Engaging the whole association around diversity and inclusion initiatives.

The National Association of Social Workers for our Day of Understanding hosted an All Staff meeting to discuss the beginning of our journey towards incorporating more Diverse and Inclusive practices into our Association. NASW is currently in the beginning stages of our Diversity assessment to begin creating our strategic plan. We have a DE&I committee who have just started subcommittees to begin creating events, newsletters, and many more exciting things to help bring the association together. During our All Staff meeting we were joined by our consultants from Our Office, the outside firm who is doing our D&I Assessments. Our Office spent time describing the assessment process which includes a maturity model survey, staff surveys, executive interviews and listening sessions.  Staff was grateful for their participation in the meeting and expressed an increased level of confidence in the assessment process.

The main purpose of this meeting was to bring the whole association together as one to have the conversation around where we are and where we are heading in terms of being more equitable and inclusive. We introduced the idea of Affinity groups which received a positive response.  We used an interactive tool called Slido to do some polling questions and create a word cloud about what diversity, equity, & inclusion means to each staff person (without using the words diversity, equity and inclusion) and received some amazing answers such as Community, Equality, and Fairness.

This is just the start of our D&I journey and we wanted our full association to know that we committed to being transparent and honest through this process. Internal communications have not always been our strong suit and as we embark on this process we want to build those channels to help people trust in the process and improve morale.