Welcome to the session. Findings from the field leading and impactful change for the whole organization. We will get started shortly. On the right hand side of your screen, you'll see a window with a chat, Q and A feedback and notes tab. You can use the chat box to chat with other attendees, but please use the Q&A box to send questions and for the presenters. You can also upvote questions in the Q&A panel. If you would like to see the question answered at the end of the session. We'll answer as many questions as we can. The Notes tab is there for you to keep your own notes during the session if you would like to. And we also ask that you complete the brief evaluation found in the feedback tab at the end of the session. We use session feedback to continue improving what we offer, so we truly appreciate you taking the time. And without further ado, please join me in welcoming our presenters Leilani and Isi. Hello everyone. Welcome to the session. Very, very excited to have you here. My name is Leilani Lewis and I'm the director of diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the Advancement Organization at the University of Washington. I am joined by Isi Ogwude - Isi introduce yourself. Hi everyone. I'm Isa argued she her her pronouns. And I'm the associate director for Equity and Inclusion at University of Washington Advancement. So happy to see all of you. All right. And with that, I'll give you a little bit of insight into what the session is going to look like we have. First, we're going to do our land acknowledgment. Then we're going to do a little bit of an exercise and then we're going to talk through some of the ways that you see myself are working to coordinate impactful change for our organization as it relates to diversity, equity and inclusion. So turn it over to you see in acknowledgment. Thank you, Leilani. So we like to do a land acknowledgment and all of our meetings and ensure that it's not performative, but we're constantly learning. So for the land that we sit on here in Washington, the University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of the land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, the Tulalip and the offshoot nations. If you're not familiar with the land that you currently sit on, we've put a link in the chat from Native land in digital so that you can put in your own location wherever you are in the world and find it out. The indigenous peoples that occupy or continue to occupy that land. So take a moment. Click on the link and put in the locale that you're in, whatever timezone you're in, and it's a really great way to kind of learn. All right. Thank you. I. Thank you. See, and before we get started with the presentation, I want to get us on the mindset of what we are trying to inspire and have folks reflect on in this work that we do. And that question is really about belonging. We are trying to inspire and and stimulate, catalyze belonging within our organization and in our relationships to our organization and our institution at the University of Washington. So we ask people all the time, what does belonging look like and feel like to you? And then we ask, who in our organization is responsible for that sense of belonging? So if you could take just a couple of minutes to put in the chart what the London looks like and feels like to you personally or on your teams, however you like to think about it, and who is responsible for that sense of belonging. You could take a moment to chat and think about that. Great. Okay. I don't know if I'm hearing you. All right. Are we getting any participants in the chat? Andrew We are. Okay. We're not seeing them. Yes. And see if there's if there's responses, but that's okay. Maggie saying there are so, which is good. Our response? Great. And. Oh, thank you, Maggie. Thank you, Maggie. Yes. There it is. Very helpful. Feeling like you can be yourself and be accepted for who you are. Acknowledging the contribution to change sense of community. Brilliant. Greetings from the UK. Can you hear me? Okay? All right. Now, this is very important. In order to make sure that we are. We are moving the needle forward. Moving things forward for our organizations and for our institutions. Understand and just reflect on our own journey and how we feel we belong. And. And who can we inspire that feeling for? Right. It is not just that folks can do do these practices for us, but we ourselves, we can move forward and inspire these practices and do these practices and and give others a sense of belonging and that sort of you know, that's sort of going to be the the primary uses here as we talk about should there be leadership in the work that we're doing to build community. Thank you so much for taking the time to reflect. And I feel everyone participating is in the mindset that we are. We are able to move forward and go forward with the presentation so we can discuss how we get to that sense of belonging and think about belonging. It's not something that's done to to us, but we have a set of practices and and ways and positions in our organizations that can give others that sense, sort of like a like a brand is reflected back to us. People will report back if they feel a sense of belonging. Right. We it's not we can't we can't ensure this. It's very sort. We have to get the feedback and know that what we're doing is giving folks that that sense of community. And in order to get to these practices and the work that we're doing within the office of Advancement and our DTI, our little DTI team, as I tell you, there's been a lot of work that's been done in this kind of journey for the University of Washington and for university advancement. So I'll just recap a little bit of how I mean, how we got to this place. We think