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Ellen McGirt|Essays

February 2, 2024

It’s Time to Find Your People

Equity Observer is dedicated to the people and ideas working toward a fairer, better, and more beautiful world. Welcome.

 

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One thing has become clear in these strange and divided times: You can find your people if you know where to look.

This was the beautiful message from Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, the particle physicist and indefatigable justice advocate tapped for the Design Observer Twenty: The Redesigners list, which was published this fall to lift up remarkable people, projects, and big ideas solving an urgent social need.
We were discussing her quest to understand the mysteries of the cosmos when she mentioned that people were often surprised to know it was possible to see the Milky Way with the naked eye. I know I was.

“There are very few really dark places,” says the dark matter expert.

That we are robbing ourselves and each other of the night sky means that we are also robbing ourselves of the opportunity to look up and reflect on our place in the cosmos in the same way our ancestors did.

It’s something I’d never considered: a shared barrier to an existential legacy, populated with people who don’t realize they’re connected through exclusion. Families in brightly lit suburbs. Incarcerated people. City-dwellers. Third-shift workers. People who don’t have access to nature.

And, it really matters. “It’s a chance to think about: ‘What is this universe that I live in?’” she says. “Everyone has a right to know the universe.”

Equity is a core value at Design Observer. To that end, Equity Observer stories aim to expand our understanding of the people, projects, and ideas — across all sectors— who are reconfiguring familiar systems to address the inequities that unite us, whether we know it or not. We call those people redesigners.

The stories in this pillar are the fuel for Design Observer Twenty, penned by redesigners creating new tools and forging new paths in design, business, education, health, philanthropy, energy, the built environment, race, identity, sustainability, civic life, poverty alleviation, and justice. 

 

Know a redesigner? Are you one? Pitch us here.

Let me give Prescod-Weinstein the last word.
 
When I asked her what gives her the energy to continue her transformational work, she said a shared community is the way forward. “I guarantee that you are not the first person to have whatever concern you’re having,” she told me. But just like seeing the stars, finding the others will take some work.

“Look for your people,” she says. “Look in books. In videos. You may find them on social media. And they might not look like you expect them to.” (Which is a good thing, she notes.) “But they’re there, and it’s everyone’s job to expand their idea of what change can look like.”

 
We hope that Equity Observer will become the place for you to find your people, the ones asking the right questions — and creating necessary solutions — for this beautiful and complex world.
 

You can stay in touch through our newsletters:

 

  • The Design of Business — the founding publication of this pillar that once shared its name — is a twice-weekly newsletter about transformational leadership from the award-winning business, race, and culture editor Ellen McGirt.
  • The Observatory — curated by Design Observer editors and contributors for our community of more than 20,000 makers, thinkers, leaders, and wayfinders — is a twice-monthly roundup of essays, news, opinion, global insights, and pithy observations on design and life. It’s guaranteed to stir the creative spirit.
 
Until then, keep looking up.
 
See you in January.
Ellen McGirt

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By Ellen McGirt

Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.

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