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Designing Resilient Communities for Change: Successes, Challenges, and Practical Ways Forward
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Designing Resilient Communities for Change: Successes, Challenges, and Practical Ways Forward
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Segment:0 .
Hi, I'm Anne stone. I'm very grateful that you all come today. I'm with Clark and Esposito as a marketing consultant there. And my panelists here today are going to talk about the affinity groups. And I just wanted to give you a moment to put your oxygen mask on. Oops before we talk about helping others, we want to help ourselves.
So why sorry. So I just thought it'd be nice to do a little bit of a self-care check in and put your own oxygen mask on before helping others here. And what our goal is for today is to have everybody in conversation about where they're at what we all can be doing together to be more successful and supportive of our colleagues.
So we're all inviting you to engage in a way that's comfortable for you. Unlike the other sessions where the code of conduct invites you to participate by stating your name and your company, if you don't feel that you're comfortable doing that can identify yourself or not identify yourself. We want to recognize that this is going to be a safe space, where any information shared is not going to be shared outside or attributed to any individuals.
So you're welcome to say what you want to say or not say anything at all if you're not comfortable and just enjoy the conversation. So I'm going to have each of the panelists speak a little bit about what introduce themselves, and then just speak to their topic for the day. And then the structure will be that they'll speak and I'll ask them one question, just as a thought starter for everybody, and they'll respond.
And then we'll at the end, we'll have gone through all the panelists and have them. You'll have time to contribute your thoughts and we'll focus on the practical ways forward together. So just a why don't you go ahead, Paul, and introduce yourself. Thank you Anne. So I'm Paul and I am a direct editorial director and publisher at the American Chemical Society.
And I'm also the chair of our pride affinity group at ACS. So I'll be talking a bit of the affinity group program at ACEs and specifically about the pride affinity group, which I'm more familiar with, obviously. Just to give you a bit of a concrete example of how we manage to rally a community around a cause at ACS. Hi Karen Farrell. I am from the Indiana University libraries, where I'm the director of scholarly communication and open publishing.
I will be talking today about our department's project called the Black Women's research community. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is Camille Lemieux. My pronouns are she/her. I am a global diversity, equity and inclusion manager at Springer Nature, and I'll be sharing a bit today about how organizations can support volunteer groups, and especially with advocating for change and equitable policies and diversity, et cetera and a lot of what I'll share can also be applied to lots of different types of sizes of organizations.
So not just the big ones. Hi, everybody, I'm Simon Holt. My day job is that I'm head of Content at the science publisher Elsevier, helping Elsevier make books, journals, audio and video accessible to people with disabilities. I am also the co-chair of Elsevier enabled elsevier's disability inclusion staff network. I'm a visually impaired person myself, so I'm going to be talking a little bit about having been involved in DEI and disability inclusion at Elsevier for about 10 years, how the landscape has changed and not changed, but also thinking about disability inclusion efforts across the industry, particularly thinking about the C4 toolkit for disability equity, of which Karen and I were two of the authors.
OK just a little bit about the inspiration for this session if I can hit the button, right. OK, so a few years ago in 2023, Camille Simon and I were involved in a C4 disk initiative to do the workplace equity survey to understand what workplace culture was like in scholarly publishing across the global landscape. We had over 2000 respondents, or roughly, I think metrics wise, we got to 744 as the largest sample size.
But one of the things that we observed in the verbatims that came through from the opportunities to have open ended response was that what they what's been known as the employee resource groups, which have maybe changed names in your organization, are really a support structure that was valued, but by colleagues and peers, but maybe not so much by leadership. And that brought us to say, we want to surface this and see where we've gotten to in 2025 and how these organizations, how organizations are supporting and having success with in affinity groups.
So that's where I'm going to turn it over to Paul to talk about a success story. No thank you so much. And so, yeah, I'm here today to present a bit about my experience at ACEs. Again, I am acting as the chair of the pride affinity group. But before I get into that, I wanted to share, first and foremost the new ACS strategic plan, which was revealed earlier this year that dictate our core values for the next five years.
So as part of that, we have passion for science, lifelong learning, sustainability and also inclusion and belonging, where there will be a lot of effort put into how we can make the workplace at ACEs even more inclusive. So as part of that, we have a division dedicated to that, reviewing best practices and policies to make sure they are as inclusive as possible. But also a key element of that program is our affinity groups.
So our affinity groups are the Aces equivalent of ERGs, and they are, organized by staff for staff. So anyone within the organization can essentially join as a member or as part of a leadership team of any of them. And the aim again, to really a community people that have a similar background, history, interests and so forth, with the aim to make again the workplace as inclusive as possible.
There are lots of benefits in joining them in terms of networking, in terms of visibility to our c-suite and executive sponsors, and also just in terms of Education of our colleagues, in terms of making them more aware of sensitivities and also our areas of interest of each of the affinity groups. So our affinity group program at ACS started about 3 and 1/2 years ago, maybe a bit more than that initially with a handful of groups.
Nowadays we have eight of them that are listed here, which range from a variety of areas of affinities. Think of ethnicity, gender based experience, based, or sexual orientation based. In the case of the pride affinity group, I would like to also emphasize that all of the affinity groups are rely heavily on allyship. So you, like all are welcome to join even though you do not necessarily like squarely identified with some of the areas of interest to you.
Most of them have a membership ranging from 50 members to 150 members, and each committee have a leadership team in the case of the pride affinity group. Again, I'm the chair. I have a co-chair and three person, one a communication expert, a technology expert, and a logistic expert that helps organize our activities and programming.
So in terms of the mission for the pride affinity group, so we have a charter. And essentially like with objectives and goals that we want to achieve. But yeah, essentially we want to create this community and this awareness about the LGBTQ cause sensitivities around like LGBTQ related issues, create an opportunity to network within our community and so forth.
And our programming has been pretty diverse. So we try to have multiple touch points throughout the year using different formats and platforms, some of them in person or hybrid or fully virtual. Obviously for us, Pride month, which is the month of June, is a very busy period for us. So as part of that, the pride affinity group manage in 2022 to make a proposal that was approved by our executive team for ACS to take part in the very first time in the Capital Pride Parade in Washington, DC, where I should share that there's very few scholarly society or scientific publishers that contribute to.
So we had very humble beginning of 15 people with the little banner. But we build on that experience and we build that community with a contingent of 40 people the year thereafter and a float and a CEO and thereafter, 60 people with again, a float and our CEO. Which brings us to this year, where worldpride is going to take place in Washington, DC. It's happening at the moment.
Our parade will take place next week, Saturday. So I'm really excited about that. Obviously hopeful for a contingent of about 80 attendees this time around. We've also been partnering with our colleagues in Columbus, Ohio at the ACEs and aces. We have been participating in the Stonewall Columbus pride parade there for a couple of years, so we've continued supporting them from a distance from Washington.
So beside our more in-person activities for Pride month, we also have a design speaker series commemorating the LGBTQ History Month in October. So a few years ago, we had a Black trans man come speak to us. The year thereafter, Asian Indian trans woman came to speak to us about their transition journey, how to make the workplace more inclusive for trans people or for LGBTQ people.
And last year, we had a fantastic training from PFLAG, which is an organization dedicated to supporting and educating and advocating for LGBTQ people, and give a wonderful training on how to make the workplace again, more inclusive, but how to be an ally in the workplace for LGBTQ colleagues. So beside those more in-person hybrid events, we also have a quarterly check ins with the whole of our membership.
And we have also a monthly coffee chat hour where everyone from the membership can just drop in and have a casual chat. Needless to say, the past couple of months have been particularly rough for the communities. And sometimes all we want is just to laugh about lighter matters, so to say. But I'm happy that we have that group and that community to rely on to celebrate and commiserate all at the same time.
So last, I wanted to share some photos of some of our activities. I'm especially proud of the first series at the top that illustrate, again, the progression and the long way. We've came in Washington from again, very modest beginnings a few years ago and then just growing that community around our cause. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing how many people we can squeeze in the photo in a week from now.
So thank you. So, paul-andre, I wanted to ask you the one question about the. Obviously, you had great support at ACEs and have grown the program and across multiple different groups. And I'm curious to know what you think for an organization from some of the audience members here who may be part of a smaller organization, or may not have already got a leadership that has embraced this, what are some suggestions you would have about getting started or raising visibility for the need and what the opportunity is.
Sure thank you Anne. So yeah, again, I've been very fortunate at ACS that when I started and joined the organization, there was already this program that was just getting started. But in case you don't have that infrastructure already, I would say, start by trying to find an executive sponsor internally. So discuss with senior management, executives or within HR to see, hey, we would like to create affinity groups on those I find areas of common interest and so forth and try to see, whether you get a bit of traction there.
