Gerri Spilka is the founding director and past president of Equal Measure (formerly the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning). She co-founded the organization with Tom Burns more than 40 years ago, exploring with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania how large institutions could help stimulate educational opportunities, housing, and jobs locally. After four decades in urban planning, community development, and social research, Gerri is now a studio artist and an avid promoter of contemporary textiles. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

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Gerri Spilka:

It was this notion of organizational learning, which really came at the right time for us in that evaluation started hitting the ground. And I will say, organizational learning was critical, as was systems thinking.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Welcome to The Measure. I am your host and moderator, Leon Andrews, president and CEO of Equal Measure. Equal Measure partners with foundations, nonprofits, and government organizations to apply new ways of thinking and learning to advance social change.

On The Measure, we host conversations about centering racial equity and how to design, implement, evaluate, and communicate efforts to disrupt inequitable systems. We are excited to have Gerri Spilka as our guest for today’s episode. For three decades, Gerri served as founding director and president of Equal Measure, establishing our organization’s regional and national presence in evaluation and research. And she is now a full-time studio artist.

Welcome, Gerri.

Gerri Spilka:

Hi, Leon. How are you?

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

I am great. Great to have you on The Measure and it’s an honor to be able to-

Gerri Spilka:

Thank you.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Have this conversation with you. And I’d like to start with more of a personal question. As you know, much of our focus at Equal Measure is on place-based work, which looks at long-term investments in transforming inequitable systems in areas such as health, education, economic mobility, especially for our Black, our Hispanic, our Indigenous, our Asian, and other people of color.

So, Equal Measure, we think a lot about places, their culture and context. As we think about this, it’s also important to personalize this work so we better understand and appreciate the impact we’re trying to have in communities. So I’d love for you to share, how do you think about place, culture, and context in your own life journey?

Gerri Spilka:

Let me just preface this by the fact that I started Equal Measure with Tom Burns. I was not alone. So I need to tip my hat in a big way to him as well.

Well, context and place really didn’t mean anything to me when I lived with my family and extended family in the New York metropolitan area. That’s all I knew. And I think most people think of place as what they grew up with. And then what shocked me when I went away to college, I went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, got out of the dorm on weekends and started looking for all-night delis or six-story apartment buildings.

But I learned very quickly that cities were different. People here in Pittsburgh were more reserved than New Yorkers. They were polite and sort of like, “This definitely wasn’t Kansas,” from my perspective. But a lot of my early thinking, and I would say Tom’s early thinking is derived from studying cities in graduate school or university.

One of the people that really influenced me was Lewis Mumford, and particularly two of his books, the Culture of Cities and the City and History. Aside from presenting a city as a living, breathing, changing organism, they were presented as cultural phenomenon that created and shaped by many factors that made them different.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

And I appreciate, Gerri, as you talk about your personal journey and naming place. It resonates a lot with me as I think about growing up in Washington DC and then I too also found my way to Pittsburgh. Like you at some point you went from New York City, I went from DC to Pittsburgh. I went there for graduate school, Carnegie Mellon as well. And Pittsburgh was an eye-opening experience of understanding place and context similar to-

Gerri Spilka:

How so for you?

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

When I came to Pittsburgh, it was very surprising to see that there were streets, little streets like Penn Avenue, that would divide a Homewood-Brushton from a Point Breeze, a Homewood-Brushton, which was a very low-income, poor, Black community from a upper middle class white community. And literally the busway would separate where lower income, poor, Black families were versus where upper middle class whites. And I didn’t see that contrast as starkly in DC.

And what I came to learn about place in context is that there were definitely more “Pittsburghs” as I started to do more work and as you started to talk about the work of place too, the work that you were doing as you launched OMG, now Equal Measure.

Gerri Spilka:

I think when we first started out, there was an urge to say one size fits all. That’s not true. There may be processes and truths that overarch a lot of change aspects, but you have to really adapt it to not only the context of what’s happening locally, but also, I think, to the readiness of the place to adapt change in a way and lead change to really make some impact.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Yeah, absolutely. Though that one size fits all is not the way to approach this work, and as I said earlier in the episode, I’m honored to have you on this episode as we’re celebrating Equal Measure celebrating 40 years.

Gerri Spilka:

That blows my mind. Really, it doesn’t feel like yesterday, but not that long ago. You know?

