A New Approach to our Holiday Calendar
Over the past year, there have been numerous moments when we’ve had to reflect on how we run our organization and how we treat our team during a time of pandemic and the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement. Additionally, with millions of tenants across the country facing eviction and unsafe living conditions, our work to build free tools in support of the housing movement has been more critical than ever. The combination of remote work, time-sensitive projects, and general pandemic-related stress made this an emotionally draining and stressful time for all of us. We were focused on the education and practice of anti-racism internally and through our services. Having the “right stance” externally of where we stood within this movement was not enough; we had to make sure that how we worked internally as a team matched our external commitments.
We asked ourselves a question: “How can we be more inclusive and intentional about what it means to be a team member at JustFix.nyc? What can we change and improve on, at this significant moment in time?”. Shortly after, we were invited by hellajuneteenth to take a stand among the 655+ companies publicly committed to celebrating Juneteenth as an official holiday. Our decision was a resounding “yes”. Shown below is a screenshot of the announcement we made on Slack, our team-wide communications platform, on the evening of June 15, 2020 to declare Juneteenth an official JustFix.nyc holiday.
That one nudge pushed us into rethinking our entire JustFix.nyc holiday calendar as part of our push to analyze all of our internal policies in a commitment to anti-racism. Initially, our calendar matched the United States Office of Personnel Management Holiday Calendar, which is widely used at organizations across the country. This calendar honors people like Christopher Columbus who have benefitted from slavery and disregards numerous holidays from other traditions and faiths outside of those celebrated by White Americans.
After conducting our own research and having conversations with DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) experts in the field, as well as consulting our own team members for direct feedback, we completely overhauled our own Holiday Calendar with 30+ office closure holidays. Now, our calendar highlights, honors, and celebrates important dates such as Kwanzaa, Lunar New Year, Holi, Eid al-Fitr, Women’s Equality Day, and Indigenous People’s Day.
You might be asking how we can get our work done with all these office closures — and it is definitely something to get used to. However, it is critical to honor the traditions of all JustFix.nyc staff present and future. As an organization, we believe that our best work will come from staff that is rested and practicing self-care. We offer flexible work schedules, optimizing the time we intentionally block out for work and respect staff to log off for the other significant parts of their lives.
We acknowledge that as a small team and young organization, we have this privilege of communicating early to our team the importance of all these dates, setting a foundation for the coming years of JustFix.nyc. Hopefully, with these changes, we can make JustFix.nyc a more inviting and inclusive space. We are and will continually be learning together. If you have any questions or ideas please reach out.
