The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “Remaking the Economy: Redefining Leadership.” View the full webinar here.

Tony Pickett: The expectation of us is somehow, we’re going to magically overcome multiple decades of oppression and bias in just the wave of the hand with very few real resources. I’ve been sort of harping on this for the last couple of years. The scale of the resources have to match the scale of the problem, and if you’re going to try to hold us to some standard of, “we’re going to base your resources on the size of your organization’s annual budget,” well, you want me to grow the organization, so why not give me the resources to allow me to do that, and not in this small incremental fashion? Because the problem is so large, and there are obstacles at every turn. I think we have to really kind of push hard to say that we need 10-, 20-year support, not 1, 2, or 3. That’s nice, but it’s a long struggle.

I’ve talked about this, that it takes a lot of patience to kind of test an approach to shift systems, shift mindsets, and really start to show demonstrations of what a different kind of approach, a different world even, a different outcome can be for communities of color. And sometimes no matter what data or proof that we have, people still don’t embrace that as a solution. They still are doubtful when you’re presenting data that shows them what success looks like. So, we’re still ourselves having to overcome, I would call it, a resistance to leaders of color actually achieving success at a large scale. It’s like we’re being held to some incremental standard, when again, we should be free to create something that we, from our experience and coming from the communities that we come from, know is part of the answer to the situation.