Dissonance
On what the sector built for the people it serves — and what it didn’t for the people who do the work.
Dissonance.
Two notes that should not exist together — and do.
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The sector has a standard for how human beings deserve to be treated when they are vulnerable. When they need something. When they are inside a system that has power over them.
We do not leave it implicit. We build it into everything.
We conduct needs assessments before we design solutions — because we know that a system which decides what someone needs without asking has already failed them. We assign advocates — people whose entire job is to be on the side of the person navigating the system, not the system itself. We create grievance processes that go beyond the organization that caused the harm. We practice trauma-informed care. We train people to understand that how someone is behaving makes complete sense given what they have been through. We measure outcomes — not just whether we delivered the service, but whether it worked. Whether the person on the other side of it is better.
We call this care. We have spent decades building the infrastructure for it.
We built it for the people we serve.
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We have not built the same for the people we employ.
They get a handbook. An HR department that reports to the same leadership they may need to report. An annual review written by the person with power over their livelihood. A DEI training that runs once a year and satisfies a requirement. An open door that everyone who has worked in this sector knows has a cost.
No advocate. No independent grievance process. No trauma-informed lens turned toward the people doing the work. No measure of whether they are okay.
The person we serve who needs to report harm gets someone in their corner whose job is to believe them first.
The person we employ who needs to report harm gets a form.
The form goes to HR. And HR reports to the person they are reporting.
The people in the middle know it best — responsible for executing the policies, with no authority to change them.
The sector that asks what do you need of the people it serves has not built the same structure for the people it employs.
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Behavior is language. And the sector has been saying two different things.
We have a word for the gap between what we say we believe and how we behave.
We have not been using it.
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We have systems. We have policies. We have processes.
Yes. And the people we serve had systems too — before we arrived and said the systems were not enough. That the systems protected the organization. That the people inside them deserved something more than a process designed by the same structure causing the harm.
We knew that. We built something better for them.
The systems we built for the people we serve exist in part because someone demanded them. No equivalent demand has been made with the same consistency for the people doing the work. That is not an excuse. It is an explanation. And it raises a harder question about who the sector is actually accountable to.
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Resources are part of the story. They are not the whole story.
The sector has a standard. It is a good one. It is one of the things we have genuinely gotten right.
We have simply never decided that the people who do this work deserve to be treated by it.
It is a decision the sector has never fully confronted.
And the people who notice are not confused.
They are hearing the dissonance.
— Keira Haley | keirahaley.com
Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.