Obviously, I'd like to think that if you reach out to someone that comes from those community, you're more inclined to get their support right and get a bit more traction. I would say you may have to knock on a couple of doors before you get a response, and that response will probably take some time as further discussions will probably need to take place internally given the current geopolitical context, obviously.
But in that case, you would not be able to identify a path forward through an executive sponsor. I think they're still regardless, a lot of things you can do just by starting very small, trying to having a leveraging social chat internally. And then telling to posting on that platform. Hey there is an event about how to empower women in the workplace and then would you be interested to that.
So trying to leverage like cultural or virtual based session that again like calls on those community that you want to rally and rally together. So I think, again, like in the perfect scenario, you have that infrastructure in place or you find that executive sponsor. But regardless, I think there's still stuff you can do by starting very small and trying to just get your people together to mingle, essentially.
OK Karen's going to talk to us about challenges. I've got them all. I'm ready, I'm ready. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Black Women's research community or BWCA because I'm terrible at creative acronyms. Acronyms, acronyms. Yeah so the BWCA was actually started about three years ago at IU, spearheaded by my colleague Heather Sloane at the time in our department.
Coming out of the pandemic, she was really aware at the lack of community and to set the stage for you a little bit. Not only were we coming out of the pandemic, but Indiana University is located in Bloomington, Indiana, which is in Southern Indiana, where there is a vanishingly small black population. I have been told multiple times, for example, that it can be hard as a Black woman to even find a place to get your hair done right.
So it's just very minimal resources. So she wanted to think about a way to bring grad students together and focus on the kinds of skills that we provide in our skull department, but also really focus on building a community for folks. So we started it in 2022. We had our first cohort had, I believe, eight members. That was mostly just done with a really brief application process, and mostly to ask people to commit to coming regularly because grad students, often their lives get full of all kinds of additional things.
The group met monthly. We sort of rotated between more relaxed sort of community building types of meetings and then building research skills, which, as you all probably is something that is not regularly taught to grad students and something that they are often missing. They don't know how to publish. They don't know where to look. They don't know everything from lit reviews and citations to the journals to look at.
So we were able to. Build this program over the course of the year, starting with, early in the skull. Process to the end, where we were talking about how to get an orchid and how to build research identity. The first year was quite successful. Students were incredibly invested, so that by the second. Year, we actually stopped advertising because everyone came to us through referrals.
So this last year we just finished up our third year of it again. It was almost all referrals. I have a little trouble remembering. We may have had one person who came in through the official application process. In the meantime, for those of you who aren't familiar with Indiana legislation, we are looking at all sorts of challenges that go beyond what is being faced at the federal level.
About a month ago, a few weeks ago, our Governor Brown signed into legislation essentially an anti DEI bill following in the footsteps of Texas and Florida. This was in addition to an 11th hour number of additions to the budget bill, which focused specifically on hitting higher Ed. So as a campus, we are looking at a number of things that we don't know the answers to right now.
Including potential shutdown of a number of majors because they're too small to meet the new federal law or the new state laws. The bill in particular, or anti DEI bill, makes the BWCA illegal. It is considered an education action to provide educational opportunity to someone or sorry, an illegal education action to provide someone an educational opportunity according to race.
So we are in the middle of playing around with how it will continue. As I mentioned, of course, we don't actually put out or have a need to put out an application process at this point because everyone comes to us through referrals. And we're also talking about ways to frankly, because the program is relatively successful, ways to grow the concept behind it.
One thing, for example, that we found this year is that most of our students, so we had a dozen this year, and the overwhelming majority of them were actually international students because again, those referrals sort of spread in one direction last year, right. So that was how it grew this year. And one of the other ideas we're playing around with is how to connect it to either a student group or a particular curriculum.
For example, this year, 11 out of 12 were members of the African Students Association, so we could easily grow it that way. We have not completely decided which way to go. The BWCC website I took down about a week ago, which is actually a little bit in advance of when we're required to. We have a timeline that was just given to us this week, in which we have to remove only the words, the specific words diversity, equity and inclusion from our websites.
That has to be done by September. I took that page down, frankly, to protect the actual activities of the group as opposed to not wanting to not wanting to put anything forward, because I'm still sort of playing around with how to keep the group going. I don't want anyone to have eyes on the fact that it exists, because a lot of I mean, we're the library, so anyone who's in a library knows that we're often ignored on campus, and it's entirely it's entirely likely that works to my benefit in this case, that most people probably don't know this group exists.
So by removing the evidence from a website, I can potentially keep it going either way. So Karen's facing a lot of challenges. And my question to her, which she may not be able to answer right now, but I'm hoping that you can help us. Answer is how can we help you. How can we support you. So you gave me just enough time to come up with an answer to this.
She told me right before we were going to start, and I apologize if I start crying. You're going to have to indulge me for a minute. Here we go. So back in the 60s, my grandfather was a tenured professor at Wayne State University. He was not an activist. However, he was very administratively skilled. At the same time, there were no community colleges in Detroit, Michigan.
He wasn't at the forefront. He had nothing to do with those who he knew, who stood up in who stood up and took it to the government and said, we deserve to have higher Ed in our County. But again, he was an administrator. So he became the first registrar for Wayne County Community College, which I will remind you at that time, was a school that didn't even have a building. And can you imagine being a registrar in the 60s.
They did not have our technology. So yeah, that's a story that I frankly didn't even hear until like 20 years ago from him. So I think what I wanted to say in terms of support is that it's not so much about having some particular set of skills that are needed at this point. It's that all skills are needed and whatever it is that you can bring need to bring it.
Thank you, Karen. Thank you, Karen. OK thank you for sharing that. Yeah and I just would like to I think broaden it out to both how we can support in lots of different ways and also how can we make sure people and communities these are really getting credit for the incredible work that they're doing, so it doesn't go away without notice, and that it is supported and recognized and gets the attention that it deserves.
Thank you. So I'm going to talk. So my role at Springer Nature is at the intersection of data and DEI. So a lot of what I do day to day is think about how can we measure success of our diversity, inclusion and equity programs. Where this relates to building and supporting resilient communities is within our employee network program.
So similarly to at ACEs, we have about nine employee networks. They're all globally focused. But the main factors I guess, that they all contribute to are these four things on the slide here. So every single volunteer group that's focused on DEI in general is doing something around community building, around advocacy, around awareness building and education.
So for us, we've seen that over the years since we started this program. These are the four largest areas that our employee networks can make the largest impacts. And we found that when it comes to showing the recognition of these groups and the people who are running them and showing to the rest of our colleagues and our leaders the value of these groups, that by measuring these different aspects in lots of different ways that I'll talk about, we can really make sure people are aware that this is a benefit.
This isn't something that should easily just go away. It's benefiting the full community, the full organization in lots of different ways. So when it comes to community building, there's a few. I mean, there's lots of different ways that people are doing that. And Paul Andre talked about a little bit of that. Thank you. But a big thing that we're seeing lately is with safe spaces.
So especially now within our US chapters, we are seeing a lot more safe spaces being held by our LGBTQ employee network, our network for Muslim employees and our network for Jewish employees. And they're all kind of working in support of each other and also for their communities to have a space to just process what's going on that's outside of their regular team and day to day work, just to recognize that we're all humans, and we come to work with our full selves, and acknowledging that and having space to really talk about that with people is valuable.
We also are supportive of people just having social activities, getting to know each other. Such a huge part of being inclusive is just knowing who we work with. When you respect the people that you work with, when you want to see them succeed, and when you get to know them, inclusive behaviors just follow. So we want to make sure that we're documenting all these different aspects of community building and communicating that out to the organization.
Another huge piece is on advocacy. So for us over the years, it's been really good to see a rise in employee networks, in putting onto policies and processes within the organization. That's really where we get into the work of equity. It's easier to just host a lot of trainings and speaker events and things like that. But really looking at the process of hiring, the process of giving performance review feedback, policies related to anti-harassment or travel policies.
When we go beyond just the HR setting and invite in members of marginalized communities, those policies can just be that much more future proof and can really apply to a much wider range of people. And not to say that HR colleagues would omit some things, but it's just helpful to get that feedback across the full communities. Another piece is just broadening our communication channels with senior leaders.
So at Springer Nature, we have an annual meeting between the c-suite, basically, and the leaders of our employee networks. And in that call, the employee network leaders are encouraged to really advocate for changes within the company to suggest new processes or new projects and initiatives that would benefit their communities. And that's a really nice space to really have a authentic dialogue.
It's not always the case that we can just bring this forward, but I find that something coming from internal HR, internal DEI die doesn't have the same impact every time as coming from employee resource groups or employee networks, so they can sometimes be the voice that really pushes things forward, which is cool to see. So we document all of that. The last two pieces are on awareness building and then professional growth.
So for the awareness building piece, those are things like hosting educational speaker events, webinars, writing blog posts about important community issues that we see a ton of that. I think that's the most common that I've seen across companies that are doing DEI work. Those are valuable for the community. Those are particularly valuable for introducing new topics to colleagues who might be completely unaware about certain topics.