of ourselves as part of a continuum, and in the slide you'll see there's been years now, several years, seven, eight years and actually 50 years prior to that at the University of Washington, that this work has taken root and take bold. But 50 years ago, student activists fought for the rights to have real, true institutional investment and values around diversity, ensuring that students had access to education, ensuring that faculty, a diverse faculty, were hired and retained, ensuring that our staff was diverse, and that they are reflective of minority and minoritized and marginalized communities that were underserved and underrepresented in the higher education at the University of Washington as it was across the country. So 50 years ago, this struggle really took root, and many years before that, many other struggles built up to the point in 2015 when at the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, the then interim president on the merits, on a mark, how say, who is now our current university? Washington president established Race and Equity initiative in order to catalyze further action, deeper rooted action and anti-racism and anti oppression within each school, college unit and and organization within the University of Washington and University Advancement answered the call and said, okay, we need to think about this more deeply. And they created some groups and teams among the staff that were working on how to how to organize this work. And that's something that's relatively new within the university advancement space. So in an evolution of that, those teams and those committees coming together was the concept of an equity council or a council that would think about enterprise wide systemic and process and policy adjustments, shifts, changes that would lead to greater equity. And that council was launched in 2020 and that is actually chaired the Council before I was hired, before the position was created for the director a couple of years ago. And immediately after that we started laying some of the groundwork and foundation for how to embed anti-racism and the practices that lead to a greater sense of belonging and psychological safety. In 2021 and in 2022, we were able to bring additional support to the team and another and another leader to the team. And you see a group set in that position as the associate director for DEI. So part of this long journey, right, is this, you know, part of this continuing part of this movement for this work. We early on in my position and we reviewed the mission and values of the organization and did this with our leadership executive leadership team, our senior vice presidents at the time and their team to see if really our values were reflected in our mission and vision. And we knew that we weren't able to at that point. I think it had just been a couple of years into establishing the mission vision, so we had to create a separate sort of but but, but primary set of values vision we called vision, values and actions. And that is to ensure that this is this work and this ideas are embedded in the ethos of the organization so that it is clear that care about this work and it makes sense to resource it and and move it forward on all levels. After that, we did some work to interview staff and take some data that I had to co-create advice strategy. So we had some direction we were going and it was a short term strategy in order to get things built, launched and embedded in the organization. Just a few things. And I really take that approach. We take a few goals and we see how we can move them forward, to see what the approaches can be, see how they're doing, and then we move to the next step. So we wanted to establish terms and make sure that in the strategy areas we were building the foundation as we did with the Equity Council and the vision, values and actions. We wanted to ensure a definition of term. So our work in diversity, diversity work is specific. It comes with a specific set of practices that was defined and and segmented as a list of a as a as a way to organize our approaches so that we're really working on diversity. We're not working on everything all at once, really working on equity to ensure equitable outcomes so that nobody has an experience that is of lesser quality or lesser service with the organization. Anything that is inequitable, determined by their marginalized identity. And we have a set of inclusion practices. They're not a this is not separate from diversity practices. The related that suffer from equity practices and foreign policy review. Inclusive practices are their own set of practices. So we had that that in the strategy as well as education and how do we evaluate our work. And the spirit of evaluation created a dashboard based in the strategy areas. And now we have recently completed a equity report. This will be an annual report about the state of our organization and how we're it's a reflective piece about how what we've done to sort of look at look at the activities and that will be released here in the summer. So we're also operationalizing the work. There's a lot to be written about it. This is how we can do it. This is how we can move forward that strategies can sit on a shelf. But they're not that they're not put to work. So immediately, almost, almost immediately, we started to think about ways we can build accountability for leadership. In 360 reviews. Was one of those one of those steps your salary analysis, making sure that we're salaries are equitable and we're thinking about how to move people forward in their salaries. The different, you know, question and performance evaluations and making sure that the questions are being asked. How are your performance decided? I would talk we'll talk more