The Lazu Group and Rivera Consulting Formalize Collaboration
Combining Thought Leadership, to Advance People, and Generative Data
The Lazu Group and Rivera Consulting – both women- and minority-owned consulting firms – are formalizing their collaboration to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) through reparative planning in the public and private sectors.
The two firms, founded by Malia Lazu and Wilnelia Rivera, have informally partnered on projects for many years. Now, given the heightened stakes and increased challenges for DEI work in the current political and economic climate, The Lazu Group and Rivera Consulting will be working more closely together on select projects where they can offer their complementary strengths and shared values.
The two firms, which will remain independent, offer a well-rounded, interdisciplinary approach that combines thought leadership with data-driven change management processes. Their shared ideology creates opportunities to bring an enhanced set of skills, expertise, and relationships to DEI work to advance equity, justice, and belonging, both within organizations and across communities.
In working together, they combine deep expertise in gathering and analyzing quantitative data, with the qualitative discipline of engaging with others to listen and learn. Importantly, both firms have institutional knowledge to understand the past, process the present, and strive for new equitable outcomes in the future.
"As a researcher, I believe in the power and potential of data to provide irrefutable evidence of the changes needed in policies, programs, and projects."
— Wilnelia Rivera
“The Lazu Group and Rivera Consulting both draw from a rich legacy of community organizing and social activism,” said Malia Lazu. “This is our common ground – the foundation on which we are building more opportunities to collaborate.”
“As a researcher, I believe in the power and potential of data to provide irrefutable evidence of the changes needed in policies, programs, and projects,” added Wilnelia Rivera. “This is the discipline we bring to our work in public policy, urban development, community planning, and sustainable economy development.”
Collaboration through in-depth expertise in specific areas
The Lazu Group and the Seven Stages
Through its DEI work leading companies, organizations, and government, The Lazu Group has developed the “Seven Stages” of DEI, outlining the process from taking an initial step to fully embracing transformation through DEI. At Stage 1, organizations feel excited relief–there is a way to solve “the problem.” At Stage 2, they learn about “the problem,” and at Stage 3, take action on low-hanging fruit. At Stage 4, things begin to get real–but organizations deny there is pushback. Stage 5 is realizing that the pushback is real, and Stage 6 is acknowledging the pushback is bias. Finally, at Stage 7, there is the commitment to move around and through the bias.
In addition, as clients advance through the stages, The Lazu Group provides support through a process it calls the 3Ls: Listen, Learn and Take Loving Action.
Listen — is the catchup work or pre-work. People must engage in this on their own to develop at least some situational awareness.
Learn — Once people have spent some time listening, they are prepared to learn in a respectful and informed way. They can begin to interact with communities to learn in real time how to be an ally.
Loving action — ensures that the work will be well received and relevant to the communities they hope to include. It builds generosity of interpretation and will help every action be authentic, not hypocritical.
Rivera Consulting and Deep Democracy
As multidisciplinary practitioners, Rivera Consulting works at the intersection of planning, engagement, and equity. As both a value and a methodology, Deep Democracy grounds the firm’s design thinking approach to its consulting services. As a value, it centers those often left out from the public discourse and decision-making process. It is grounded in ambitious trust, open minds, radical honesty, and rigorous interconnectedness. The firm combines qualitative and independent research and platform technologies focused on the civic engagement techniques, lived experience, and knowledge (cultural, experiential, spiritual, institutional) of BIPOC communities with demographic and socioeconomic geographic markers in identified Deep Democracy countries across the country. In so doing, the firm aims to fuel the care and growth of a civil rights movement across this country.
Rivera Consulting’s design thinking approach to restorative planning:
Foundation of Empathy: The importance of deep listening, restoring trust and repairing harm within communities and organizations.
Co-Defining and Ideation: Deliberate, inclusive planning to enable a shift in mindset to advance the operations, planning, and process improvements needed to pursue increased equity, sustainability, and affordability.
Co-Prototyping and Testing: The need for reparative planning, innovative decision-making, and equitable resource allocation that accounts for economic and racial disparities as well as environmental justice.