For example, we had a webinar, an intersex webinar recently, and that was hosted by our LGBTQ network. But we had a bunch of feedback from people who were not part of the network who said, wow, I've never heard of this before. It's really interesting as a parent, I'm more equipped to talk to my child about these issues, things like that. So it's really good to see the kind of cross findings and intersectional aspects of this work.
But that awareness building is important just to introduce people to these things that they might not necessarily be googling or seeing on social media in their day to day. And the last piece on professional growth, this is super important just to make sure that we're recognizing and supporting the people who are doing this work within employee resource groups or employee networks.
We're lucky enough to be able to provide extra budget for people to pursue whatever professional trainings that they want during the year. We're hoping to continue to build that up, but we definitely encourage people in the employee resource groups to bring in speakers just to educate themselves on a particular topic. For example, our Black employee network hosted a session for women empowerment and personal finance and things like that, and a healing session from trauma.
And these are just really powerful when you go to them. And yeah, so it's important to just encourage all these different aspects and to make sure we're communicating that these things are happening and measuring their success, measuring feedback from them, et cetera. And just as an example of the data piece and how we're understanding the impact of these things, I wanted to share a bit from our DEI survey.
So Springer Nature runs an annual DEI survey. But if you have an engagement survey or any kind of employee survey, it will apply similarly. And we find that typically for people who are part of our employee networks, they respond more positively on almost every single measure of inclusion that we ask about. So of course, this is just correlation. We can't assume causation.
But something's going on here. We see that supported in more of our qualitative feedback that we're getting. But to see it here in that when they're asking questions or answering questions about their psychological safety, how inclusive their team is, and whether they feel that they have equal opportunities to succeed at work as others.
Seeing that people who are Palo Alto Networks are feeling more included in general is a huge benefit and something that should be celebrated. So yes, I think that is it for me. Thank you. Except for my surprise question, which I tried to give you a little hint on before, but for all of you in the organization here today that may not have a person in the capacity of Camille, I'd like to personally endorse talking to her later about her job description and what it entails, and how you might level set a version of her job in your organization, if legally it's possible.
But to the support of everybody, I think. I think you do amazing work in all different levels, and I'd like to ask you to help everybody here by suggesting one or two areas of measurement that could be impactful in a small group where it's just a nascent emerging community affinity group or a larger one. What kinds of measures of support and impact can you get the attention of leadership.
Yeah thank you, Anne, for that question. I think that this framework here that I made up, but that is from years of working with employee resource groups, is really helpful here in terms of just thinking through what are the impact areas that these groups can have. So it could be at any type of organization. It could be within SSP or volunteer groups. It doesn't require budget like I think whatever people are really passionate about doing, they're going to do the work.
And I think just making sure we build in ways to recognize that work is the important thing. So whether people are hosting these events or having these safe spaces or advocating to leadership about particular issue, documenting that and sharing the results and the outcomes of that and the feedback from that, that's going to help continue to formalize that work, regardless of how informal. It is at the time, and just show that benefit more clearly.
So a big part of it is communication and recognition and recognition. Yes no. Diversity taxes, please. Yes over to you. Hi, everybody. No slides from me because what I would like to say is not particularly slide appropriate. I guess I'm going to talk about energy and I'm going to just reflect a little bit on where we are now and how we've come to be here.
Before talking a bit about some wider community resources. Before I start, I'd like to just acknowledge the fact that as many of you will be able to hear, I'm not American, I'm British, I live in the UK. Whilst I travel to the US quite a lot with work, I want to acknowledge that whilst I logically understand some of the things that are going on in the US at the moment, I'm one step removed. I can get the plane back to where I live and so therefore please understand that what I'm about to say isn't meant to try and tell you guys here what you should do more.
It's reflections that I have working for a company with a large American presence, but one step removed because I don't live in the US. I think with diversity and inclusion and everything else learned, experience is quite different to lived experience. So whilst I have learned experience of what the US is like at the moment my friends, people like these guys and from many of you that's not the same as living it.
So on to what I wanted to share. And I've been thinking a lot about this term, resilient communities. I remember when I first decided that I wanted to start a disability staff network. I've been visually impaired my whole life. The first thing that I learned when I left University was that in the UK and sadly, in the US, around 75% of visually impaired people of working age are unemployed.
That's if you have a disability. More generally, then you're only half as likely to have a job as the rest of the working population. So the able-bodied population. And so when I left University, a lot of my friends were like, oh, I want to do this with my career. I want to be a director of that. I want to go into whatever sector. My only career goal was to have a job and to get paid.
That was it. And as I got older, I found that fundamentally unacceptable. And I kind of said to myself, well, if I got to the stage in my career where I could help others, I would. Because even working for a large organization like Elsevier, for maybe the first five or six years of my career. I didn't know anybody else with a disability at all. I felt like I was the only one.
And then the MeToo movement happened and companies started to have some ideas that diversity, inclusion, equity was a thing. Unfortunately, at that time, disability didn't really play a part in that. There was this idea, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So the focus is very much on gender and on race. And these things are very important.
But I remember sitting in meetings thinking, well, I'm not represented, where am I. So I thought, well, I can either stay angry or I can do something about it. So I started a community, and the big thing that helped me and helped us was that at some point, Elsevier decided that they wanted to take this seriously and got every member of the executive leadership team to sponsor and an employee resource group. So I had the head of HR sponsoring my group, and that was great because he helped me to be able to interact with senior leaders.
Which is pretty important given at that point in my career, I'd never even run a meeting myself. So it's not like I was some senior person. I was pretty inexperienced. All I did, similar to other people that have spoken, was I put an advert out there on the internet. About 10 people applied and we started our community and it's grown since. And the reason I'm telling you all this is because for a period there of a few years, there was a lot of energy in the organization at Elsevier.
There was a lot of senior leadership support. There was a lot of money going into this. There was a lot of accountability as well. And that was great. And then at some point, and this was before all the current nonsense that stopped, there was a feeling that, we've gone far enough. Or as one senior leader at work said to me, we've solved diversity.
The yeah, we'll solve diversity. The employee opinion surveys are looking good. People feel psychologically safe. We've done it. We can move on to the next thing now. And I was like, I think we seem to have a problem in understanding the fundamental nature of this. And so these days, we have a situation where on paper I can't complain.
Our employee resource groups are well funded several thousand dollars a year if we want to do something. So if I have something to say to the head of recruitment, I can ring them up and I will get hurt. But there's no energy anymore. And that's something that's quite hard to quantify with measurements or with criteria. It's difficult to get people to volunteer, not because people aren't interested, but because these days managers aren't on encouraging them.
It's kind of like, oh, this thing's a distraction rather than this thing is something that will gain you skills. So I can't say that the organization isn't supportive. And I also can't say that I don't understand why they're being careful, especially externally these days with the way things are. But I also must say that I've learned two things. One, being a community group is enough.
When we talk about resilient communities actually having a safe space, that people can come every month and talk, and not feel alone and feel like they're being heard, solve some problems together is enough. And that's taken me, somebody who by nature wants to change the world a while to accept. The second thing is you have to meet people where they're at. And Camille talked about this earlier. I hate the idea of making the business case for diversity and for inclusion.
It should be a given, but unfortunately it isn't. And the only way that we're going to be able to reignite some of this is to tie it to some commercial goals. I don't like that very much, but that's the way it is. And so let me come on to the other thing I wanted to talk about, which is Karen and I and various others, Sylvia Hunter and Erin Osborne Martin at Wiley have been involved in the C4 disk toolkit for disability equity, which launched last week.
This started during the pandemic and has been an iterative process since then, and it basically deals. It's for people with disabilities, managers and anybody else who is interested in empowering people with disabilities to succeed in the workplace. So it talks about each stage of the hiring of the process. So attracting, hiring, onboarding, developing, promoting, performing and promoting. And the idea is to empower people to normalize conversations around disability, and also to help empower people to be better advocates for themselves.
Because what I've learned is the thing about these companies are however great they are. And for the record, I do think Elsa is a pretty good company to work for. Actually, no company is going to do it for us. As Demeter snow, our illustrious President-elect, said the work will continue as long as there are people available to do the work. We can't rely on companies or organizations or governments to do the work for us.
We have to do it ourselves. So what that means is empowering each other and teaching ourselves how to be empowered, how to ask those awkward questions. When I first started work. So when I was growing up, I don't know why, but I had this real fear of talking on the phone. And I remember when I first started work, I had a job where I had to ring up editors like once a week or something.
I was really scared. I remember the first time I got up to do a presentation, I was shaking. These days I'm quite a confident speaker, but it's only because I've made myself do it a bunch of times. One of my favorite sayings is by former President Teddy Roosevelt, who said so before he was president. He used to be a cowboy in the Wild West, and he said, when I first went out to the West, I was scared of all kinds of things, Bears and bison who might come and get me in the middle of the night.