about how this is everyone's work get to end you get the extent statement a statement and a statement of ethical principles for fundraising, acknowledging the power dynamics between fundraisers and our stakeholders and donors. We created affinity groups that created and planned for affinity group and deepening leadership engagement. So there's some there's some work that was done almost immediately, but it was all planned for well thought out. And actually, as immediately I say, it takes it took about a year to map things out and how we would approach this is careful, thoughtful and intentional in the way that we move things forward because our goal is big. And if we're moving, we got to know we're moving towards something. And our goal is to ensure equitable outcomes for activities generated within and associated with the University of Washington. So i'll say this over and over again. This is not about just h.r. And people feeling good at work. This is about the work that we do. The engagements that we make belonging has a lot to do with engagement, how we how we fundraise, who we fundraise with, how we engage with alumni and who we engage with, how we tell our stories, take our photos. Everything we do is impacted. And if we embed this work, we are statistically and by studies. So our business is better, our work is better, We are improved. When we have a work force that is able to engage and embed belonging and equity and inclusion in what we do. So this is just a sample of our diversity, our strategic plan dashboard. We have the strategic plan available to all of our staff leadership and some stakeholders have taken a look at it. They're interested in all of the work that we do and it actually factors into their decision making and how they want to engage with the organization. So our dashboard is on our our intranet page. We are building these tools, ensuring that we're showing, showing progress and showing areas where we need to invest. Transparency is a big part of this work, and we do this all with the spirit of shared equity leadership. So shared equity leadership is a term that was put together by the let me find my space here by the American Council of Education in collaboration with us Sees Center. And what they did was they reached out to about 60 leaders in 2020 and they wanted to understand how equity is really activated within organizations, within within higher education. And they came to understanding how developing how to go about developing practice based insights relative to share that the leadership in higher ed and the report found that shared and shared leadership includes multiple stakeholders and agenda setting and decision making, and it can produce better outcomes for teams and organizations. So the approach about scaling the work and ensuring that actually it's it's on all of us to drive inclusion in our organizations, to lead well to to see ourselves no matter where we sit in the organization as part of this journey toward building equity and and they came out with a model here it is. I on their article Building a Shared a Culture of Shared Leadership. Our leader, our senior vice president Mary Bresch, speaks often about this, as many other leaders do, and they're really dedicated to ensuring that their leaders and their teams feel a sense of ownership over this work and a sense of a sense that they are able to carry this forward in a way that is going to help the organization drop the link to the leadership of some of their next slide. Since. So we're talking about it being a personal journey. I just want to share this little anecdote. I was a real genius, young nonprofit worker many, many years ago, excited, ready to go. I promise. I say that facetiously. Not a genius. But here, here's where I'm getting at. I felt really, really sure of myself going into my career, right? I actually not only was I a genius, I knew what everybody should do. I could tell everybody what they should do and this should happen and these things should happen. And I had a lot of somebody's shoulds in my wheelhouse. And man, I thought everybody thought I was great. That was that was how I was going to approach things. Well, I found out that that's not necessarily true, that people don't necessarily like that. And again, it was early career. I was ready to go. Maybe, you know, somebody who's got some somebody said, but being in a position to die team and being in this role, I got it. I get a lot of somebody said so then so you deal with that. But one day we were in the staff meeting and I was breaking out. Somebody should do X, Y, Z, and my boss, wonderful person I was working in the museum field at the time, said, It's you somebody meaning wait a minute, hold on. You got you know, you're pointing your finger or you need to point your finger yourself and worry about what's going on with you. And I thought that was that was a turning point for me. I keep that story and I use it several times just to illustrate. You know, it's not about unnecessarily about arrogance or looking towards somebody else to do it. And the study of the American Council for Education and the players center back this back this up, they go to the next slide. And shared equity leadership it's it's it talks about leaders making leaders are paramount to making significant progress in issues of equity. And I hear a lot of our leadership should and leaders should X, Y, Z. But we can't wait for individual leaders to act. It won't get us to equity. It's going to take all of us. Enacting change is is not a work done by a team of people. It's not done by others. It's building a culture and that if you're part of a community and are and I will argue that if we're an engagement and we work with people and we are out in the