Section 5. Learning to be an Ally for People from Diverse Groups and Backgrounds

 

"Mind your own business."

Does that phrase sound familiar? Many of us heard some version of it growing up.

There are certainly times when respecting privacy and boundaries is important. But community building also asks us to pay attention when other people are being excluded, mistreated, or denied opportunities. It may require us to listen, offer support, challenge harmful behavior, share resources, and work alongside people whose experiences differ from our own.

That is part of what allyship can mean.

If we want strong partnerships and coalitions, people and groups need to be able to support one another across differences. We may not experience the same forms of discrimination, exclusion, or disadvantage, but we can still work together toward communities in which people are treated fairly and have meaningful opportunities to participate.

What is an ally? An ally is a person who acts in solidarity with people or communities experiencing discrimination, exclusion, or inequity and supports their rights, leadership, priorities, and ability to act for themselves.

Most people have experienced times when support from someone else made an important difference. Perhaps someone believed you when others did not, defended you from unfair treatment, shared information or resources, helped you navigate an unfamiliar institution, supported your leadership, or stood beside you during a difficult situation.

In this section, we will focus on how people can practice allyship across differences in race, ethnicity, culture, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, age, immigration experience, and other identities or circumstances.

Allyship does not require having experienced the same form of discrimination as another person. It does require listening carefully, learning about the issue, recognizing how power and access may differ, and avoiding the assumption that you know what another community needs better than its members do.

Experience with discrimination can help someone recognize injustice, but it does not automatically make a person an effective ally to every other group. Allyship is an ongoing practice that involves relationships, learning, accountability, and action.

Why do we become allies to others?

One reason is that community well-being is interconnected. Exclusion, discrimination, and inequity affect not only the people directly targeted but also the institutions, relationships, and communities around them.

Allyship can also reflect a commitment to dignity, fairness, shared responsibility, and the belief that people should be able to participate fully in community life.

In this section we will talk about:

• What allies are
• Why community builders should understand and practice allyship
• How to support people and communities across differences while respecting their leadership and priorities

What are allies?

Allyship can take many forms.

• A coworker speaks up when sexist jokes or comments are made at work and supports clear expectations for respectful behavior.
• An experienced employee shares information with a newer coworker about how decisions are made, how to access opportunities, and where to seek support.
• A community member supports a candidate from a historically underrepresented community through fundraising, volunteering, voter outreach, or another form of participation.
• A professional working with a neighborhood organization helps residents develop facilitation, organizing, and planning skills while making sure residents retain decision-making authority.
• Students, families, and school staff work together to address harassment of LGBTQ+ students and create clear policies and support systems for all students.
• A resident challenges stereotypes about immigrant workers and supports the workers and organizations directly involved in identifying the issues and solutions that matter to them.
• A family provides temporary care or practical support to a young person whose household is experiencing a crisis, with appropriate consent and coordination.

Allyship may involve listening, encouraging someone, sharing information, challenging discriminatory comments, supporting another person's leadership, providing access to resources, participating in advocacy, or standing with people during a crisis.

It may also mean knowing when not to speak. Sometimes the most useful role for an ally is to create space, provide support, and make sure that people directly affected have an opportunity to speak for themselves.

Like many community-building practices, allyship involves skills that can be strengthened over time.

If you are not a member of a particular community, your role will be different from that of people who directly experience the issue. You may have access to institutions, information, professional networks, funding, decision-makers, or other resources that can be useful.

Having that access does not mean that you understand the issue better than the people living it. Your contribution is strongest when you combine whatever access or resources you have with the knowledge, leadership, and priorities of people directly affected.

Additional important points to remember about allyship:

• You do not always have to wait to be personally invited before challenging discrimination or changing your own behavior. At the same time, when entering another community's organizing space or taking action that affects that community, pay attention to existing leadership, goals, and boundaries.
• People from any background can support people from other communities. Allyship does not require identical experiences.
• Allies will sometimes make mistakes. When that happens, listen, take responsibility, repair harm where possible, and change your approach rather than allowing fear of mistakes to prevent action.
• Allyship is demonstrated through actions and relationships, not simply by claiming the label.
• Allyship can be reciprocal. People and communities may support one another in different ways and around different issues.