But by pretending I wasn't afraid, I slowly ceased to be afraid. We need to be less afraid. It's difficult with everything going on. And as I said, I'm not here every day. So, I totally get. Maybe I don't 100% understand, but we can't rely on other agencies to do it for us if we want a more equitable society, if we want a more resilient community, we have to do it ourselves.
Thank you. Since I didn't know exactly what he was going to say, I didn't give him a question ahead. So I'm just going to go with, are you available to anybody in the room. We would need some resiliency, mentorship. Anytime I'm available to anybody for a conversation, change happens one conversation at a time.
That's my mantra, right. I don't have any magic answers, but anything I've learned is only because I had conversations with other people. I'm more than happy to have any conversations with anybody, body, and maybe I can teach you guys some things and learn some things from you that I've maybe have learned in a not always amazing way. And I can maybe help you guys learn in a slightly kinder way than some of the things I had to learn.
So now we're on to practical ways forward. That's me again, isn't it. That was you before. You didn't know it, but it was there. OK cool. So just thinking about the question, the range of conversation that we've had here today.
Does anything come to your mind about comments you'd like to share about successes or challenges that resonate with you, that you think other people would benefit from hearing about. Please hi everybody. I am Valerie guagnini. I'm the global head of edib for Cambridge University Press Excuse me.
And we've been on a journey in the past four years. I was the first person to be with this title. And now after four years, we're about seven people within the organization, so we're growing. But one of the things that resonated with me was about the ERGs. And what we've done is we've actually supported them by giving them protected time. We also established budgets for each of the ERGs so that they have control over, for the most part.
And just like you said, Camilo, we do have data on all the things that they're doing because it's important for us to see or benchmark the things that they're doing and what works and what doesn't work. And they are part of our community. I think, though, the challenge that we have is and Simon will this is the growing role of the gender critical movement in the UK and the attack on our trans community right now in the US as well.
And so how do we support them with through our Pride Network. And that's something that has come up for us over and over again. But like we've talked about is creating that safe space so that people can have a place to talk, but also meeting them at the place where they are in their journey to understanding, because there's not a lot of people who is really going to be on the same journey as you.
So really use it as a teaching moment. And that's something that I personally have been trying to advocate for our ERGs to understand, because they have to come to a place of understanding that people are not always going to be on that same journey. Because our histories are all different. So just be mindful a little bit about how you need to educate in that space, because that is what your role is at the same time.
But yeah, that's what I want to say. Can I just quickly respond to that. I think that's brilliant. I feel and Paul, I'd be interested in your opinion here as well. One of the biggest barriers to inclusion is people being too afraid to ask because they don't and they're worried about offending people. We're all big enough and old enough, I think, to know when people are trying to be offensive versus when people just don't know.
And I think what I'd request is kindness. People aren't going to get it wrong. But we know about intention, and it's about taking time. Even though it takes energy and we're all tired. Let's be honest, to teach people how to be a bit wiser. Actually, we didn't know anything once either. And people only learn if we can develop an environment where it's OK to get it wrong in a genuine kind of a way.
And I worry sometimes that people are so worried about getting it wrong and they say nothing at all. And if people say nothing at all, then that's not really psychological safety. That's just an environment where we never learn. Yeah I mean, the idea of inclusion keeps getting lost somewhere. And when you talk about inclusion and you start talking about, let's say, race or gender or sexuality.
People are now like, well, what about me. Like that kind of thing. And it's like, well, if we're using inclusive language, it includes you too. Like, we didn't ask you to take yourself out. So that's been frustrating for me in a lot of ways. Yeah I mean, what has been shared. And I totally agree, like regarding meeting the people where they are and having a huge educational component.
I'm certainly not an expert on LGBTQ matter. And like, just as part of being the chair of the affinity group and through like coordinating and recruiting speakers, like I've learned a ton also just by those sessions myself. So I think there's an education component even from you from within your community to learn more about it. And at the same time, also people outside of your community in terms of again, educating them about what are the issues you care about.
And again, but with the caveat that you have to meet them where they are with a very probably a wide range of understanding of the issues. But yeah, even as the chair of the pride affinity group, I can confess that I'm not an expert on all those matters. Does anybody else have any success stories around affinity groups or inclusion efforts. Do you want to share.
OK anybody want to talk about challenges. We're all here in a safe space. So this I'd like to pose a question. And if anybody has examples of things that they've done or that they are doing or what they'd like to see. We haven't. We touched on disability. And for me, that connects very strongly to mental health.
And I think mental health is a huge part of this conversation as well. I personally this year have struggled a lot with coming to work and being a good worker, period because of what we're facing around us. And I think when I would bring it up or in conversations I had with colleagues, everybody felt that way and everybody acknowledged it. And then they said, OK, so but you're but do the work.
It's like, yes, I guess if everybody's having the same problem, then we just ignore the problem. And I think especially thinking of trans colleagues and friends who are facing, danger in a way that has to affect their ability to show up and be a professional and things like that. What strategies are there for, supporting colleagues, supporting one another and giving that, extending that grace when sometimes maybe that grace doesn't make there's not a great business case for the grace what I mean.
So if anybody has thoughts there because I've gotten very frustrated with what seems to be the response of like, yep. But that's due on Thursday. How can we navigate that. I mean, I guess I can just speak as a middle manager that there's a lot of ways in which I treat this time similarly to the way I treated early pandemic time.
I remind people to turn their away message on and respond more slowly to things right. We are awfully flexible about what it means to take a sick day, or whatever you legally have to call the thing. None of us work in a place where we're literally saving lives, so if somebody needs a day off, then they take a day off and you say, sorry, it didn't get turned in on time.
But you do. I mean, not every maybe not everyone is in a unit like that. So then there's going to be some different strategies. Although I still say why not just turn your away message on and say sorry, expect responses to be delayed. I mean, for our department email. Early in the pandemic, we turned the away message on permanently and just said, look, we are lower staffed, please, expect this amount of days before you receive a response.
And anyone that emailed us got that response. And I guess I'll respond to if people don't have that supportive environment, maybe. I think one approach I've seen that kind of transcends, what's going on in the US right now, but just that applies pretty much always is to ask people, how can I support you.
How can we get this done. The deadlines often aren't going to go away. They're still going to be really hard to meet. We're still expected to perform at as high a level as possible, but I think what I find useful is, for example, my manager saying, OK. Acknowledging what's going on that is making it difficult. How can our team work together to make this happen.
I think regardless of what's going on, no manager is going to automatically know how to support every single person on their team. So just asking is, I think, the best thing we can do, ask each individual and try to work together because we're all working for the same goal and hopefully we can do that together as a team.
Something that's helped me personally and I've shared in my workspaces is putting a name to this experience. And I have a therapist, I go to therapy long before January, but have been able to talk to my therapist about this experience, and my therapist said, this is grief, which you're feeling is grief, and being able to put a name to it, being able to say, I am grieving and feel those emotions in a way, like a death or a alternating I also have a son with disability.
So I understand the stages and transitions of expectations of the future that are different than you expected. And so being able to put a name to it like that has really been helpful. And so when I do encounter folks who are really feeling it, it's really sitting heavy. I'm like, we're experiencing grief right now and we are allowed to pause.
We're allowed to put the delay message on. We're allowed to treat it, treat it in that way. And what I am looking for. But I haven't found the energy yet. But what I'm looking for is how to move within that framework and say, this is what it is. This is what I understand it to be. And what is that next step. Do you turn that corner in grief and you're ready to have some energy.
And I think it's about community making community and things like that. So for me it's been helpful to name it. And that is allowing space to start thinking about how do I look for community, how do I look for affinity groups and things like that to move forward in this. In the resources section and people are looking for resources.
I wanted to just put up a few things that are available through Fordisc in addition to the new toolkit on disability and inclusion. We have several others that have been developed by volunteers within the community over the last, I don't eight years or so. They've been evolving and we have. I highly encourage you to check out the C4 website and then also the scholarly kitchen.
Many of our community have written on many different topics, but the diversity tax is something to just acknowledge that you may be experiencing. And if that's weighing on you, you should recognize it and look for recognition in a peer group or among your leadership and start advocating if you have that energy. I highly recommend Deanne Roberts session. What have you present on scholarly kitchen article.
What have you done for D. Well, it can be exhausting, but Camille's also put a few references books that she's enjoyed, and she also has been reading what you have 52 books that you've been reading so everybody doesn't have to. Yeah follow me on LinkedIn for book content Thanks She has excellent reviews of she has a whole rubric actually, of how she reviews her books she's reading.
So do follow Camille and reach out to us as community members. And because we're looking for volunteers, starting tomorrow, we'll have the opportunity for participation in the Dia volunteer group of SSP. If you're interested in finding community here. With that, I think, thank you for a little extra time today and your participation.