world, we are part of a community, all of us in some way or another, that it takes all of us and it takes the courage to to build on our build our strength and build our understanding of others. So I had to I reflected on that. Somebody said, and in the context of this framework of shared equity leadership, and we asked, you know, what could this type of distributed collaborative leadership look like in university advancement? And that is how we built the work. That's how we started to build and how we continue to build our work. What can we think collaborative leadership look like and how can I really stimulate that next slide? It's we had some starting points and these are just some starting points. This is not the whole I mean, the strategy is pages long, but how can how can leaders and our staff committees co-create a direction forward? How can our committees be embedded in disciplines so that we're in an integrated model with our alumni stakeholder engagement or university marketing communications and our development and our our development area? So how can we ensure that we're embedded in disciplines so that each each committee is working together with leadership to co-create some goals to move this work forward? How can how can decisions about resources be read in equity? How can we you know, we're moving this forward with these questions in mind? So when i say this is much deeper than sort of an h.r. Context, which is where traditional dei practices have relied on have sat where we're expanding this out to really think about portions of transformative work that is both that's transformative, not transaction. And with that pivot to see. Thank you, leilani. Just want to confirm. Everyone can hear me. I can't really see everyone. Can you hear me? Leilani Okay, perfect. So I just want to transition to really touch upon what Leilani is saying, which is that building community for a better culture really brings about that sense of belonging. So I'm going to read this quote by Carpathia that transformational culture work is always relational. It's not transactional and real diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging work is not about a checklist. It's about relationships. So you and I are vision, values and actions, and the link should be there for you. If you have a copy of this presentation. We're focused on strategy areas, and those areas are relationships, culture, accountability, a commitment to diversity and inclusion. Everything we do in way really connects to the whole institution. This is the institution's mission. This is their values. This is who UW said they are. And so we're building upon that for our advancement staff and our stakeholders. So our goal for right now really is the historically marginalized staff, stakeholders and volunteers report a stronger sense of belonging and agency, not just belonging, but that they have the agency to do the work that they do, to partner with us, to be staff within way. So we cannot create the kind of organizational wide change that we want to see and let me just rephrase it. All of us in our institutions cannot create the kind of organizational wide change that we want to see without making sure that the current spaces that we occupy are safe and inclusive for everyone. And so some of the spaces that we try and ensure and we are working towards that R&D I committees and most institutions, you may have these committees within your institution Advancement Shops or Equity Council, which Leilani touched upon, are employee resource groups, ERGs, also known as affinity groups, and then our partnership with h.R. Which is paramount. We're in second here. Okay, so with our dei committees, we have dei committees throughout our organization, not just in central advancement, but also in our schools and colleges. The advancement teams and some of our schools and colleges have created dei committees. And so when i was hired in March of 2022, I was tasked with really talking to a lot of committee leaders, co-chairs, chairs, vice chairs who have been doing this work for years. I want to call out our staff who have been doing this work for a long time, before Leilani was hired, before I was hired. And so I met with a lot of them individually and I heard some challenges. And so we were like, How can we align these folks and how can we really support them? And make sure that the work that they're already doing can be elevated and resource? And so we held a structured listening session. We brought them all together. They'd never met together before, and we process the feedback both in my individual meetings with them as well as in this collective group. And then we followed up with consistent communication to that group. We created intentional gatherings for them. So, you know, we we know that a lot of these DEI leaders are doing this work voluntarily and so we wanted to focus on better connectivity amongst the DEI committees that are already formed and those that were forming. And we ensured that we knew what was happening across the teams as well as how we could continue to support. They didn't feel like they were on an island by themselves anymore. And so we coordinated this some facilitation training. One of the feedback that I got from almost all of the DEI leads was that they really wanted facilitation training, and so we made sure that we invested in that for them. And so they've had two facilitation training so far in the past year. And also the leaders of the DEI committees within UA meet with Leilani and I on a bi monthly basis as we put staff again and kind of these voluntary leadership roles, which is not necessarily part of their job description. We want to make sure that they are set up for success. There's no burnout, they are