Creating a team of internal stakeholders to facilitate sustainable DEI work

This strategy explores building a team made up of stakeholders from the school community in a remote environment in order to facilitate sustainable DEI work.

DEI change teams are cross-functional committees with diverse representation (i.e., across roles, teams, identities) that steward DEI work within an organization. The work of a strong, cohesive team of DEI champions can provide the jumpstart a system needs to improve DEI and transform culture.

Use this in order to…

• Create a dedicated internal resource committed to moving DEI forward.

• Connect DEI activities to a broader business-driven, results-oriented strategy.

• Accelerate employee engagement across the organization.

“Creating an internal employee group that can partner with leadership, represent the voices of the organization, and move forward on clear action steps goes a long way to build momentum and drive employee buy-in.” – Kristen Welch, Illustrative Mathematics

Key Components

• Team composition is critical as this team ideally represents the personal, social, and work identities across the system.

• Leadership support is necessary for any DEI program to be successful. Senior leaders play a critical role in providing direction with respect to the change team’s mission, strategy, and deliverables.

• Clear roles and responsibilities keep the team focused and help to prevent “scope creep,” which could lead to team and/or individual burnout.

Considerations for Remote Implementation

• Create more frequent (but perhaps shorter) touchpoints for this group to meet to deepen relationships and build trust since the group will not have the opportunity to meet in person.

• Ensure diverse voices and perspectives are represented. In remote environments, distance and recency bias are at play. Make sure to elevate the voices of all colleagues, especially those who may have less power in the organization.

The Remote DEI Collective was a collaborative group led by The Learning Accelerator (TLA), and brought together participants from remote organizations to address the challenges of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in remote environments. This strategy has been adapted from the Remote DEI Collective’s toolkit, which was built to offer resources to improve remote culture and practices, in order to better suit leaders and educators working for schools that offer virtual and hybrid learning options to students.