Segment:0 .
Hi, I'm Anne stone. I'm very grateful that you all come today. I'm with Clark and Esposito as a marketing consultant there. And my panelists here today are going to talk about the affinity groups. And I just wanted to give you a moment to put your oxygen mask on. Oops before we talk about helping others, we want to help ourselves.
So why sorry. So I just thought it'd be nice to do a little bit of a self-care check in and put your own oxygen mask on before helping others here. And what our goal is for today is to have everybody in conversation about where they're at what we all can be doing together to be more successful and supportive of our colleagues.
So we're all inviting you to engage in a way that's comfortable for you. Unlike the other sessions where the code of conduct invites you to participate by stating your name and your company, if you don't feel that you're comfortable doing that can identify yourself or not identify yourself. We want to recognize that this is going to be a safe space, where any information shared is not going to be shared outside or attributed to any individuals.
So you're welcome to say what you want to say or not say anything at all if you're not comfortable and just enjoy the conversation. So I'm going to have each of the panelists speak a little bit about what introduce themselves, and then just speak to their topic for the day. And then the structure will be that they'll speak and I'll ask them one question, just as a thought starter for everybody, and they'll respond.
And then we'll at the end, we'll have gone through all the panelists and have them. You'll have time to contribute your thoughts and we'll focus on the practical ways forward together. So just a why don't you go ahead, Paul, and introduce yourself. Thank you Anne. So I'm Paul and I am a direct editorial director and publisher at the American Chemical Society.
And I'm also the chair of our pride affinity group at ACS. So I'll be talking a bit of the affinity group program at ACEs and specifically about the pride affinity group, which I'm more familiar with, obviously. Just to give you a bit of a concrete example of how we manage to rally a community around a cause at ACS. Hi Karen Farrell. I am from the Indiana University libraries, where I'm the director of scholarly communication and open publishing.
I will be talking today about our department's project called the Black Women's research community. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is Camille Lemieux. My pronouns are she/her. I am a global diversity, equity and inclusion manager at Springer Nature, and I'll be sharing a bit today about how organizations can support volunteer groups, and especially with advocating for change and equitable policies and diversity, et cetera and a lot of what I'll share can also be applied to lots of different types of sizes of organizations.
So not just the big ones. Hi, everybody, I'm Simon Holt. My day job is that I'm head of Content at the science publisher Elsevier, helping Elsevier make books, journals, audio and video accessible to people with disabilities. I am also the co-chair of Elsevier enabled elsevier's disability inclusion staff network. I'm a visually impaired person myself, so I'm going to be talking a little bit about having been involved in DEI and disability inclusion at Elsevier for about 10 years, how the landscape has changed and not changed, but also thinking about disability inclusion efforts across the industry, particularly thinking about the C4 toolkit for disability equity, of which Karen and I were two of the authors.
OK just a little bit about the inspiration for this session if I can hit the button, right. OK, so a few years ago in 2023, Camille Simon and I were involved in a C4 disk initiative to do the workplace equity survey to understand what workplace culture was like in scholarly publishing across the global landscape. We had over 2000 respondents, or roughly, I think metrics wise, we got to 744 as the largest sample size.
But one of the things that we observed in the verbatims that came through from the opportunities to have open ended response was that what they what's been known as the employee resource groups, which have maybe changed names in your organization, are really a support structure that was valued, but by colleagues and peers, but maybe not so much by leadership. And that brought us to say, we want to surface this and see where we've gotten to in 2025 and how these organizations, how organizations are supporting and having success with in affinity groups.
So that's where I'm going to turn it over to Paul to talk about a success story. No thank you so much. And so, yeah, I'm here today to present a bit about my experience at ACEs. Again, I am acting as the chair of the pride affinity group. But before I get into that, I wanted to share, first and foremost the new ACS strategic plan, which was revealed earlier this year that dictate our core values for the next five years.
So as part of that, we have passion for science, lifelong learning, sustainability and also inclusion and belonging, where there will be a lot of effort put into how we can make the workplace at ACEs even more inclusive. So as part of that, we have a division dedicated to that, reviewing best practices and policies to make sure they are as inclusive as possible. But also a key element of that program is our affinity groups.
So our affinity groups are the Aces equivalent of ERGs, and they are, organized by staff for staff. So anyone within the organization can essentially join as a member or as part of a leadership team of any of them. And the aim again, to really a community people that have a similar background, history, interests and so forth, with the aim to make again the workplace as inclusive as possible.
There are lots of benefits in joining them in terms of networking, in terms of visibility to our c-suite and executive sponsors, and also just in terms of Education of our colleagues, in terms of making them more aware of sensitivities and also our areas of interest of each of the affinity groups. So our affinity group program at ACS started about 3 and 1/2 years ago, maybe a bit more than that initially with a handful of groups.
Nowadays we have eight of them that are listed here, which range from a variety of areas of affinities. Think of ethnicity, gender based experience, based, or sexual orientation based. In the case of the pride affinity group, I would like to also emphasize that all of the affinity groups are rely heavily on allyship. So you, like all are welcome to join even though you do not necessarily like squarely identified with some of the areas of interest to you.
Most of them have a membership ranging from 50 members to 150 members, and each committee have a leadership team in the case of the pride affinity group. Again, I'm the chair. I have a co-chair and three person, one a communication expert, a technology expert, and a logistic expert that helps organize our activities and programming.
So in terms of the mission for the pride affinity group, so we have a charter. And essentially like with objectives and goals that we want to achieve. But yeah, essentially we want to create this community and this awareness about the LGBTQ cause sensitivities around like LGBTQ related issues, create an opportunity to network within our community and so forth.
And our programming has been pretty diverse. So we try to have multiple touch points throughout the year using different formats and platforms, some of them in person or hybrid or fully virtual. Obviously for us, Pride month, which is the month of June, is a very busy period for us. So as part of that, the pride affinity group manage in 2022 to make a proposal that was approved by our executive team for ACS to take part in the very first time in the Capital Pride Parade in Washington, DC, where I should share that there's very few scholarly society or scientific publishers that contribute to.
So we had very humble beginning of 15 people with the little banner. But we build on that experience and we build that community with a contingent of 40 people the year thereafter and a float and a CEO and thereafter, 60 people with again, a float and our CEO. Which brings us to this year, where worldpride is going to take place in Washington, DC. It's happening at the moment.
Our parade will take place next week, Saturday. So I'm really excited about that. Obviously hopeful for a contingent of about 80 attendees this time around. We've also been partnering with our colleagues in Columbus, Ohio at the ACEs and aces. We have been participating in the Stonewall Columbus pride parade there for a couple of years, so we've continued supporting them from a distance from Washington.
So beside our more in-person activities for Pride month, we also have a design speaker series commemorating the LGBTQ History Month in October. So a few years ago, we had a Black trans man come speak to us. The year thereafter, Asian Indian trans woman came to speak to us about their transition journey, how to make the workplace more inclusive for trans people or for LGBTQ people.
And last year, we had a fantastic training from PFLAG, which is an organization dedicated to supporting and educating and advocating for LGBTQ people, and give a wonderful training on how to make the workplace again, more inclusive, but how to be an ally in the workplace for LGBTQ colleagues. So beside those more in-person hybrid events, we also have a quarterly check ins with the whole of our membership.
And we have also a monthly coffee chat hour where everyone from the membership can just drop in and have a casual chat. Needless to say, the past couple of months have been particularly rough for the communities. And sometimes all we want is just to laugh about lighter matters, so to say. But I'm happy that we have that group and that community to rely on to celebrate and commiserate all at the same time.
So last, I wanted to share some photos of some of our activities. I'm especially proud of the first series at the top that illustrate, again, the progression and the long way. We've came in Washington from again, very modest beginnings a few years ago and then just growing that community around our cause. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing how many people we can squeeze in the photo in a week from now.
So thank you. So, paul-andre, I wanted to ask you the one question about the. Obviously, you had great support at ACEs and have grown the program and across multiple different groups. And I'm curious to know what you think for an organization from some of the audience members here who may be part of a smaller organization, or may not have already got a leadership that has embraced this, what are some suggestions you would have about getting started or raising visibility for the need and what the opportunity is.
Sure thank you Anne. So yeah, again, I've been very fortunate at ACS that when I started and joined the organization, there was already this program that was just getting started. But in case you don't have that infrastructure already, I would say, start by trying to find an executive sponsor internally. So discuss with senior management, executives or within HR to see, hey, we would like to create affinity groups on those I find areas of common interest and so forth and try to see, whether you get a bit of traction there.
Obviously, I'd like to think that if you reach out to someone that comes from those community, you're more inclined to get their support right and get a bit more traction. I would say you may have to knock on a couple of doors before you get a response, and that response will probably take some time as further discussions will probably need to take place internally given the current geopolitical context, obviously.