resourced, they know they have this kind of umbrella support on the DEI team as well as in the leaders as well. So we we find that to be very valuable to ensure that we're building this space for them. Also, the DEI co-chairs have their own Microsoft teams channel so that they can collaborate with each other, they can share ideas. Okay. And then Leilani kind of brought up our university Advancement Equity Council, and this is a generative body whose purpose is to advise on support and develop equity based strategic goals that will have an impact on you. A practice, culture and policy. This is created in 2020. We have a membership of about 19 to 21 people when we're fully members and including chair and vice chair, and we are really we're a body. This is not a learning space. This is a doing space. And we have learning spaces. We'll talk about in a minute. But this is our doing space in our accountability space for the whole organization. We are composed of three subcommittees representing major areas of work. Those are alignment. So focusing on things like a DTI survey for the whole organization, a resources community and culture group that really focuses on inclusion and belonging, really targeting those ergs and affinity groups and ensuring that there's engagement. And then also our external collaboration. Right now, one of the things we're working on the project is a is a UK wide land acknowledgment, the one that we use as you double wide also for the region and some other organizations, but we want to use a wide one. We also want more education on land acknowledgments. So again, they're not performative as we keep doing them. And so the UN Equity Council's a one year commitment with three year terms. We just finished up our third year and a lot of the members who started three years ago want to stay on and they are staying on. So that's really a testament to the space that we've created. And applicants are from diverse areas of advancement. It's really important when we have kind of these large groups that we build that there's representation from any other campuses that we have and across the advancement Shop. So are you to Bothell when you Deb Tacoma is represented on the Equity Council as well? It's very important to us emphasis on having an interdisciplinary group of folks from all corners of UA. Like I mentioned, we want to create enterprise wide impact and we do that by ensuring that the group is diverse and from diverse areas of advancement. So the Equity Council is successful and we retain members because we are demonstrating inclusive practices in that space. The outcome of belonging is that people want to stay. We're proving the point by bringing joy, collaboration, a sense of safety for everyone, and this should be modeled throughout the organization. So these are equity current equity Council members, currently 16 members, and we're about to add seven or eight and representing 14 units across advancement and three campuses. They're beautiful and they do amazing work. All right. So moving on to kind of our employee resources groups and really talking again about that culture building employee resource groups, as many of us know, are voluntary employee led groups made up of individuals who join together based on a common interest backgrounds or demographic factors such as gender, race or ethnicity. Right now we currently have three official ergs within the organization, one focused on staff of color, one focus on white allies, one focused on a Jewish affinity group with 2 to 3 more slated to start this year. And these are employees coming to us saying they wanted to start NRG. Our first ERG started a year ago, so we've created three officially in the past year, which is fantastic. We want more. The team again regularly meets with ERG leaders to support, to help, to brainstorm, to organize and to plan. We are not leaving DEI leaders on an island somewhere to do this work by themselves. They know that they have the support of us. There is a leadership support for ERGs within the organization, which is also important. Conducting listening sessions is key. When we were thinking of starting a staff of color focused ERG, which is now called Bipoc Swag, we knew that we didn't want to create programing for them. We didn't want to create events without hearing from staff of color. What they wanted to see in an employee resource group. And the first thing we did was conduct a listening session. Last year we gathered staff of color and invited them on a Zoom call and we just said, This is our idea. We want to create a what do you want? And we weren't surprised that we're a little surprised that folks did not want a learning space. They didn't want webinars or trainings. They wanted two things joy and food, and they wanted to collaborate and network and learn from other staff of color and get to know people. Because as we know, with the pandemic, there's there's kind of been a slight decline in kind of engagement with each other. So we wanted to create that. We also created a post listening session survey to gauge interest and gather information. So when ERGs are able to start, we conduct that listening session and that's key. And then we do a post listening session survey for folks who attended and who weren't able to attend. So ERGs also create we create kickoff events for all the ERGs to welcome members and build community Hybrid and virtual opportunities should also be available for staff. So as you creating these ERGs, ensure that you're including everyone. Some folks are fully remote, some people are hybrid. So having in-person events, hybrid events and virtual events so everyone can participate. So just a little bit of information about ERGs that I found. According to a 2014 survey conducted by Software advice, 70% of U.S. respondents who were 18 to 24 years old and 52% of respondents between 25 and 34 reported that they would be more likely to apply for a role at a company that had employee resource groups. 