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

That’s a testament to you. It’s also, I appreciate you also acknowledging the late Thomas Burns as well. A testament to him. Its origin starting at the University of Pennsylvania in the Wharton School, and we are excited to be able to celebrate that history. How did you get started and what are the origins of Equal Measure?

Gerri Spilka:

There are some philosophical points or viewpoints that underpinned our work. I started thinking about them today in preparation for talking with you, and they’re still so rich and resonate in my soul and in my heart and in my mind and how I think about life in general. So it started out when we were at the Management and Behavioral Science Center. There are a bunch of us who migrated there from different disciplines.

At the time, it was, in retrospect, one of the more innovative settings and a real hotbed for many people who went on to influence many different fields. So it was an interesting group. We were all in our thirties. We were the ’60s activists. Many of us were born and bred in civil rights movement. So there were several big ideas. There were five big ideas that were derived from post-World War II thinkers, and they had their roots in biology, organizational development, psychology, urban planning, and probably many others that I can’t even identify at the moment.

But the first one, as I said, were civil rights and equity. It was largely focused on my generation around equity, around racial issues, women issues. Women’s issues and gender moved into ageist rights as well. So, equity and civil rights were critical. That was one aspect, one philosophy, one lens.

Another big one was the emergence of systems thinking. Someone who really pushed systems thinking was Russ Ackoff, who was at Penn at the time. He was a professor at Wharton in organizational development and he further developed the ideas. I’m just going to hit a few high points. One of his big points of view, and he did a lot of corporate work, was that thorny problems are transdisciplinary and require, by nature, solving them across many points of view, many disciplines. It involves teams of people working together.

If you improve the parts, let’s say, of an organization, let’s use Equal Measure. If you improve talent development, marketing skills, communications, if you improve the parts, the whole system improves. Another perspective that in this notion of socio tech skills, and that is if we’re going to advance change, you need to bring to the table not only the disciplines of the technology, but you also, if you’re going to collaborate with lots of people, you have to have people skills and ability to facilitate and manage groups of people. And it’s really important to get common vision and common execution in these complex systems.

The next lens was organizational learning, which had to do with learning as practitioners. Not so much book learning, but learning while doing. There was some discussion when we are all growing up that you’re born with talent and you go out into the world and you know how to do it. Well, that’s very rare in some ways. In truth, practicing it and really being successful in making projects actualize, you have to learn how to do that not only in school but also in practice.

There really has to be time in the organizations and the professional’s daily, regular life cycle to stop and reflect and really get the lessons that we’ve learned through the years about our failures as well as our successes. It was this notion of organizational learning, which really came at the right time for us, in that evaluation started hitting the ground. And I will say, organizational learning was critical, as was systems thinking. So you learn and you adapt. You go through numerous cycles, you try again, collect data along the way. You reflect, you learn and adapt to a reiterative learning process. We were applied researchers really trying to tell accessible stories about what we’re finding.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Love that. I appreciate you sharing that journey. Most of it I’ve heard, but the way you’ve described the five different lenses, I think is the first time I’ve heard you organize in the context for how OMG, Equal Measure really drove its framing from the lens of civil rights and equity, the emergence of systems thinking, the socio tech skills, the organizational learning and applied researchers trying to tell accessible stories using different tools.

And as I think about Equal Measure and that history that you lay out and where Equal Measure stood as one of the first firms nationally to provide developmental evaluation, where we work with clients to understand complex emerging environments in social sector, that’s driven from those lenses that you laid out. During your tenure, as you saw the OMG Center grow and as you saw the evaluation field evolve toward these multi-year investments in systems change, what was your sense of what that evolution looked like over the years?

Gerri Spilka:

Essentially, we left in 1988 and started OMG, which was not a joke at that point, although I will tell you, we started off as the Organization and Management Group for Institutional Learning. We were involved in social place-based innovation, not just social innovation, multi-focus, multi-tiered innovation across new areas. There’s no recipe book for how not only to do evaluation, but even at the time, what to expect in terms of carrying out the work or thinking about outcomes.

