same as those most impacted by illegal dumping.
Crucially, Tanya explained, they were tapping into their own expertise in assessing who truly is underserved in the context of their work. Summing up, she said:
“To see city staffers creating their own interventions, using Equity Sequence® as a methodology to center their work on equity, has been really impressive.”
She added:
“These are boots on the ground people. They're people who now are not only conceptualizing interesting interventions on their own. They're launching them and project-managing them.”
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At Tidal, we often talk about the capacity of Equity Sequence® to activate change from the “bottom-up,” as well as the “top-down.” Anyone at any level of an organization can make use of the Sequence® questions. It’s not designed for use SOLELY by high-level policy-makers and decision-makers. (Although we certainly encourage them to use it, as well!)
Tanya similarly talked about a macro-to-micro shift she sees with the adoption of Equity Sequence®:
“We're going from a macro way of looking at equity to a micro way of looking at equity. And I think our liaisons are really starting to understand what an equity intervention means.”
Tanya further expressed praise toward Equity Sequence® for what we call its intersectional approach.
We sometimes call Equity Sequence® a “content agnostic” tool. It's meant to cut across sector, role, industry—even national and cultural boundaries. In other words, it’s designed to be applicable no matter the situation or context in which it’s being used. It prompts learners to think about equity as a whole. Rather than focus on single facets of identity in insolation, it asks them to think about overlapping dimensions of identity.
It’s an approach that seems to mirror Tanya’s own career trajectory.
In her previous role, she worked closely with colleagues whose focus was racial equity. But her own focus was still gender equity, specifically. Now, at the Office of Workplace Equity, she looks at ALL aspects of inequity. Her focus is equity overall.
“With the Housing Department example,” she noted, “they’re looking at housing and equity as a whole. They’re looking at intersectionalities that exist. With the Sanitation Department example, they're using Equity Sequence® to really think about the most underserved communities, like South L.A.”
“It’s really exciting because, while I'm a huge advocate and champion for gender equity, obviously—it’s my passion, and I've been in that space for so long—I do think we were doing a disservice by just looking at one piece of the larger puzzle,” she admits.
Finally, Tanya expressed hope for what we sometimes call the “generation of positives,” as opposed to the “prevention of negatives.”
To put this in concrete terms, it means a shift in focus. It means going beyond SOLELY curbing bias to expanding equity and equality. It means spending time and effort NOT ONLY designing interventions but also designing programs that actively foster inclusion.
We look forward to following this progress with Tanya and other L.A. City colleagues.
In the meantime, the Sequence® has equipped pilot participants with a common language, framework, and intersectional approach. As Tanya herself put it, it's helping them “drill down more deeply in their work to figure out who is truly underserved.”
Most importantly, it’s giving each department autonomy—something Tanya always wanted to see but was not always sure how to bring about. It captures the true meaning of empower—to transfer power or authority; to shift the locus of power from the few to the many; to those who know best about the nature of their work.
It’s a development Tanya finds exciting. And it’s a movement that’s catching on.