50% of survey respondents say that they would remain at a company because it had an e r g e etiologies. And this is another quote like a birthday. You can tell that I really like her. ERGs bring many benefits to organizations they identify and help develop internal leaders. They lead to higher retention rates. They educate employees, including senior leadership through internal events, panels and more. They help companies recruit underrepresented individuals and develop a talent pipeline. So it's very important as this new generation of folks come up. We know we've seen the research Gen Z and Alpha generation, they care about social issues, they care about identity, they care about social justice. And so we want to ensure that we as an organization are reflecting our values and that they about when they're hired, when they're in and when they exit it. So as you think about how to think about belonging and engagement, think about the employees that you're welcoming in the next five, ten, 15 years. This was our kickoff June 29th, 2020 to our Bipoc Swag employee resource Group Bipoc Black Indigenous People of Color Swag for Staff Wide Advancement Group. One of our marketing one of our marketing folks came up with that and it was just a great day of community. It was fantastic. Okay. And then now just more of that kind of investing and staff and building culture. We have been very intentional, Leilani and I and really our leadership in investing in various programs for all staff to participate in. So while the equity counsel is not necessarily that learning space for staff equity lab, which we have, is a learning space for all UA staff looking to broaden their knowledge on all things diversity, equity, inclusion and we bring in experts within the organization and outside the organization, when I say organization advancement, but also the institution as a whole. We are a research public Ivy at University of Washington. We have experts and faculty and graduate students and research folks. And so we we reach out to them. And, you know, if they consult, we we invest in them. And we hire them to kind of lead our staff as well. And then also we reach out with consultants outside of the organization. Our staff also are able to do the dare to leave Brené Brown's courageous leadership program. This is also led by a couple that we are in our third year, third cohort starting in the fall, and this includes more Bipoc focused cohorts historically, and we know that a lot of our BIPOC staff have not been given the same opportunities to engage in professional and personal development at the workplace. And so we we were really intentional about creating spaces and investing so that they could have trainings, they could have leadership opportunities and within the organization. And then the Amplified Gender Equity and Leadership Initiative. Maybe some of you have gone through this, I've gone through it. It's amazing. It's an eight week program that focuses on individual leadership and organizational capacity building to address gender inequity. We make this available to our staff as well. We just finished our second cohort and we're doing it again in 2024. And this is out of Dartmouth College. And it also won the Cases Circle of Excellence award a few years ago. All right. So some additional actions that we've taken and we really point staff to ensure that they are checking our intranet page. It's very important to us to have some sort of place within a software that staff can go to for resources. It's one thing to talk at staff or with staff. It's another thing for people who need to read, to visualize. We need to see to have a space where they can go and read and have literature and have resources to continue their education or for support. In spring of 22, 2022, we create an observance calendar to ensure that important days and months, which recognize historically marginalized groups are highlighted and communicated to staff. So whether it's Native American Heritage Month. Black History Month, Asian Pacific Islander, Hawaiian Month, Pride Month, Women's International Day, whatever it is, we try to highlight it on the calendar, but also we'll put a message on our UK wide teams channel for folks to comment, to share an event within the area that's happening or to give their own opinion on spring of 2022. We also create a glossary of terms of D-I terms for US staff. We also pass this out during orientation for new hires to use as a guide. So we're welcoming people with information as they come into the organization, letting them know who we are as a DEI team, giving them resources immediately, how they can join ERGs or affinity groups within the broader UDA, but also giving them some learning literature with the glossary of terms. This also lives on our intranet Summer of 2022. We also create an overall DEI teams channel with sub channels included. This is in order to streamline communication across the organization. So some of the sub channels we've included our employee resource group channels, conversations and opportunities, and then a DEI co-chairs channel that I mentioned earlier. All right, so let's send it out to the Leilani now. Thank you. Thank you for giving that view. And I just want to just applaud the work that's been done, but also just tell everybody this is in some ways our ESG program was not about creating more DEI work for people of color and organizations. In fact, it was about pivoting away from that practice, which is often one of the things that we hear from folks who