Where's the "DEI"?
I intentionally steer away from using the acronym DEI. Not because I have an issue with diversity, equity, or inclusion, but because somewhere along the way, we've managed to take work that should challenge systems, examine power, and address harm and turn it into something organizations can package, promote, and check off a list. Some organizations have gotten exceptionally good at telling us how much they value equity while operating in ways that suggest otherwise. I'm not particularly interested in helping folks get better at that.
Everything I do falls under what many call the "DEI umbrella," but that umbrella is a whole lot bigger than three letters. We're talking about equity, belonging, accessibility, cultural humility, psychological safety, accountability, restorative practices, and all the ways these things intersect. This work is vast, messy, interconnected, and unending. I also think we've gotten some things backward, particularly our obsession with diversity. Diversity should be an outcome of belonging, not a substitute for it. You can recruit all the different faces, identities, and lived experiences you want, but if the expectation is that folks assimilate, stay quiet, or make themselves smaller to survive your organizational culture, what exactly have you accomplished?
There's no finish line to this work. No training that magically makes an organization equitable, no checklist that earns you a gold star, and no point where you get to declare victory and move on. I'm interested in helping organizations examine what they've normalized, challenge practices that cause harm, and build cultures where their stated values are actually experienced by the people who work with and within them. Call it DEI if you'd like as there is nothing wrong with that acronym or others that have come from it. I'm far more interested in what we're doing, who benefits, who's still being left out, and what we're willing to change when our impact doesn't match our intentions. Because at some point, the work has to move beyond what we say we believe.