But in that case, you would not be able to identify a path forward through an executive sponsor. I think they're still regardless, a lot of things you can do just by starting very small, trying to having a leveraging social chat internally. And then telling to posting on that platform. Hey there is an event about how to empower women in the workplace and then would you be interested to that.
So trying to leverage like cultural or virtual based session that again like calls on those community that you want to rally and rally together. So I think, again, like in the perfect scenario, you have that infrastructure in place or you find that executive sponsor. But regardless, I think there's still stuff you can do by starting very small and trying to just get your people together to mingle, essentially.
OK Karen's going to talk to us about challenges. I've got them all. I'm ready, I'm ready. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Black Women's research community or BWCA because I'm terrible at creative acronyms. Acronyms, acronyms. Yeah so the BWCA was actually started about three years ago at IU, spearheaded by my colleague Heather Sloane at the time in our department.
Coming out of the pandemic, she was really aware at the lack of community and to set the stage for you a little bit. Not only were we coming out of the pandemic, but Indiana University is located in Bloomington, Indiana, which is in Southern Indiana, where there is a vanishingly small black population. I have been told multiple times, for example, that it can be hard as a Black woman to even find a place to get your hair done right.
So it's just very minimal resources. So she wanted to think about a way to bring grad students together and focus on the kinds of skills that we provide in our skull department, but also really focus on building a community for folks. So we started it in 2022. We had our first cohort had, I believe, eight members. That was mostly just done with a really brief application process, and mostly to ask people to commit to coming regularly because grad students, often their lives get full of all kinds of additional things.
The group met monthly. We sort of rotated between more relaxed sort of community building types of meetings and then building research skills, which, as you all probably is something that is not regularly taught to grad students and something that they are often missing. They don't know how to publish. They don't know where to look. They don't know everything from lit reviews and citations to the journals to look at.
So we were able to. Build this program over the course of the year, starting with, early in the skull. Process to the end, where we were talking about how to get an orchid and how to build research identity. The first year was quite successful. Students were incredibly invested, so that by the second. Year, we actually stopped advertising because everyone came to us through referrals.
So this last year we just finished up our third year of it again. It was almost all referrals. I have a little trouble remembering. We may have had one person who came in through the official application process. In the meantime, for those of you who aren't familiar with Indiana legislation, we are looking at all sorts of challenges that go beyond what is being faced at the federal level.
About a month ago, a few weeks ago, our Governor Brown signed into legislation essentially an anti DEI bill following in the footsteps of Texas and Florida. This was in addition to an 11th hour number of additions to the budget bill, which focused specifically on hitting higher Ed. So as a campus, we are looking at a number of things that we don't know the answers to right now.
Including potential shutdown of a number of majors because they're too small to meet the new federal law or the new state laws. The bill in particular, or anti DEI bill, makes the BWCA illegal. It is considered an education action to provide educational opportunity to someone or sorry, an illegal education action to provide someone an educational opportunity according to race.
So we are in the middle of playing around with how it will continue. As I mentioned, of course, we don't actually put out or have a need to put out an application process at this point because everyone comes to us through referrals. And we're also talking about ways to frankly, because the program is relatively successful, ways to grow the concept behind it.
One thing, for example, that we found this year is that most of our students, so we had a dozen this year, and the overwhelming majority of them were actually international students because again, those referrals sort of spread in one direction last year, right. So that was how it grew this year. And one of the other ideas we're playing around with is how to connect it to either a student group or a particular curriculum.
For example, this year, 11 out of 12 were members of the African Students Association, so we could easily grow it that way. We have not completely decided which way to go. The BWCC website I took down about a week ago, which is actually a little bit in advance of when we're required to. We have a timeline that was just given to us this week, in which we have to remove only the words, the specific words diversity, equity and inclusion from our websites.
That has to be done by September. I took that page down, frankly, to protect the actual activities of the group as opposed to not wanting to not wanting to put anything forward, because I'm still sort of playing around with how to keep the group going. I don't want anyone to have eyes on the fact that it exists, because a lot of I mean, we're the library, so anyone who's in a library knows that we're often ignored on campus, and it's entirely it's entirely likely that works to my benefit in this case, that most people probably don't know this group exists.
So by removing the evidence from a website, I can potentially keep it going either way. So Karen's facing a lot of challenges. And my question to her, which she may not be able to answer right now, but I'm hoping that you can help us. Answer is how can we help you. How can we support you. So you gave me just enough time to come up with an answer to this.
She told me right before we were going to start, and I apologize if I start crying. You're going to have to indulge me for a minute. Here we go. So back in the 60s, my grandfather was a tenured professor at Wayne State University. He was not an activist. However, he was very administratively skilled. At the same time, there were no community colleges in Detroit, Michigan.
He wasn't at the forefront. He had nothing to do with those who he knew, who stood up in who stood up and took it to the government and said, we deserve to have higher Ed in our County. But again, he was an administrator. So he became the first registrar for Wayne County Community College, which I will remind you at that time, was a school that didn't even have a building. And can you imagine being a registrar in the 60s.
They did not have our technology. So yeah, that's a story that I frankly didn't even hear until like 20 years ago from him. So I think what I wanted to say in terms of support is that it's not so much about having some particular set of skills that are needed at this point. It's that all skills are needed and whatever it is that you can bring need to bring it.
Thank you, Karen. Thank you, Karen. OK thank you for sharing that. Yeah and I just would like to I think broaden it out to both how we can support in lots of different ways and also how can we make sure people and communities these are really getting credit for the incredible work that they're doing, so it doesn't go away without notice, and that it is supported and recognized and gets the attention that it deserves.
Thank you. So I'm going to talk. So my role at Springer Nature is at the intersection of data and DEI. So a lot of what I do day to day is think about how can we measure success of our diversity, inclusion and equity programs. Where this relates to building and supporting resilient communities is within our employee network program.
So similarly to at ACEs, we have about nine employee networks. They're all globally focused. But the main factors I guess, that they all contribute to are these four things on the slide here. So every single volunteer group that's focused on DEI in general is doing something around community building, around advocacy, around awareness building and education.
So for us, we've seen that over the years since we started this program. These are the four largest areas that our employee networks can make the largest impacts. And we found that when it comes to showing the recognition of these groups and the people who are running them and showing to the rest of our colleagues and our leaders the value of these groups, that by measuring these different aspects in lots of different ways that I'll talk about, we can really make sure people are aware that this is a benefit.
This isn't something that should easily just go away. It's benefiting the full community, the full organization in lots of different ways. So when it comes to community building, there's a few. I mean, there's lots of different ways that people are doing that. And Paul Andre talked about a little bit of that. Thank you. But a big thing that we're seeing lately is with safe spaces.
So especially now within our US chapters, we are seeing a lot more safe spaces being held by our LGBTQ employee network, our network for Muslim employees and our network for Jewish employees. And they're all kind of working in support of each other and also for their communities to have a space to just process what's going on that's outside of their regular team and day to day work, just to recognize that we're all humans, and we come to work with our full selves, and acknowledging that and having space to really talk about that with people is valuable.
We also are supportive of people just having social activities, getting to know each other. Such a huge part of being inclusive is just knowing who we work with. When you respect the people that you work with, when you want to see them succeed, and when you get to know them, inclusive behaviors just follow. So we want to make sure that we're documenting all these different aspects of community building and communicating that out to the organization.
Another huge piece is on advocacy. So for us over the years, it's been really good to see a rise in employee networks, in putting onto policies and processes within the organization. That's really where we get into the work of equity. It's easier to just host a lot of trainings and speaker events and things like that. But really looking at the process of hiring, the process of giving performance review feedback, policies related to anti-harassment or travel policies.
When we go beyond just the HR setting and invite in members of marginalized communities, those policies can just be that much more future proof and can really apply to a much wider range of people. And not to say that HR colleagues would omit some things, but it's just helpful to get that feedback across the full communities. Another piece is just broadening our communication channels with senior leaders.
So at Springer Nature, we have an annual meeting between the c-suite, basically, and the leaders of our employee networks. And in that call, the employee network leaders are encouraged to really advocate for changes within the company to suggest new processes or new projects and initiatives that would benefit their communities. And that's a really nice space to really have a authentic dialogue.
It's not always the case that we can just bring this forward, but I find that something coming from internal HR, internal DEI die doesn't have the same impact every time as coming from employee resource groups or employee networks, so they can sometimes be the voice that really pushes things forward, which is cool to see. So we document all of that. The last two pieces are on awareness building and then professional growth.
So for the awareness building piece, those are things like hosting educational speaker events, webinars, writing blog posts about important community issues that we see a ton of that. I think that's the most common that I've seen across companies that are doing DEI work. Those are valuable for the community. Those are particularly valuable for introducing new topics to colleagues who might be completely unaware about certain topics.