say, you know, we created this thing, but, you know, we're expected to do some work. And and honestly, people can have places for connection and joy and or the organization can invest in that. So they don't have to just focus on how to make change. They can just focus on how to, you know, or disconnecting with others. And that was really important to create these spaces for where folks could relax, experienced joy, and that we do that in our work, but we also can do that in other ways. So that was that was a really important part of that feedback as well and something we hope to uphold. So moving forward, we have a lot of work to do. I'm thinking about the again, enterprise enterprise wide impact and change. Doing a strategic plan revision, like I said, adjusted a short term strategy to to see what we can move forward and how we can move things forward to test the systems and see how things work. Now I can revise and expand upon that. The dashboard will be refined. We were doing our annual survey. Now we've had two and we're going to continue to benchmark with another one and start to hopefully gather trend lines and also add in another instrument for assessment. We also have a wonderful case index, which the Office of Opportunity Inclusion has been really wonderful and and helping us look at the criteria and seeing we're not just measuring where we are and in relation to our parents organizations, but also just giving us the criteria itself. And the questionnaire was really, really helpful. And our program really we're moving with that shared equity leadership to build a stronger culture of inclusion. So hopefully the outcome as belonging, equity and diversity, diversity and often people are attracted to, as you pointed out, people are attracted to organizations who build a strong culture of inclusion, a strong culture of belonging, people who, you know, there are urges. People want to come and work for you. If if you have these things in place as we build this and people want to give also, people want to support, people want to volunteer in places that have a great culture where they feel psychologically safe, a sense of belonging and a sense of agency. We have a campaign and as we do this work, we are and we're going to move into a campaign and plan for that. So how do we tie into the campaign planning so that the learning is really the outcome as we move forward and ask for support to support the institution? We're fortifying the program within the University of Washington advancement for two and a half years in. And there's a lot of work to be done to make sure that are the things that we are moving. The transformations we're making are embedded deeply within each part of the organization. It's going to take some time and some effort. And I want to reiterate, too, we're not just doing this for university advancement employees. We are doing this for university advancement. There are a lot of people who engage with the University of Washington advancement that are stakeholders, alumni, donors, volunteers, potential applicants, people who may want to work because people want to engage in many other ways. Our vendors, there's a whole economy and a whole a whole a whole community around this and that engage with us. But we do this work because our institution, institutions called us to do this work. Our institution has said our initiative and our president has said, hey, we need to step up our work. This is beyond awareness. This is beyond just knowing that there are people who are marginalized. People are left excluded from historically excluded from the higher education and higher education. And within our field of advancement. So let's do the work to change that. And our president has called us a board of Regents is called us to do this. Our senior vice president and her leadership team is working. I'm really proud to give it kudos to my my direct boss who reports to the senior vice president, Julie Brown, who has backed up this work in support of this work and advocated for this work across the institution. And she's an associate vice president. And I am just, you know, without the support of leadership this is really this would make our work much more difficult. We would spend most of our time trying to convince our leadership this is important. And so having the support of leadership to make enterprisewide deep lasting change or our organization or the institution and or most importantly, our students who are going to change the world, this is what we to researchers, our faculty, we are doing great work and we need to support it with that sense of of with the young better than anything we do and and we have the support to do so. With that, I thank you all for the time presentation and I think we have space for questions. Do we have time for a question? Yes, I think we have time for a couple questions. First of all, thank you both so much for that presentation. First question, can you share some suggestions on how to encourage leadership to implement 360 reviews? And if you have any recommendations on if budget and resources are the main reason why they are implemented, A lot of them are not implemented because of budget and resources, But there are ways that you can do a deeper accountability review and that could be with your senior vice presidents. Do you know the budget for do 60 reviews can be expensive Sometimes folks do it every other year or they do a different type of review, a deeper review into DNI practices or review materials, or ask for more evidence. The work that's being done to move forward in their performance review. So there are few ways to just understand or get to the conversation about the work that leadership is doing. That may include a 3060 review not included