Emily White Hodge

I’m an HR consultant with a passion for racial justice. A Certified PHR (Professional in Human Resources) through HRCI with over 20 years of nonprofit experience across the full spectrum of HR and People Operations functions, I specialize in working with small to medium sized non-profit organizations, who want to approach human resources from a people-first perspective.

Before I started White Hodge HR,  I served as the HR Director for the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) and led several organization-wide efforts to support the fully remote, national staff and helped them thrive through a period of rapid growth during the uprisings in defense of Black life and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior to my time at NNAF, for six years I was Director of HR & Operations at New Moms in Chicago, IL. Awarded the Bamboo Hero award for Onboarding, I was asked to be an ambassador for BambooHR.

Why do I do what I do? Here’s My  Story.

In my early years I was surrounded by people . . . lots of people: family, multiple foreign exchange students, friends, my sibling’s college friends, church members, and community members. Everywhere I went, people were always around.

Those people were almost exclusively white.

One summer in high school, I went to an event only about 15 miles away, where I discovered a whole new world. It was a world of people from another culture and a different lived experience.

It was one of those life-shifting moments. A moment in which my eyes were opened a little wider and everything I thought I knew and understood about myself, my family, my country and the world was suddenly called into question.

At that moment I decided I wanted to learn more about other people outside of my little circle – about lives not exactly like my own. And the more I learned the more my eyes were opened to the inequities that I was perpetuating.

So, I dedicated myself to undoing my old ways of thinking and being in the world, the ways I’d been taught were right and true. I committed myself to becoming a welcome home for all people.

While I started out in a career doing direct service with young people, I soon began exploring other ways of serving people – ALL people. I discovered that my deepest calling was in developing systems and processes that helped people, and simultaneously worked for justice.

As I’ve built my own HR practice, I’ve done so with a passionate commitment to making it one that’s rooted in justice – particularly racial justice. Every protocol and system I set up is developed through a lens that centers equity: for BIPOC women in particular.

My deepest longing is to leave a more just world for my BIPOC family members & friends. My core belief is that we cannot be loving without working for justice.