What Your Comfort Costs Us

“This book provides necessary assistance with clarity and compassion.”—Booklist starred review“Gabriela opened her heart to deliver a deeply personal and reflective journey through the experiences and challenges of women of color in leadership. This book can be particularly instructive to cis-men leaders wanting to foster empathy, deep inclusion, and mutuality in their organizations. By learning about Gabriela and other women leaders’ experiences, men can help dismantle harmful structures that perpetuate inequality and restrict true freedom for all.Once you see the injustices women of color are experiencing, you can’t unsee them.”—Efraín Gutiérrez, co-founder, Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy“What Your Comfort Costs Us is part of an emerging and damning narrative about the experiences of women of color in leadership. Though race/ethnicity and gender are key shapers of how much power society thinks women of color should be able to wield, this is a woefully understudied area in leadership.The last few years saw an opening into leadership as organizations struggling with inequality tapped women of color to lead during extremely tumultuous times, with little support and heightened expectations. Now, a few years later, these leaders have horror stories to tell about their experiences, and they are breaking the rules in telling them. They also tell us what they need to be supported.”—Cyndi Suarez, author of The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics, former president and editor-in-chief of Nonprofit Quarterly“What Your Comfort Costs Us is part personal story, part collective witnessing, and a challenge to workplaces—particularly those in the third sector—to step up. Dr. Alcalde adds an important critique to the growing literature on white supremacy in the workplace. Yet this book is for all of us who work, regardless of our racial background or gender expression, regardless of whether we have harmed others or been harmed. Most compelling is Dr. Alcalde’s interrogation of workplace infrastructure itself and the invitation to dream up new models for getting things done. Can we imagine self-managed workplaces without hierarchy? Can we imagine workplaces rooted in Indigenous wisdom alive in social philosophies like buen vivir?Dr. Alcalde invites us to take a hard look at the workplaces we have inherited and experiment our way into a future where work looks nothing like it does today.”—Yanique Redwood, PhD, author of White Women Cry and Call Me Angry“The powerful stories woven throughout this book provide a visceral illustration, at times gut-wrenching, of the struggles faced by and harm enacted on women of color in leadership positions. As an executive coach to women of color leaders, the stories are all too familiar. I love that this book rightly shifts the responsibility back to organizations to change the white-dominant workplace culture enacting the harm, instead of placing the burden on women to be more resilient.Not only does this book challenge us to critically examine traditional organizational structures and workplace culture, but it invites us to reimagine them, and to entertain new concepts of power and leadership that are not tied to capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.”—Estrella Dawson, personal and executive coach, emotional intelligence trainer

M. Gabriela Alcalde is a public health leader with nearly 3 decades of experience and commitment to equity and social justice. She has worked in the philanthropic, academic, government, nonprofit, and grassroots sectors throughout her career and served in various volunteer capacities. Since 2019, Alcalde has led the Sewall Foundation, a private, independent foundation, as executive director through radical culture change and the integration of environmental, human, and animal wellbeing as the foundation works to center equity and community voices in all their work and strategies. Alcalde regularly speaks and writes locally, nationally, and internationally about shifting the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, racial equity and justice, and the experience of women of color in leadership. A native of Lima, Peru, she currently lives in Maine with her partner, children, and dog.