Physics review review includes some other tactics of of and lines of questions that are within the review that they fill out. So there's a there are a few other tactics I'm happy to discuss with everybody. I think my contact information is on case. It's anybody want to go into deeper discussion about what these tactics are. But there are there are the this the budget is a constraint. Now if the will is not there, that's a different conversation. All right. Let's do one more. What are some approaches to cultivate and maintain safe spaces? I've observed a reluctance to promote spaces as safe unless we can guarantee that they are, which is difficult to do. And this gets more complicated when we consider everyone as it's as a different stage of learning. And some people are not committed to learning and can cause harm in safe spaces, I can I can start to answer them. But please, your voice is valuable here because you talk about this quite a bit. And I never I could never guarantee a safe space. I'm a director and I can I can say I even as me personally can say that I will always do my best. I may cause I may cause harm. Anybody has a potential to cause harm in any space. So that is that is the true what you can do is set up norms within before a gathering or meeting to reduce the possibility of causing harm and norms. I mean, I do that. I do norms workshops with teams within our organization. So it's it's a co-created space. You say this is how we agree to interact. This is how we agree to move our conversations forward. And this is how we agree to resolve issues. We acknowledge there are power imbalances, there are lot of ways to create norms or set or I guess rules and not rules. I call them norms because we want to embed it in the culture. But creating a culture where you do acknowledge or understand and that people understand the impact of the harm that they've caused, that they have caused harm. There are a lot of ways to do that. The other thing is by developing caucus space or urges are developed by affinity. And one of the reasons was because folks might feel safe in conversation. We have a white allies group that they self-organize and get together and have their conversations so that they can work out and talk about and they actually intentionally talk about microaggressions, bias, barriers to their leadership, and about barriers to their so to to getting and moving the culture forward. So that's called focusing or intentional intentional caucusing by affinity. And that is a safe space based on identity. It is it has to be done very carefully in order for, again, harm reduction. But there are a lot of ways to think you have to be intentional and take time. A lot of times safety and bringing everybody together and they're sort of and throwing them into a conversation that's very deep, nuanced, emotional and potentially traumatic is is not the intentional, thoughtful approach that that is required with with the work or conversation or learning environments. Sometimes it needs to be caucusing, sometimes it needs to be some other approaches. And those are two that I can offer. There are lots more in terms of creating six Basically want to add to that? No, I just think that's perfect. And I would say with everything that Leilani is saying, the most important thing is that it has to be consistent with norms and really expectations that you are creating and all of your meetings and all of your, you know, retreats and whatever it is that you're having that they should they should be expected, as you stay consistent, as a leader, as a facilitator, whatever your role is in kind of gathering employees together in these spaces, it's it's you read your norms, but you read them every meeting and you do them all the time. And so that it becomes, you know, it's just the norm for people and it becomes, you know, like clockwork. And it's not something that's for new employees to come in. They expect it. And it's familiar because you've talked about it in interviews. And for people who have been here 20 years, you know, change management is difficult, but, you know, after a while that they expect it. And so I think the key is to be consistent and and to create spaces where this is the expected way that we are going to create a safe space and so that people understand that, oh, as quickly to that, in our meetings, in our equity Council meetings, we always get people that like people can leave the meeting if they don't feel comfortable at any time. People can we have a safe person, There's somebody that somebody can reach out to if they want to opt out of a breakout room that hasn't been utilized in that space. We created a real sense of community there, but there has been spaces where it's been needed and in other conversations. So we do there are a number of practices or ways that we try to increase the likelihood of safety and never guarantee that somebody is not going to be harmed, nor should I. Thank you all so much. We still have questions that we weren't able to get to. So I just want to remind everyone that we are more than welcome to finish this conversation in the conference community. It's a great place to connect and keep these thoughts going, but I want to be conscious of everyone's time. So I just want to say thank you so much to Leilani and for such a great presentation, and thank you to all of our attendees for joining. And before you go from haven't yet completed the session evaluation, please do so. And now we can return to the agenda for our final session of the day. But thank you both so much. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for attending.

diversity

equity

inclusion

DEI

University Advancement

employee resource groups

DEI training

leadership programs

safe spaces