Why practice allyship?

Allyship can strengthen both relationships and collective efforts for change.

• Communities are diverse. Working across differences can help residents and organizations address shared priorities while recognizing that people may experience those priorities differently.
• Support can strengthen relationships and cooperation. People are often more able to work together when they know others will listen, follow through, and respond when unfair treatment occurs.
• Systemic problems usually require broad participation. Coalitions among affected communities, community organizations, professionals, institutions, and other supporters may be needed to change policies or systems.
• Speaking up can help establish community expectations. Challenging discrimination communicates that harassment, exclusion, or unequal treatment should not simply be accepted as normal.
• Allyship can reduce isolation. People experiencing discrimination may feel more supported when others take concerns seriously and act alongside them.
• Communities benefit from broader participation. Institutions and community initiatives are stronger when people with different experiences can contribute knowledge, leadership, ideas, and relationships.
• Allyship can expand understanding and responsibility. Working alongside people whose experiences differ from our own can help us recognize how community conditions affect others and what roles we may have in changing them.

Consider your motivations.

Good intentions do not automatically lead to useful allyship. It can help to reflect on why you are getting involved and what role you are taking.

Avoid approaching allyship as a way to:

• Distance yourself from your own community or prove that you are different from other members of it.
• Relieve personal guilt without changing behavior, relationships, or institutional practices.
• “Save” people or assume that your education, income, professional status, or social position makes you better able to decide what they need.
• Receive praise or recognition for supporting a marginalized community.
• Take over leadership from people who are directly affected.

Discomfort, guilt, or other emotions may arise as people learn about discrimination or recognize ways they have benefited from unfair systems. Those emotions do not need to be ignored, but they should lead toward reflection, responsibility, changed behavior, and action rather than becoming the center of the work.

How do you become an effective ally?

Build genuine relationships across differences.

Friendships and other relationships can help people understand one another as whole individuals rather than primarily through stereotypes or social categories.

Relationships across differences may develop through neighborhoods, work, schools, community organizations, recreation, faith communities, public events, shared projects, or everyday life.

Do not approach friendship primarily as a strategy for learning about an “oppressed group.” Relationships should be mutual and based on genuine interest, respect, trust, and choice.

If someone has experienced discrimination or exclusion, they may be cautious in new relationships or institutions. Do not treat that caution as something that must be overcome. Trust develops through consistent behavior, respect for boundaries, reliability, and time.

If someone tells you that something you or your organization has done caused harm, listen without immediately becoming defensive. Honest feedback can be important to sustaining a relationship.

Learn about histories, communities, and current issues.

Allyship includes doing your own learning rather than expecting people from marginalized communities to provide all of your education.

Books, research, journalism, oral histories, museums, community organizations, documentaries, archives, public lectures, and other sources can provide important context.

For example, someone seeking to understand Japanese American experiences in the United States might learn about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II as well as Japanese American community life, activism, culture, and experiences before and after that period.

Someone interested in age discrimination might learn about how older adults experience employment, health care, transportation, housing, caregiving, social participation, and public policy while also recognizing the wide diversity among older adults.

Historical knowledge should provide context, not create new assumptions about individuals.

Examine your own assumptions and biases.

People absorb messages about race, class, gender, disability, religion, age, sexuality, immigration, and other identities from family, peers, schools, media, institutions, and society.

Those messages can influence expectations and behavior even when people do not consciously endorse them.

Useful reflection questions include:

• What messages did I receive about this community while growing up?
• Which groups were represented positively, negatively, or not at all?
• Whose histories did I learn?
• What assumptions do I make about people's abilities, values, safety, income, education, family life, or behavior?
• Do I respond differently to the same behavior depending on who is doing it?
• Whose leadership do I naturally trust?
• Are there communities I avoid because of discomfort or stereotypes?
• What could I learn that might challenge those assumptions?

