Teaching America’s Complete Enduring Story

Challenge

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is a not-for-profit educational institution committed to preserving, interpreting and recognizing all of the realities present at our nation’s founding and helping translate them to today.

To successfully do this work, we must have a highly functioning leadership team and workforce that is representative, inclusive, diverse and able to come together and grapple with difficult issues in both our past and present, and to find solutions to those issues.

Our actions must be comprehensive across the organization to successfully impact the guest experience through our programming, which includes over 500,000 annual on-site visitors and millions of on-line interactions.

Actions

Build an inclusive and diverse leadership team:  We have made substantial progress this year building a diverse senior leadership team.  This team will continue to make additional progress on inclusion, with training on unconscious bias and other proven exercises to increase its ability to work as a team on difficult issues.

Conduct unconscious bias training for middle management:  Colonial Williamsburg plans to conduct unconscious bias training for middle management to make meaningful progress on inclusion and diversity across the organization.

Reevaluate benefits and work/ life balance practices:  We are comprehensively evaluating all our benefits to ensure they fully support all our employees in all stages of life.  This work will enable all to fully engage and participate with our organization.

Outcomes

All of our employees will feel more included and willing to discuss challenging topics and explore potentially uncomfortable areas with each other.  This environment will allow us to expand the breadth and quality of our programming in meaningful ways to translate the issues present at our nation’s founding to the challenges of today in order to improve education, create dialogue and increase understanding among all citizens.

Contact

Sharon Dorsey, Executive Director, Inclusion and Diversity

Quote

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation strives to teach the complete story of our nation’s founding, with all of its inherent complexity and challenges. We must do this so that people understand how our historical realities made us as a nation today, and in doing so help make meaningful progress to improve our present. Our employees must be fully engaged to do this challenging work, which means inclusion and diversity is central to our mission and critical to our success.

Cliff Fleet
President & CEO
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