The following article is written by Kaitlyn Endo (she/her), Victoria Kupu (she/her), and Erick Roa (he/him).
We have recently seen a large scale back, or as Forbes puts it “quiet quitting,” when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, or DEIB, initiatives within companies and organizations across the U.S.
Regardless of how clear the business case is for intentional and authentic DEIB policies and practices, the current charged social and political landscape is making it easier for companies to drop commitments that many made after George Floyd was murdered.
While others scale back, at Making Waves Education Foundation, we are doubling down on our commitment to DEIB.
Because of this commitment, over the last two years, the sense of psychological safety and our overall Employer Net Promoter Score, or ENPS score, have increased significantly. For example, our ENPS score went from negative 25 in August 2022 to positive 15 a year later and has held about steady at positive 12 this past summer.
DEIB work is hard work. It’s work that’s never done, never perfect. And it can definitely feel heavy at times. It can also be meaningful and even fun (yes, we said fun!).
While the work is never done, you have to start somewhere. Starting can be hard for many reasons, but we implore you to step into, not back away from DEIB.
Here are some of the ways we’re focusing on DEIB work with some key takeaways that we hope help your efforts too.
Pace yourself with a multi-year roadmap
One of our core values is to promote equity. To live out this core value externally, we need to also promote and embody equity internally. We partnered with an external firm to create what’s known internally as our equity roadmap, a multi-year plan for addressing pain points over the short, medium, and long-term.
Drawing from input from years of employee engagement surveys, plus informational interviews with team members, the roadmap has three goals:
- Build a high trust organization that centers psychological safety.
- Dismantle White supremacy culture characteristics, like power-hoarding through equity-centered decision-making.
- Prioritize employee well-being to combat burnout.
The reality is a lot needs to get done. It can be easy to get impatient. The roadmap helps us both have a foundation for our DEIB committee work and intentionally pace out the actions needed to achieve the above goals.
The roadmap serves as a strong starting point and will evolve as we do. This year, we are zeroing in on the highest impact challenge and pouring our collective energy into solving it.
We learned that having too many priorities causes confusion and a lack of clarity for our larger team. This is a collective initiative, so it needs to be digestible and actionable.
Have a budget (and pay your DEIB committee!)
If you’re serious about DEIB efforts, then you need a budget, even if it’s a small one.
This should include stipends to pay the DEIB committee or some form of monetary payment. At Making Waves, each committee member gets $1,000 per six months of committee work.
This honors and acknowledges team members for the extra labor and mental capacity they are putting into the work, especially for folks who identify with marginalized identities.
Allow for collective ownership
The committee should have an intentional structure to create collective ownership.
- This means having representation from different levels of the organization, different roles, and different teams.
- This also means having members with varying levels of comfort and knowledge around DEIB topics as long as folks are open to the overall goals and willing to learn.
From there, each member should have a chance to lead certain projects or presentations, to weigh in, and to facilitate. If you’re a smaller organization with limited vertical promotion opportunities, these paid committees serve as pivotal leadership opportunities for your emerging leaders.
Your DEIB committee work should include involvement from your senior leadership team if your organization follows a hierarchical structure. We had two senior leaders on the DEIB committee this past year. This meant senior leaders could hear directly from committee members and be strong sponsors of the work, bringing topics and decisions to senior leadership team meetings and implementing learnings in day-to-day work across goal setting, projects, and meetings.
This approach also creates more alignment between staff and senior leaders, shifting the dynamic from ‘us vs. them’ to a model of collective ownership of the work.
Collective ownership also means committee members are liaisons and advocates across the organization and should be invited into spaces where DEIB perspective might be lacking or could use an extra boost to impact overall organizational culture.
In bringing folks together it’s critical that the committee show deep care for each other, for the equity work, and for what this means for how we support students. This supportive environment then spreads across the whole organization and into our work with our communities.
Be focused and be realistic
There is no overnight fix when it comes to DEIB efforts.
It’s ok to be focused and realistic in your efforts so you can successfully address certain pain points first and then move on to others. We used the equity roadmap to identify two focus areas for this past year:
- Equity in our policies and practices.
- Learning experiences and community building.
From there, two subcommittees focused on these two areas. We saw more immediate impact from learning and community building and we saw that policy changes take more time to implement.
Embed intentional professional development into DEIB work
When you are intentional about bringing diverse perspectives together on your DEIB committee, you’ll hopefully see folks who might not typically get to present sessions or lead projects get to jump in.
This brings opportunities for learning experiences in a safe environment. For example, folks can learn more about or take a leadership role around creating project plans, learning sessions, presentation materials and hand-outs, or facilitating workshops.
Moving forward, we are taking this a step further through a DEIB committee chair role, an opportunity for someone outside the leadership team to receive a larger stipend to take more of a leadership role in communicating, facilitating, and strategizing around DEIB work.
Make progress over aiming for perfection
It’s all about balance to make progress around DEIB efforts.
There is a balance in being respectful and being nuanced and in moving work and small improvements forward. There is a misconception that DEIB work is about agreeing on everything and being the wokest person or wokest organization.
This past year, we learned in our committee work and in our org-wide learning sessions that we didn’t always agree. We had different ideas. There was tension at times. But we understood it was not about perfection and that it was more important to make small improvements to move the work forward, even if imperfect.
About the authors
Kaitlyn Endo
As Career Development Manager at Making Waves, Kaitlyn Endo (she/her) co-creates and implements career related programming, resources, and projects as a part of the Early Career & Alumni Team. She is deeply passionate about diversifying the workforce and providing tools and resources to support the empowerment of individuals from vulnerable communities through education accessibility. It is these passions that largely fuel her work in supporting Wave Makers on their journey to accomplish their career goals.
Victoria Kupu
Victoria Kupu (she/her) is the Senior Manager of the Financial Services at Making Waves. She manages a team that assists students in navigating financial aid and budgeting their financial awards and scholarships. She loves helping students plan to avoid student loan debt so they can start their careers on solid financial footing. Having learned about financial aid through trial and error in college, she is passionate about sharing this knowledge to support them.
Erick Roa
As COO at Making Waves, Erick Roa (he/him) oversees the strategy and teams for People & Culture, IT, and Real Estate. He also sits on the Senior Leadership Team. Erick believes deeply in designing and implementing systems and processes that are centered on fairness and clarity.