For example, we had a webinar, an intersex webinar recently, and that was hosted by our LGBTQ network. But we had a bunch of feedback from people who were not part of the network who said, wow, I've never heard of this before. It's really interesting as a parent, I'm more equipped to talk to my child about these issues, things like that. So it's really good to see the kind of cross findings and intersectional aspects of this work.
But that awareness building is important just to introduce people to these things that they might not necessarily be googling or seeing on social media in their day to day. And the last piece on professional growth, this is super important just to make sure that we're recognizing and supporting the people who are doing this work within employee resource groups or employee networks.
We're lucky enough to be able to provide extra budget for people to pursue whatever professional trainings that they want during the year. We're hoping to continue to build that up, but we definitely encourage people in the employee resource groups to bring in speakers just to educate themselves on a particular topic. For example, our Black employee network hosted a session for women empowerment and personal finance and things like that, and a healing session from trauma.
And these are just really powerful when you go to them. And yeah, so it's important to just encourage all these different aspects and to make sure we're communicating that these things are happening and measuring their success, measuring feedback from them, et cetera. And just as an example of the data piece and how we're understanding the impact of these things, I wanted to share a bit from our DEI survey.
So Springer Nature runs an annual DEI survey. But if you have an engagement survey or any kind of employee survey, it will apply similarly. And we find that typically for people who are part of our employee networks, they respond more positively on almost every single measure of inclusion that we ask about. So of course, this is just correlation. We can't assume causation.
But something's going on here. We see that supported in more of our qualitative feedback that we're getting. But to see it here in that when they're asking questions or answering questions about their psychological safety, how inclusive their team is, and whether they feel that they have equal opportunities to succeed at work as others.
Seeing that people who are Palo Alto Networks are feeling more included in general is a huge benefit and something that should be celebrated. So yes, I think that is it for me. Thank you. Except for my surprise question, which I tried to give you a little hint on before, but for all of you in the organization here today that may not have a person in the capacity of Camille, I'd like to personally endorse talking to her later about her job description and what it entails, and how you might level set a version of her job in your organization, if legally it's possible.
But to the support of everybody, I think. I think you do amazing work in all different levels, and I'd like to ask you to help everybody here by suggesting one or two areas of measurement that could be impactful in a small group where it's just a nascent emerging community affinity group or a larger one. What kinds of measures of support and impact can you get the attention of leadership.
Yeah thank you, Anne, for that question. I think that this framework here that I made up, but that is from years of working with employee resource groups, is really helpful here in terms of just thinking through what are the impact areas that these groups can have. So it could be at any type of organization. It could be within SSP or volunteer groups. It doesn't require budget like I think whatever people are really passionate about doing, they're going to do the work.
And I think just making sure we build in ways to recognize that work is the important thing. So whether people are hosting these events or having these safe spaces or advocating to leadership about particular issue, documenting that and sharing the results and the outcomes of that and the feedback from that, that's going to help continue to formalize that work, regardless of how informal. It is at the time, and just show that benefit more clearly.
So a big part of it is communication and recognition and recognition. Yes no. Diversity taxes, please. Yes over to you. Hi, everybody. No slides from me because what I would like to say is not particularly slide appropriate. I guess I'm going to talk about energy and I'm going to just reflect a little bit on where we are now and how we've come to be here.
Before talking a bit about some wider community resources. Before I start, I'd like to just acknowledge the fact that as many of you will be able to hear, I'm not American, I'm British, I live in the UK. Whilst I travel to the US quite a lot with work, I want to acknowledge that whilst I logically understand some of the things that are going on in the US at the moment, I'm one step removed. I can get the plane back to where I live and so therefore please understand that what I'm about to say isn't meant to try and tell you guys here what you should do more.
It's reflections that I have working for a company with a large American presence, but one step removed because I don't live in the US. I think with diversity and inclusion and everything else learned, experience is quite different to lived experience. So whilst I have learned experience of what the US is like at the moment my friends, people like these guys and from many of you that's not the same as living it.
So on to what I wanted to share. And I've been thinking a lot about this term, resilient communities. I remember when I first decided that I wanted to start a disability staff network. I've been visually impaired my whole life. The first thing that I learned when I left University was that in the UK and sadly, in the US, around 75% of visually impaired people of working age are unemployed.
That's if you have a disability. More generally, then you're only half as likely to have a job as the rest of the working population. So the able-bodied population. And so when I left University, a lot of my friends were like, oh, I want to do this with my career. I want to be a director of that. I want to go into whatever sector. My only career goal was to have a job and to get paid.
That was it. And as I got older, I found that fundamentally unacceptable. And I kind of said to myself, well, if I got to the stage in my career where I could help others, I would. Because even working for a large organization like Elsevier, for maybe the first five or six years of my career. I didn't know anybody else with a disability at all. I felt like I was the only one.
And then the MeToo movement happened and companies started to have some ideas that diversity, inclusion, equity was a thing. Unfortunately, at that time, disability didn't really play a part in that. There was this idea, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So the focus is very much on gender and on race. And these things are very important.
But I remember sitting in meetings thinking, well, I'm not represented, where am I. So I thought, well, I can either stay angry or I can do something about it. So I started a community, and the big thing that helped me and helped us was that at some point, Elsevier decided that they wanted to take this seriously and got every member of the executive leadership team to sponsor and an employee resource group. So I had the head of HR sponsoring my group, and that was great because he helped me to be able to interact with senior leaders.
Which is pretty important given at that point in my career, I'd never even run a meeting myself. So it's not like I was some senior person. I was pretty inexperienced. All I did, similar to other people that have spoken, was I put an advert out there on the internet. About 10 people applied and we started our community and it's grown since. And the reason I'm telling you all this is because for a period there of a few years, there was a lot of energy in the organization at Elsevier.
There was a lot of senior leadership support. There was a lot of money going into this. There was a lot of accountability as well. And that was great. And then at some point, and this was before all the current nonsense that stopped, there was a feeling that, we've gone far enough. Or as one senior leader at work said to me, we've solved diversity.
The yeah, we'll solve diversity. The employee opinion surveys are looking good. People feel psychologically safe. We've done it. We can move on to the next thing now. And I was like, I think we seem to have a problem in understanding the fundamental nature of this. And so these days, we have a situation where on paper I can't complain.
Our employee resource groups are well funded several thousand dollars a year if we want to do something. So if I have something to say to the head of recruitment, I can ring them up and I will get hurt. But there's no energy anymore. And that's something that's quite hard to quantify with measurements or with criteria. It's difficult to get people to volunteer, not because people aren't interested, but because these days managers aren't on encouraging them.
It's kind of like, oh, this thing's a distraction rather than this thing is something that will gain you skills. So I can't say that the organization isn't supportive. And I also can't say that I don't understand why they're being careful, especially externally these days with the way things are. But I also must say that I've learned two things. One, being a community group is enough.
When we talk about resilient communities actually having a safe space, that people can come every month and talk, and not feel alone and feel like they're being heard, solve some problems together is enough. And that's taken me, somebody who by nature wants to change the world a while to accept. The second thing is you have to meet people where they're at. And Camille talked about this earlier. I hate the idea of making the business case for diversity and for inclusion.
It should be a given, but unfortunately it isn't. And the only way that we're going to be able to reignite some of this is to tie it to some commercial goals. I don't like that very much, but that's the way it is. And so let me come on to the other thing I wanted to talk about, which is Karen and I and various others, Sylvia Hunter and Erin Osborne Martin at Wiley have been involved in the C4 disk toolkit for disability equity, which launched last week.
This started during the pandemic and has been an iterative process since then, and it basically deals. It's for people with disabilities, managers and anybody else who is interested in empowering people with disabilities to succeed in the workplace. So it talks about each stage of the hiring of the process. So attracting, hiring, onboarding, developing, promoting, performing and promoting. And the idea is to empower people to normalize conversations around disability, and also to help empower people to be better advocates for themselves.
Because what I've learned is the thing about these companies are however great they are. And for the record, I do think Elsa is a pretty good company to work for. Actually, no company is going to do it for us. As Demeter snow, our illustrious President-elect, said the work will continue as long as there are people available to do the work. We can't rely on companies or organizations or governments to do the work for us.
We have to do it ourselves. So what that means is empowering each other and teaching ourselves how to be empowered, how to ask those awkward questions. When I first started work. So when I was growing up, I don't know why, but I had this real fear of talking on the phone. And I remember when I first started work, I had a job where I had to ring up editors like once a week or something.
I was really scared. I remember the first time I got up to do a presentation, I was shaking. These days I'm quite a confident speaker, but it's only because I've made myself do it a bunch of times. One of my favorite sayings is by former President Teddy Roosevelt, who said so before he was president. He used to be a cowboy in the Wild West, and he said, when I first went out to the West, I was scared of all kinds of things, Bears and bison who might come and get me in the middle of the night.
