DEI Community of Practice
we’ll be launching our DEI community of practice soon, if you’re interested in being part of our community, share your information below.
DEI as a practice has its roots in the civil rights movement(s) of the 1960s in North America. Over time, practitioners have transformed this space into a professionalized one with objectives and profit. However unlike most professionalized spaces, this transformation has not come with standardization, shared approaches and baselines. Part of the resistance has been warranted - how do you standardize a profession that is meant to be more closely aligned with activism, one that should be disruptive and focused on its own obsolescence. At its face, this is a fair critique.
However, where this critique falls short, is that it is based in aspiration, not reality. DEI as we see it today, may have emerged from civil rights movements, but its traditional approaches and practice was not aligned with the movement, but a response to fear because of the movement. The first DEI practitioners were embedded in Human Resources departments of organizations that were witnessing the entry of marginalized people into their workplaces, and were concerned with the increased risk of litigation. DEI training was not born from a desire for equity, justice or liberation - but from a need to prepare cis, white, men for the change in demographics.
The idea that liberation, justice and equity is inherent to this work is false, and absolves us of having to think deeply about how DEI as a profession and industry has developed over time. For instance, a recent capture of Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) jobs showed that this industry has a wage gap by race and gender.
Then there is the other side of this argument - in the push to further professionalize DEI with standardization, baselines, shared approaches etc. we are at risk of falling into the same pitfalls as other professional disciples. This idea keeps me up at night. Professionalization comes with the false perception of meritocracy, it comes with competition, it comes with best practices that become status quo that becomes immovable mountains formed by the gods. This idea, sends me into a spiral, and I don’t think we can guarantee that this possibility is unlikely. What we can be honest about, is that regardless of whether we choose to accept the professionalization of DEI, it’s already happened.
Chief Diversity Officer is not a strange title, it is a normal across multiple industries. Consultants, companies, and agencies like QuakeLab have been in business for years, some more than a decade. DEI has been professionalized, but it has also moved forward with all the perks of professionalization. What are these missing perks:
It is nearly impossible as a new practitioner to understand how to cost your work. As an industry we are riddled with secrecy, and do not have a shared space to discuss the cost of our labour, time, and expertise. New practitioners are forced to under price themselves for years, which overall skews client understanding of the cost of our work.
Speaking of the work - does anyone know what the DEI practitioner next to you does? I’m sure we all have a general sense of what our offering may look like, from assessments to training. But because we don’t have shared language, approaches, processes or even agreed upon standards it’s impossible for practitioners and clients alike to fully understand what ‘good work’ is and more importantly, what desired outcomes are.
Without a space to share how we work, share our wins, losses, and approaches, we lose the opportunity to be excellent. We lose the chance to refine our work, to avoid harm and to make a positive impact.
Professionalization is not our silver bullet, it comes with risk, and it makes a lot of us nervous - but it’s here. We are in a position to form what professionalization looks like, to use the same lens, take on this challenge and build intentionally and with purpose. Perhaps we can be audacious and imagine a version of professionalization that might be aligned with justice, equity and liberation.
I don’t claim to have the answers, but as a starting point, QuakeLab is inviting DEI practitioners across Canada, North America and the world to form a community of practice with us. Our hope is to:
Share our work, how we do it, and what we’ve learned;
Share the tools that we tried, tested, and like;
Come together to form a powerful community that will force the market to properly compensate everyone;
Open up opportunities to collaborate on projects, RFPs, and exciting work;
Get together, talk, build and connect.
If this sounds like something you would be interested in, join us.