In addition, both firms have developed equity research and digital assets that reflect their intellectual processes. They include:
Rivera Consulting’s Deep Democracy databases of counties (largely in the South and Southwest) and mutli-variable analysis rooted in intersectional justice and movement values that help inform philanthropic and individual donor giving strategies to BIPOC communities and organizations committed to multi-racial power building, racial and social justice. Since 2015, the firm has helped identify and move over $7 million in philanthropic giving to 501c3, 501c4 and women of color running for office in these counties. Previously, the Rising American Electorate was the firm’s foundational basis for long term philanthropic and organizational giving strategies. Yet the legal and democratic erosion of our political system means that in 2024, we will refresh this research to better understand what’s happened to these communities over the last four years and what you can do to chart a new chapter for American civil rights and democracy.
CULTURL Equity Toolkit meant to shift people and organizational culture from bias to belonging. Digital tools include training videos, rubrics, and its CULTURL Heritage Calendar of more than 80 holidays, commemorations, and heritage months to help foster discussion and respectful, cross-cultural curiosity. This toolkit helps people look inward at their own lived experiences and outward at the daily interactions within communities and organizations–whether as BIPOC individuals constantly subjected to the “white gaze” or white people willing to take on allyship.
These are unprecedented times for those working to further reparative planning practice that take the promise and best practices DEI and reparative planning: a Supreme Court challenge to affirmative action, state laws dismantling DEI in the public sector, and more companies distancing themselves from anti-racist language and thinking – not to mention a presidential election year in a country deeply divided.
Yet these times also call for boldness, to foster new thinking and new approaches anchored in decades of collective expertise in and corporate consulting. This is why The Lazu Group and Rivera Consulting are collaborating to bring all that the two firms have to offer for a holistic, comprehensive approach to consultation, solutions, and implementation.
About the Principals
Malia Lazu, Founder and CEO of the Lazu Group, is author of From Intention to Impact: A Practical Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (2024, MIT Press). As a fellow at MIT’s Community Innovator’s Lab, she launched The Urban Labs, a multicultural agency helping brands reap returns on diversity. The Urban Labs expanded into The Lazu Group, creating DEI products and processes. She is also a Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, where she co-created The Inclusive Innovation Economy.
An award-winning, tenured strategist in diversity and inclusion, she has sparked economic development and investment in urban entrepreneurship for over twenty years. In her previous role as EVP and Regional President at Berkshire Bank, Malia worked to generate economic growth and wealth by expanding access to capital, especially in communities of color that have traditionally been left behind.
Malia chairs the Mill Cities Community Investments Board, and sits on the Massachusetts Business Roundtable Board, the Investment Committee of Boston Impact Initiative, and Nation Magazine’s Editorial Board. She was named Boston Magazine’s The 100 Most Influential Bostonians in 2021.
Wilnelia Rivera, Founder and CEO of Rivera Consulting, is an urban planner and equity strategist with a 21-year track record of success and results focused on the nexus and connectivity between the built environment, people, and public and private organizations. Her firm’s approach to planning, engagement, and equity, rests on the insight that the most important economic and social issues are intersectional and interconnected but require different mindsets, collaboration, and adaptability to actually address them. She prototypes values-driven ideas and solutions while fostering buy-in and trust for leaders and multidisciplinary teams to advance their mission and outcomes with their staff and communities.
Before founding RC in 2015, Wilnelia was a history-making community organizer, advocate, and political strategist across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She founded RC as a solution to the silos and resistance she often encountered. RC is a Boston-based change management and strategy consultant firm working at the intersection of planning, engagement, and equity management and strategy consultant firm. As equity researchers and strategists, we integrate mixed-method research, urban planning, and organizational development to advance innovative solutions to complex culture and structure problems.
Her leadership has been recognized by Boston Magazine in 2022 and 2021, as one of Boston’s Top 100 Influential Bostonians, the Tufts University Alumni Magazine, and the Lyon & Bendheim Citizenship Award from Tisch College of Civic Life (2021). She also serves as a Board of Advisor at Tisch College of Civic Life, a Board Member of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, a member of the Eastern Bank Board of Ambassadors, and Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Rare Ensemble Foundation.