There is no single method for examining prejudice. People may use structured reflection, facilitated dialogue, education, affinity groups, workshops, supervision, counseling, community conversations, or other approaches.

The important goal is to recognize inaccurate or harmful assumptions, understand how they may affect behavior, and practice different responses.

Participate in dialogue and reflection.

Small-group dialogue can provide opportunities for people to examine assumptions, hear experiences different from their own, discuss difficult issues, and consider possible action.

These conversations may include participants from different backgrounds or, in some circumstances, affinity groups in which people who share an identity or social position reflect together.

For example, people directly affected by racism may want a space to discuss experiences and priorities without having to explain those experiences to others. White participants may choose a separate space to examine racial socialization, privilege, responsibility, and ways to challenge racism.

Similar approaches may be useful around disability, gender, class, religion, sexual orientation, or other forms of identity and inequality.

Dialogue should be voluntary, respectful, and connected with action when participants want change. No particular emotional response – such as crying, anger, grief, or discomfort – should be treated as proof that someone is learning or changing.

Take action when people are treated unjustly.

One of the most important parts of allyship is responding when discrimination, harassment, exclusion, or inequity occurs.

The appropriate response depends on the situation.

Possible actions include:

• Challenging a discriminatory comment
• Supporting the person targeted
• Reporting harassment through an appropriate process
• Documenting a pattern of discrimination
• Supporting an affected community's advocacy campaign
• Attending a public meeting
• Writing public comments or contacting decision-makers
• Joining a peaceful demonstration or vigil
• Supporting policy or organizational change
• Helping obtain legal, financial, technical, or other resources when requested

Before taking public action on behalf of another community, consider whether people directly affected have already identified priorities or strategies. When possible, support their leadership rather than creating a separate response that competes with it.

Support leadership and remove barriers to participation.

Marginalized communities do not lack leadership. Often the issue is that institutions fail to recognize, support, fund, or share decision-making power with existing leaders.

Allyship can include helping remove barriers that limit people's access to leadership opportunities.

Useful actions may include:

• Inviting people into meaningful decision-making roles
• Providing leadership-development opportunities when participants want them
• Sharing information about how decisions are made
• Supporting campaigns for elected or appointed leadership
• Providing childcare, transportation, interpretation, disability access, or other supports that make participation possible
• Compensating community members for substantial expertise and labor when appropriate
• Examining whether meeting practices, organizational culture, or informal networks favor some people over others

Leadership support should continue after someone enters a new role. All leaders benefit from information, mentoring, relationships, resources, and honest feedback.

Support should not become control. New leaders should have the authority to develop their own approaches rather than being expected to follow the person who helped open the door.

Follow communities' priorities on the issues that affect them.

Do not assume you can identify a community's most important needs after a few conversations.

Ask:

• What issues are people already organizing around?
• What have residents or community organizations identified as priorities?
• What work is already happening?
• What kind of support would be useful?
• What resources can you offer without taking control?

Support might include funding, technical assistance, research, transportation, meeting space, communications support, legal expertise, professional networks, or other resources.

The type of support should come from the situation and from what the affected community identifies as useful rather than from assumptions about what a particular racial, ethnic, immigrant, disability, or economic group needs.

Share resources and access while supporting community self-determination.

Some individuals and organizations have greater access to funding, institutions, professional networks, media, elected officials, technical expertise, or other resources.

Allies can use that access to help communities pursue priorities they have already identified.

This might mean:

• Supporting a community organization in developing a grant proposal
• Connecting residents with technical or legal expertise
• Helping community leaders access decision-making spaces from which they have historically been excluded
• Supporting tenant or resident efforts to preserve housing
• Sharing fundraising or communications resources
• Advocating for community organizations to receive direct funding rather than routing resources through outside organizations

The goal is not to make communities dependent on allies. Whenever possible, allyship should strengthen people's ability to exercise their own leadership and control resources that affect them.

