Co-Creating Inclusion is a diversity, equity, and inclusion firm with a focus on shifting culture and driving equity through strategic consulting, leadership & team development, workshop facilitation, and business integration.
Our mission is to help people, teams, and organizations create culture transformation through inclusion and belonging in order to co-create the conditions where all can thrive and do their best, most fulfilling and most impactful work.
We love being in conversation.
And believe it or not, we love having the hard conversations and saying the things that we’ve all been taught should go unsaid about race and identity and power and privilege, about patriarchy and white supremacy culture, about capitalism and systems of oppression.
We believe in the power of truth telling.
We believe in the power of truth telling because we know that you can’t change what you can’t name.
And it’s also exhausting and difficult work.
Because it’s exhausting and difficult work, we laugh a lot and find joy and healing in the process where we can - the joy of speaking the truth and being present to all emotions, the joy of taking a tiny part in undoing systems of oppression, and the joy of creating aha moments, new understandings and facilitating transformation that benefits us all.
As DEI consultants, we are proudly and intentionally a team of women and gender-expansive people of color.
This means we bring not just our professional experiences but our lived experiences having spent much of our careers working in organizations like yours.
We know what it’s like to be dismissed, devalued, overlooked or characterized as divisive for speaking up when in fact we care deeply and passionately for the organizations we work for and with.
We know what it’s like to be used as workhorses and to take on, sometimes entirely voluntarily, sometimes without being given a choice, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by default, the invisible work of emotional labor, caretaking, community building and administrative grunt work that still disproportionately falls on women, especially women of color, and especially Black women.
We know what it’s like to be hired to do a job and then punished for doing it.
We also know what it’s like to be complicit in behaviors, even as we are harmed by them.
As women and gender-expansive people of color, we have the ability to build trust with those who are often deeply impacted by harm in the organization.
We don’t center on leadership as our “client” as traditional consulting structures and practices would have us do.
Instead, we see your organization as our client, and we believe that centering on those who are more deeply impacted by systems of oppression is the most effective way to integrate equity and inclusion into every aspect of what you do, in alignment with your organization’s mission and to its benefit.
In other words, centering on the needs of staff is the best way to center on the needs of your organization.
But don’t worry, we are also skilled at coaching and scaffolding leadership so they can not only hear what their staff is experiencing but have tools for processing and responding with concrete actions, behavioral changes, redesigned policies and procedures, and a shift in culture that benefits everyone while creating the authentic commitment to DEI that staff crave.
Wherever you sit in your organization, once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it and you won’t want to. You and your organization will be enriched in ways that you never imagined.
We are facilitators, strategists, coaches, designers, creatives, analysts, explorers, activists, healers and change makers.
To do DEI work means to design things differently - it’s not about lending a helping hand to pull up those further down the ladder than you, nor is it about turning the ladder upside down by erasing those with privilege. It’s about taking the ladder down entirely and creating a circle where there is space for all.
Because we believe we are all inherently worthy and none of us should have to defend or prove our worth.
In the words of aboriginal activist Lilla Watson:
“If you have come to help me, you’re wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