But by pretending I wasn't afraid, I slowly ceased to be afraid. We need to be less afraid. It's difficult with everything going on. And as I said, I'm not here every day. So, I totally get. Maybe I don't 100% understand, but we can't rely on other agencies to do it for us if we want a more equitable society, if we want a more resilient community, we have to do it ourselves.
Thank you. Since I didn't know exactly what he was going to say, I didn't give him a question ahead. So I'm just going to go with, are you available to anybody in the room. We would need some resiliency, mentorship. Anytime I'm available to anybody for a conversation, change happens one conversation at a time.
That's my mantra, right. I don't have any magic answers, but anything I've learned is only because I had conversations with other people. I'm more than happy to have any conversations with anybody, body, and maybe I can teach you guys some things and learn some things from you that I've maybe have learned in a not always amazing way. And I can maybe help you guys learn in a slightly kinder way than some of the things I had to learn.
So now we're on to practical ways forward. That's me again, isn't it. That was you before. You didn't know it, but it was there. OK cool. So just thinking about the question, the range of conversation that we've had here today.
Does anything come to your mind about comments you'd like to share about successes or challenges that resonate with you, that you think other people would benefit from hearing about. Please hi everybody. I am Valerie guagnini. I'm the global head of edib for Cambridge University Press Excuse me.
And we've been on a journey in the past four years. I was the first person to be with this title. And now after four years, we're about seven people within the organization, so we're growing. But one of the things that resonated with me was about the ERGs. And what we've done is we've actually supported them by giving them protected time. We also established budgets for each of the ERGs so that they have control over, for the most part.
And just like you said, Camilo, we do have data on all the things that they're doing because it's important for us to see or benchmark the things that they're doing and what works and what doesn't work. And they are part of our community. I think, though, the challenge that we have is and Simon will this is the growing role of the gender critical movement in the UK and the attack on our trans community right now in the US as well.
And so how do we support them with through our Pride Network. And that's something that has come up for us over and over again. But like we've talked about is creating that safe space so that people can have a place to talk, but also meeting them at the place where they are in their journey to understanding, because there's not a lot of people who is really going to be on the same journey as you.
So really use it as a teaching moment. And that's something that I personally have been trying to advocate for our ERGs to understand, because they have to come to a place of understanding that people are not always going to be on that same journey. Because our histories are all different. So just be mindful a little bit about how you need to educate in that space, because that is what your role is at the same time.
But yeah, that's what I want to say. Can I just quickly respond to that. I think that's brilliant. I feel and Paul, I'd be interested in your opinion here as well. One of the biggest barriers to inclusion is people being too afraid to ask because they don't and they're worried about offending people. We're all big enough and old enough, I think, to know when people are trying to be offensive versus when people just don't know.
And I think what I'd request is kindness. People aren't going to get it wrong. But we know about intention, and it's about taking time. Even though it takes energy and we're all tired. Let's be honest, to teach people how to be a bit wiser. Actually, we didn't know anything once either. And people only learn if we can develop an environment where it's OK to get it wrong in a genuine kind of a way.
And I worry sometimes that people are so worried about getting it wrong and they say nothing at all. And if people say nothing at all, then that's not really psychological safety. That's just an environment where we never learn. Yeah I mean, the idea of inclusion keeps getting lost somewhere. And when you talk about inclusion and you start talking about, let's say, race or gender or sexuality.
People are now like, well, what about me. Like that kind of thing. And it's like, well, if we're using inclusive language, it includes you too. Like, we didn't ask you to take yourself out. So that's been frustrating for me in a lot of ways. Yeah I mean, what has been shared. And I totally agree, like regarding meeting the people where they are and having a huge educational component.
I'm certainly not an expert on LGBTQ matter. And like, just as part of being the chair of the affinity group and through like coordinating and recruiting speakers, like I've learned a ton also just by those sessions myself. So I think there's an education component even from you from within your community to learn more about it. And at the same time, also people outside of your community in terms of again, educating them about what are the issues you care about.
And again, but with the caveat that you have to meet them where they are with a very probably a wide range of understanding of the issues. But yeah, even as the chair of the pride affinity group, I can confess that I'm not an expert on all those matters. Does anybody else have any success stories around affinity groups or inclusion efforts. Do you want to share.
OK anybody want to talk about challenges. We're all here in a safe space. So this I'd like to pose a question. And if anybody has examples of things that they've done or that they are doing or what they'd like to see. We haven't. We touched on disability. And for me, that connects very strongly to mental health.
And I think mental health is a huge part of this conversation as well. I personally this year have struggled a lot with coming to work and being a good worker, period because of what we're facing around us. And I think when I would bring it up or in conversations I had with colleagues, everybody felt that way and everybody acknowledged it. And then they said, OK, so but you're but do the work.
It's like, yes, I guess if everybody's having the same problem, then we just ignore the problem. And I think especially thinking of trans colleagues and friends who are facing, danger in a way that has to affect their ability to show up and be a professional and things like that. What strategies are there for, supporting colleagues, supporting one another and giving that, extending that grace when sometimes maybe that grace doesn't make there's not a great business case for the grace what I mean.
So if anybody has thoughts there because I've gotten very frustrated with what seems to be the response of like, yep. But that's due on Thursday. How can we navigate that. I mean, I guess I can just speak as a middle manager that there's a lot of ways in which I treat this time similarly to the way I treated early pandemic time.
I remind people to turn their away message on and respond more slowly to things right. We are awfully flexible about what it means to take a sick day, or whatever you legally have to call the thing. None of us work in a place where we're literally saving lives, so if somebody needs a day off, then they take a day off and you say, sorry, it didn't get turned in on time.
But you do. I mean, not every maybe not everyone is in a unit like that. So then there's going to be some different strategies. Although I still say why not just turn your away message on and say sorry, expect responses to be delayed. I mean, for our department email. Early in the pandemic, we turned the away message on permanently and just said, look, we are lower staffed, please, expect this amount of days before you receive a response.
And anyone that emailed us got that response. And I guess I'll respond to if people don't have that supportive environment, maybe. I think one approach I've seen that kind of transcends, what's going on in the US right now, but just that applies pretty much always is to ask people, how can I support you.
How can we get this done. The deadlines often aren't going to go away. They're still going to be really hard to meet. We're still expected to perform at as high a level as possible, but I think what I find useful is, for example, my manager saying, OK. Acknowledging what's going on that is making it difficult. How can our team work together to make this happen.
I think regardless of what's going on, no manager is going to automatically know how to support every single person on their team. So just asking is, I think, the best thing we can do, ask each individual and try to work together because we're all working for the same goal and hopefully we can do that together as a team.
Something that's helped me personally and I've shared in my workspaces is putting a name to this experience. And I have a therapist, I go to therapy long before January, but have been able to talk to my therapist about this experience, and my therapist said, this is grief, which you're feeling is grief, and being able to put a name to it, being able to say, I am grieving and feel those emotions in a way, like a death or a alternating I also have a son with disability.
So I understand the stages and transitions of expectations of the future that are different than you expected. And so being able to put a name to it like that has really been helpful. And so when I do encounter folks who are really feeling it, it's really sitting heavy. I'm like, we're experiencing grief right now and we are allowed to pause.
We're allowed to put the delay message on. We're allowed to treat it, treat it in that way. And what I am looking for. But I haven't found the energy yet. But what I'm looking for is how to move within that framework and say, this is what it is. This is what I understand it to be. And what is that next step. Do you turn that corner in grief and you're ready to have some energy.
And I think it's about community making community and things like that. So for me it's been helpful to name it. And that is allowing space to start thinking about how do I look for community, how do I look for affinity groups and things like that to move forward in this. In the resources section and people are looking for resources.
I wanted to just put up a few things that are available through Fordisc in addition to the new toolkit on disability and inclusion. We have several others that have been developed by volunteers within the community over the last, I don't eight years or so. They've been evolving and we have. I highly encourage you to check out the C4 website and then also the scholarly kitchen.
Many of our community have written on many different topics, but the diversity tax is something to just acknowledge that you may be experiencing. And if that's weighing on you, you should recognize it and look for recognition in a peer group or among your leadership and start advocating if you have that energy. I highly recommend Deanne Roberts session. What have you present on scholarly kitchen article.
What have you done for D. Well, it can be exhausting, but Camille's also put a few references books that she's enjoyed, and she also has been reading what you have 52 books that you've been reading so everybody doesn't have to. Yeah follow me on LinkedIn for book content Thanks She has excellent reviews of she has a whole rubric actually, of how she reviews her books she's reading.
So do follow Camille and reach out to us as community members. And because we're looking for volunteers, starting tomorrow, we'll have the opportunity for participation in the Dia volunteer group of SSP. If you're interested in finding community here. With that, I think, thank you for a little extra time today and your participation.
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