On Board With… Dr. Destiny Thomas, Founder and CEO, Thrivance Group
Dr. Destiny Thomas is a change agent and Founder and CEO of Thrivance Group, a multi-regional, socially responsible, for-profit firm that works to make public spaces and public services more safe, more healthy, and more accessible, especially for Black, Indigenous, and transgender people, and those with disabilities.
An anthropologist planner hailing from Oakland, CA, Dr. Thomas has a combined 15 years of experience in nonprofit management and project management within government agencies, including the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the City of Los Angeles. In addition, Dr. Thomas has led advancements in statewide racial equity initiatives for over a decade. Her focus has been urban planning, policy writing, and organizational development in communities most impacted by racial inequities.
Dr. Thomas’s areas of interest include: harm reductive planning, implementing the Dignity-Infused Community Engagement methodology, anti-displacement studies, healing environmental and infrastructural trauma, and bolstering agency and voice in marginalized communities within municipal planning processes. To this end, she launched Thrivance in 2020. As a culturally-rooted, trauma-informed enterprise, the team works to build capacity for these very values within municipal agencies, direct service providers, and advocacy organizations. Dr. Thomas earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Fisk University in 2006; a Master of Public Administration with an emphasis in Public Health and Non-Profit Management from Tennessee State University in 2008; and a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2016.
Dr. Thomas was the closing keynote speaker at the California Transit Association’s 56th Annual Fall Conference & Expo. What follows is a highlight of the interview portion of the presentation between Dr. Thomas and Alva Carrasco, VP Transit and Rail National Business Line, West Region Market, WSP and Vice Chair of the Association’s IDEA Task Force.
Alva Carrasco:
Transit agencies oversee projects, but often do not have access to policy levers for addressing issues of housing and displacement. How can we make progress in this area?
Dr. Thomas:
This is a great question. As a community organizer first, I know that there are seldom levers to pull to achieve the changes we seek. My suggestion to transit agencies is to hire people, like a housing specialist for example, who have an embodied experience and also understand the potential impacts of the work that you are doing, so that the way they do the work has better outcomes for the communities that you are serving. That is a small step that we can take, while we work our way through policy channels.
I would also push back on that and say that you [transit agencies] DO have levers that you can pull. The mega counties where I have lived (Alameda County, Los Angeles County) the local transit agencies have been very influential in just about every land use related thing – either through lifting up their voices or through the various governing bodies that they sit on.
Alva Carrasco:
Transit agencies, like most government organizations, are making decisions within their resource constraints. What are some best practices to identify community benefits?
Dr. Thomas:
With my recent experience at LADOT, we were able to hire 82 people representing community-based organizations (CBOs) to work on a series of projects covering the entire geography of South Central LA. Each organization had its own interests and its own specialty and they became experts. So, I would say look at your contracting mechanisms that exist within civil service process like creating a bench specifically for CBOs, a bench specific for resident leaders, and then make sure that the process doesn’t create barriers for them to actually access the project itself.
As for resource constraints, I don’t want to say too much about that, but I would say dig into your marketing budget, look at all of the buckets of money that might have $10,000 dollars sitting, maybe a project that has already been built that has some leftover funds. On the Vision Zero project that I worked on, I sifted through 23 different accounts in the City of LA looking to find remaining balances and we culled them together and ended up with $2.9 million dollars for community engagement in South Central LA. It’s really about being resourceful. Sometimes we aren’t as constrained as we might think we are.
Alva Carrasco:
What is the number one step a white cisgender heterosexual (cishet) male can take within his organization to acknowledge or address institutional racism embedded in transportation policies and organizations?
Dr. Thomas:
The workplace has been an incredibly emotionally violent place for me, which is why I started the Thrivance Group. There was a time I cried in the bathroom at work everyday for months straight leading up to the time I started my business. I would say the one thing that you could do is be honest when you see someone that is not being heard or someone has been mistreated. Because, for you the stakes are much lower, than for someone like me. Make friends with someone that is not a white cishet male and ask them what it is they need you to say when they are in those spaces and be willing to give up some of your clout and your power, so that those issues can be advanced. And then, don’t take credit for them, if you happen to get the equity promotion, as a result of their ideas.
Alva Carrasco:
How do you react to a white cishet when they say, ”I don’t get all this diversity talk?” How do you react to that?
Dr. Thomas:
You know, some just don’t. They really don’t. We have been socialized into the experiences that we have. So, if you come from parents who are of the generation where Black people had to move off the sidewalk and into the street for them to walk down the sidewalk, knowingly or not, you were raised with a certain level of entitlement and freedom to not HAVE to notice racism. So, a lot of times, a white cishet male doesn’t know. I don’t think it’s our job as co-workers to teach them. I think you should work with your human resources department to institute a formal way of making sure the folks who don’t know can come into knowing.
