You made the commitments, funded the work, and proclaimed your vision. So why does your staff describe a different organization than you do?

The Team Solidarity & Unity Barometer™ brings four people from your organization through seventy-five real scenarios, separately. Then it shows you where their answers part ways.

You didn't need another survey. You needed to hear from your own people.

You’ve run the engagement survey. Psychological safety came back at 4.2 out of 5, and you were pleased, and then two key staffers left within a month of each other and said things in their exit interviews that really didn’t sound like a 4.2.That gap is not a measurement error. It’s the most actionable information your organization has, and almost nothing in your current toolkit is built to find it.Here’s why. Surveys ask people to rate their employer, and rating one’s employer is a political act. Everyone knows who reads the results. Everyone knows how small the staff is. So people pick the number that is true enough to be defensible and safe enough to be survivable. Everyone ends up doing the same thing, and the average comes back looking very reassuring.

But.Reassuring isn’t always real, and we know it. Unspoken realities fracture teams and disrupt mission attainment.

The Barometer doesn’t ask you to rate a thing. It gives you a scenario and asks which ending sounds most like your reality. Nobody has ever learned anything from scoring their own organization a 2 out of 5 on inclusion. But show someone four versions of a meeting and ask which one is theirs, and they’ll tell you.

You'll recognize these people. You'll also meet them inside the Barometer, because the scenes take place at a made-up foundation staffed by them.

Diane, the Director Who Lives for the Mission

Twelve years on, she’s said the trusted face at the conferences and in the media. She’d like to know how truthfully her statements about the org flow within their own offices, and she has a nagging suspicion that she’s the last person who would find out.

She’ll see: the distance between her score and her staff’s, with information she can bring to a board meeting without awareness that matches her authority and experience.

Priya, The Engine That Could, Can, and Does

She is the operations manager, and in many ways, the glue. Priya is an empath and a problem-solver; she started the mentoring circle, she smooths over the conflicts, she onboards everyone, and none of it appears in her role description or her review.

What she gets: a name for what is happening to her. The Labor Imbalance is a Blocker, not a personality trait, and seeing it in a report helps the org change who is always the fix-it person.

Nora, the Officer Who Is Burning Out

Six years in. With both deep credentials and invaluable lived experience and sectoral knowledge, she has been the conscience and moral compass. This came at a cost, though, and, deciding rest and preservation matter too, she’s stopped speaking up as much. Running on auto-pilot, it could be that no one even notices.

What she gets: a place to say it where saying it is the assignment, not a risk she took on her own.

Marcus, the New Kid on the Block, Raring to Go

Ten months in, and really valued because he brings commitment, enthusiasm, and innovation. He’s still learning and adjusting, so he remains quiet and watchful—but also, maybe a little disappointed. He went to grad school to make a difference in the world, but the workplace is full of oddities that give him pause.

What he gets: his read counted alongside everyone else’s, before he learns not to notice.

What actually happens

You buy it once, for your organization. $350. One purchase for the team, not per person.

Four colleagues take it separately. We recommend you pick different levels on purpose. One from senior leadership, one manager, at least one person from the staff most affected by how your organization currently works, and for the fourth seat, someone in operations or finance who sees the resourcing patterns program staff never do.

Each of them works through seventy-five scenes. It takes about forty-five minutes, and it saves as they go, so people can do it in more than one sitting if they’d rather. Nobody rates anything. They pick the ending closest to their reality.

You get a report. Here is what is in it:

Your five pillar scores, as percentages, on a radar chart
Where your organization falls on the Solidarity and Unity Continuum™
Your primary and secondary Solidarity Blocker™, drawn from your weakest pillar
Every perception gap over twenty-five points, named, with which levels disagreed

Your values-behavior gap: where what you publish and what your staff live have come apart
A ninety-day plan built for the Blocker you actually have, not a list of thirty things
Recommendations for deeper expertise where you need it: HR structure, compensation, board governance

This is not really a problem of not caring. It's a problem of not knowing.

Philanthropy is full of people who believe in this work. You read the books, hired the consultant, wrote the commitments, and meant every word. That sincerity is real, and it is also the thing that hides the drift, because when leadership believes and says so regularly, the belief starts to feel like proof.

