As a white (or a non-black) person do you sometimes feel fake to support the Black Lives Matter cause? Or even as a non-American person do you feel supporting the Black Lives Matters feels fake? Are we just jumping on the bandwagon?

I certainly felt fake at the time back in South Africa in the Apartheid era. Yes I had black friends, yes I co-started a student movement to improve the conditions and the dialogue with black students, yes I was picked up by the police and I was pressured to leave the country. But still it was not my story and hence I looked at the cause as not my own. What I know today is that you have to own the story to truly own the change. And it was the idea of “the rainbow nation at peace with itself and the rest of the world” that helped me own the story of change in South Africa.

To stop feeling fake about supporting the Rainbow Nation transformation I had to change my frame of reference around the cause. I had to humanize the cause and see it for what it is, an injustice to humanity and abuse of power on the basis of skin colour, something I cannot tolerate for myself nor for others. Hence, together with a group of innate social justice strivers, we created Innate Motion, a global consultancy business focused on humanizing business. Together we strongly believe business becomes infinitely more valuable for everyone when humanized and today we believe this too about the Black Lives Matter movement.

So if you are hesitating to support this movement, don’t, rather ask how it can become part of your story that you and your business can live it everyday. Here are 5 ways of how we at Innate Motion strive to contribute to the fight for social justice and inclusion. We strive to live the story through our practices, values and the people we are:

In practice we help organizations and brands become empathy fit, so they can connect with greater human and business sense. Like Rene Brown so beautifully illustrates “empathy connects, sympathy drives disconnection.
We champion feminine values like generosity, co-creation, empathy, intuition, flexibility and play (maybe the last one is just me). We make them part of who we are and want to be.
We work hard to improve our #BCorp scores so we can use our business as a force for good
We assure we are a 100% transparent company ensuring that people across the world and across gender or colour divides can benefit from our incentive and remuneration systems without discrimination.
And last but not least, we believe in ownership of inclusion. All people in innate motion have a right to ownership if they choose

Is this enough? Surely not, but we will become better each day.
Christophe Fauconnier,
Co-founder and Chairman of Innate Motion