I do get upset at the amount of resources we have to invest in bringing our white colleagues up to speed. Especially, if we could hire someone who has that embodied experience.
Limtus Test for Reparative Planning
Dr. Thomas recommends a reparative strategy for policies rooted in displacement intervention should include:
- The policy, on its own or in combination with another policy, addresses a specific element of harm identified through research and stakeholder perspectives.
- The policy or the implementation plan strives to identify a specific and intentional recipient of issue-specific, direct intervention.
- The eligibility/qualifying factor does not pose an additional burden or barrier that would contribute to new or additional displacement.
- The policy and the people who implement the policy intend to create a permanent redress for the impacts of past harmful planning practices.
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Alva Carrasco:
Can you describe a community outreach experience that you felt was extremely successful in engaging with folks in the community and implementing their ideas?
Dr. Thomas:
Although I have some philosophical challenges with the notion of Vision Zero nationally, our effort to implement comprehensive community engagement in South Central LA on the Vision Zero project was incredibly successful. The short version of it is this: we only hired people who lived within the face of the project to do the community engagement and those are all people who would otherwise not have access to jobs: veteran’s that had mental illnesses, former sex workers, people who had drug convictions, and undocumented people. They were hired staff and they received high quality professional development training every Monday. We created a center for them called the Dignity Center. At the end of the 18-months of community engagement – we lost count after 6,000 because our counter broke – but we saw over 6,000 people show up to an open house for a roadway re-configuration project at a park where the elected officials had said there was no way we’d get more than 10 people to show up because the community hated the neighborhood.
I would also say re-frame community engagement, so that it’s not just about implementing a project that you want to do. Think about the long term benefits of having authentic relationships at the community level and creating those satellite hubs, so that folks aren’t having to come to our government buildings, get patted down, show their id, and get harassed by security just to tell us what color paint they want to see in the bike lane.
Alva Carrasco:
Are there resources or organizations that can support public transit agencies in making progress in addressing anti-displacement?
Dr. Thomas:
The California Strategic Growth Council is doing excellent work to research and to implement anti-displacement metrics into all of their transportation related funding projects. So, I would say that funding mechanism in and of itself would help resource that work. I would also say start to incorporate your local housing agencies in your transportation planning strike team efforts.
And certainly there are organizations, like the Thrivance Group, that are experts on anti-displacement related transportation planning. There are many social justice organizations, like the Crenshaw Subway Coalition or the LA Bus Riders Union, who have been studying this forever and would be happy to lend their insights to your work.
Alva Carrasco:
What are some of the specific ways that public transit agencies can intentionally include voices of color that will be affected by transit changes?
Dr. Thomas:
This is a sticky question because it is not just including voices of color, it’s about including those among voices of color that are the most vulnerable to the changes that we are making – people with disabilities, transgender people, people with cognitive differences, transition age youth that have been stripped from their families but are transitioning to adulthood. Going down that list of people and identities, the obvious answer is to have all of your social services agencies at the table with you. So call the probation officer, the foster care department, and the crisis center at the hospital that handles mental health and include them at the conceptual design phase of whatever it is you are working on. They can speak to the specific impacts and they can engage communities to scale. They have a familiarity that even a resident won’t have because they understand that specific issue across a broader footprint.
Alva Carrasco:
What does weaponizing affordable housing mean?
Dr. Thomas:
We see a lot of contention come up when we have affordable housing conversations. There are two things that are happening. One is we are stigmatizing the notion of affordable housing. So people who need affordable housing are now advocating against it because of the poor quality of materials that go into building it, and because of the inaccess to transportation amenities that they know will exist post implementation of affordable housing. The flip side of that is we have folks who have benefitted and enjoyed living in communities where there has never been affordable housing, so they weaponize the introduction of affordable housing by using dog whistles like increased crime, lowered property values, blight, and trash. Those are all falsehoods that mischaracterize the human beings that just want dignified housing. When I say, “weaponizing affordable housing,” I mean using affordable housing as a racist dog whistle to maintain the level of white privilege and comfort that we have had.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Learn more about Dr. Thomas’ work on dignity-infused community engagement, thrivance (helping people heal from environmental trauma), and the importance of removing "enforcement" and "punishment" from our public institutions by viewing PED Talks Episode 2: A Conversation With Dr. Destiny Thomas.
Learn more about the Thrivance Group here.