Meanwhile the people four steps down from you have known where the gaps are for a while now. They talk about it with each other. What they don’t have is a way to convey this information without feeling they may be putting their livelihood at risk.

At Brave Sis Project and the Solidarity Lab, we know that two things can be true at once: your commitment is genuine, and your organization is not currently living up to it. The first factor does not cancel the second, and the second reality does not erase the first.

Pricing and follow up

$350 for your organization. Four respondents, one report. We know what many audits cost. We are after structural change in building solidarity and unity, so we are taking a different approach, and the goal is discovery, conversation, exploration, and real change.

$200 of that credits toward any engagement with us, for sixty days. If the Barometer surfaces something you want help with, you are most of the way to the next step already, and I would rather you spend your money on the work than on finding out you need it.

The Barometer will tell you something true. Whether it tells you something comfortable is not in my control, and a guarantee against discomfort would be a promise to soften the findings, which would make the whole thing worthless.

Need to ramp up first? Start with the Team EQ Assessment. It’s free, takes about ten minutes, and gives one person a snapshot of where they think the organization stands. The Barometer is what happens when you put four of those snapshots side by side.

Questions about the Team Solidarity & Unity Barometer

1. Who should take it?

Different levels, deliberately. Three people from your leadership team will produce a confident, unanimous, useless reading. The distance between an executive director and a program associate is the single most valuable thing in the report, and you only get it if both seats are filled.

2. Will people actually be honest?

They will likely be more honest than they are on a survey, because the format asks for recognition rather than judgment. Choosing between four scenes is not the same act as scoring your employer, and people who would never write “leadership is out of touch” will absolutely pick the scene where the conversation stops when the boss walks in.

3. Is it anonymous?

Respondents are identified by their level, not their name, because a gap only means something if you know which seats it ran between. Nobody is quoted. No one’s individual answers appear in the report.

4. What if we score badly?

Brave Sis Project does not use shame and blame in our work. Nobody in the report is a villain, including the leaders. The scenes were written that way on purpose, because most of what the Barometer finds is structural rather than anyone’s fault. Most organizations land somewhere in the middle, and the middle is where the useful information is. A low score is at least honest. The result actually worth your attention is a respectable score sitting next to a wide values-behavior gap, which is the most common outcome we see and precisely what this instrument was built to catch.

5. Isn't this just DEI with a new name?

No, and the difference matters. DEI programs were built to satisfy institutional liability, which is why they vanished the moment institutional will did. The Barometer measures whether solidarity is structurally present in how your organization actually operates: how it spends, who it promotes, what happens when someone is harmed, whether anything changed. That question survives any political moment, because it was never dependent on permission.

6. We already did an equity audit in 2022. Why this?

Because that audit told you what to do and this one tells you what is happening. Most audits produce recommendations. This produces a picture of the gap between your leadership’s experience and your staff’s, which is the thing that determined whether the 2022 recommendations ever became realities.

7. How long does it take?

About forty-five minutes per person. Progress saves, so it can be done across two sittings.

8. Can we do it again later?

Yes, and you should, twelve months down the line. The Continuum was designed to show movement, and a second reading is where you find out whether anything you did after the first one worked.

9. What if our staff is small?

Define “small.” The assessment needs at least four respondents because when you’re querying fewer than fifteen people, the perception gap gets harder to report without identifying who said what. So we would talk first about whether the Barometer is right for you, or a different conversation and path would be better.

10. What comes after?

That depends on your Blocker. The ninety-day plan is specific to it, and where the fix is genuinely outside what we do, structural HR work in particular, we say so and point you toward people we trust rather than selling you something adjacent.

Your people already know.

They have known for a while. They talk about it with each other, in the hallway, after the meeting, in the car on the way home.

The Barometer is a way to ask them that doesn’t require anyone to be brave about it. Seventy-five scenes, four seats, forty-five minutes each, one report. $350, and $200 of it comes back to you if you decide to keep going.

"Rozie has a rare ability to design big-picture change strategies that honor where each person is starting from, bridging blind spots, biases, and differing experiences without losing sight of the mission. She translates complex and sensitive topics into frameworks and practices that are both accessible and actionable, helping teams move through discomfort toward alignment and trust. Her work doesn't just improve conversations, it transforms not just relationships, but the systems that sustain trust over time." - EH, chief of staff