Reduce barriers to participation without demanding assimilation.

People may participate in community life in different ways. Some may have strong connections within their own cultural, religious, linguistic, disability, neighborhood, or other communities and may not want those connections weakened in order to participate in broader institutions.

Rather than trying to bring supposedly “isolated” groups into a cultural mainstream, ask whether institutions themselves create unnecessary barriers.

Barriers might include:

• Language access
• Disability access
• Transportation
• Scheduling
• Cost
• Discrimination
• Lack of representation in leadership
• Unwelcoming organizational practices
• Immigration-related concerns
• Limited information about how to participate

Solutions might include interpretation, accessible communication, transportation assistance, schedule changes, community-based outreach, inclusive programming, leadership opportunities, or changes to policies and practices.

Inclusion does not mean expecting people to abandon their languages, cultures, disability identities, community organizations, or other important relationships.

Work to change systems that create or maintain inequity.

Individual support matters, but allyship should not stop at helping people navigate systems that remain unfair.

Use the "But Why?" technique or another root-cause approach to examine why a problem exists.

For example:

If residents with lower incomes have difficulty accessing job training, ask whether transportation, childcare, eligibility requirements, schedule, cost, disability access, broadband, or other barriers are involved.

If entrepreneurs from historically underrepresented communities have difficulty obtaining financing, examine lending criteria, credit systems, collateral requirements, access to banking relationships, historical discrimination, business-development resources, and other possible factors rather than assuming that the entrepreneurs lack knowledge or ability.

Allies can help examine how institutions distribute resources and opportunities and can support affected communities in seeking changes to those systems.

This might include participating in public decision-making, changing organizational policies, supporting legislation, reviewing lending or hiring practices, improving accessibility, expanding representation, or reallocating resources.

Help other people practice allyship.

One person can make a difference, but large institutional or community changes usually require many participants.

Organizations can create opportunities for people to learn about discrimination, examine their own roles, practice responding to harmful behavior, and develop strategies for supporting communities affected by inequity.

People learning to be allies also need accountability. A group should not become a place where participants congratulate one another for good intentions while avoiding feedback from the communities whose concerns they claim to support.

Build alliances across communities.

Allyship is often reciprocal and may involve many communities working together.

Coalitions may form around housing, education, disability access, worker rights, public health, environmental justice, immigration, racial equity, LGBTQ+ rights, youth opportunity, transportation, or other shared priorities.

Communities do not have to experience the same forms of discrimination in order to cooperate. Strong coalitions can recognize differences among groups while identifying areas of shared interest and responsibility.

When inviting another group to support your issue, explain the concern, listen to their priorities, and recognize that they may have different capacities or strategies. Reciprocal support should grow from relationships rather than obligation.

In Summary

Allyship means acting in solidarity with people and communities experiencing discrimination, exclusion, or inequity while respecting their leadership, knowledge, priorities, and right to speak for themselves.

Allies can challenge discriminatory behavior, share access and resources, support leadership, participate in advocacy, build relationships, examine their own assumptions, and help change organizational or institutional practices.

Effective allyship does not depend on rescuing people, speaking for them unnecessarily, or assuming that outside perspectives are more objective. It begins with listening and understanding how the people most directly affected define the issue.

Allyship also requires attention to systems. Helping an individual navigate an unfair institution may be valuable, but lasting change may require examining why the barrier exists and changing policies, practices, resources, or decision-making structures.

People will make mistakes while learning to work across differences. What matters is being willing to hear feedback, take responsibility, repair harm, and adjust behavior.

Strong alliances recognize both shared interests and differences among communities. They do not require people to assimilate or give up important identities in order to participate.

The goal is not simply to become a person who calls themselves an ally. It is to build relationships and communities in which people support one another, challenge injustice, share access to resources and decision-making, and work together toward conditions in which everyone can participate with dignity and meaningful influence.