When we were evaluating CCRP in the South Bronx, Sandy Jibrell was heading up an exploration in research about how to head up an evaluation and how to design an initiative for a rebuilding communities initiative in Annie Casey. And they were, at the time, ready to make a long-term commitment like CCRP. One of the early meetings that we attended was with other evaluators, and Annie Casey asked the group, “What data should we collect? What’s important?”

And there was a strong case for process-related kinds of data, but also quantitative data and Annie Casey was pushing. So this was just one theory of change and outcomes thinking was really taking hold in our world, that foundations who were playing more and more of a leadership and innovative role in communities and social innovation, their boards were wanting to know were their investments making a difference? And that’s a certainly worthwhile thing to ask.

But in one of the earlier meetings, we’re sitting around the table and we’re trying to build a theory of change with the foundation. So, okay, six year initiative. Let’s say a year or two for planning half a million a year. And we’re asking for what kind of outcomes are they hoping for? Well, they wanted to change childhood mortality rates. They wanted to shift the income levels of communities, move them towards middle class. They’re thinking very big, and thank God we do think big like that.

So, it really behooved all of us to back up and think about how are we going to learn to get even short-term outcomes and what’s really realistic based on the level of investment when it’s so complicated.

So we started doing developmental evaluation very early on. We didn’t call it such, but it really seemed like the only way to approach it.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Love to hear that journey and the emergence of how some of these concepts, terminology, that we use today—developmental evaluation, the theory of change, logic models—things that are tools now that come from the context of folks figuring it out and really trying to put names on it as we think about how to leverage that in the work that we do.

Gerri Spilka:

When I was involved early on in livable cities, thinking and movements. There’s an organization that brought a lot of different kinds of thinkers together or practitioners together. And one of my first conferences that I went to was in San Antonio in the early ’80s, and Henry Cisneros was a mayor, and I think he was relatively new in his position. And around that time, I think he talked about Latinos and people of color will be in the majority of the American population in 2040. And that was, what was that? 60 years hence. But I would say for me, the success of change is in large part to that people leading institutions, leading government, leading organizations, corporate sector kinds of things, whole fields who have grown up with non-white supremacist perspectives.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

I really do appreciate it, Gerri, how you reflected on that, thinking about leadership and leadership change and the diversity of leadership that you’ve seen over the years and how that is promising, right? It’s not the answer completely, but it’s promising to see shifts of where there are leaders of color in different places, whether it’s in foundations, in nonprofits, in government and that serves as promising, knowing that that’s not the answer alone. President Obama becoming president doesn’t mean that we became a post-racial society, right? But, so-

Gerri Spilka:

For sure. It’s really hard for me to think, honestly, about places and initiatives that sustain scale over time. I’ll tell you, between you and me and now many other people, I got really jaded about foundation initiatives that did not focus on broader systemic public will issues really impacting public will. Because if you think about it, and I’ve seen it all too often, we know so much about how to facilitate equity and make it happen now. How do we sustain it over long periods of time, deep investments in education, in underserved communities with lots of money? We know what to do there. Why do we keep having to reinvent the wheel?

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

And then also, I appreciate the honest reflection, which I think is true. It’s hard to think about places that have been able to sustain this. So even as you think about all the work over these last 40 years, there might’ve been some good signs and good promises.

And as we’ve been talking and reflecting on the last 40 years of Equal Measure, we’re acknowledging there’s still so much work to be done towards social justice. Equal Measure has been well positioned to navigate through these complexities. There’ve been some success stories and wonderful to be able to share and talk with you about that. But it also, as we think about it, sometimes it could feel a little overwhelming in terms of what this looks like. So as I think about the next 40 years, I’d like to end with this question about what gives you hope?

Gerri Spilka:

What gives me hope are smart, open-hearted, and generous young people. We all know people who are wonderful, smart, great people with great ideas leading change. And for me, it makes me feel so proud of what we all have done. It’s not just Tom and myself, but it’s all the people who were involved in the experimentation, not only because we were interested in the ideas, but we had a lot of heart in the work and our values are and have been in it from the very beginning. Were they the right ones always? No, but we figured it out as best we could, so I’m very proud of all of you.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Thank you, Gerri. Thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode. I’d like to leave you with a quote inspired by my conversation with Gerri. It is by Oprah Winfrey.

“Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.”

You can learn more about Equal Measure at equalmeasure.org. Stay up to date with The Measure by rating, commenting, and subscribing to our show.