Co-Creating Inclusion is hiring an Administrative Coordinator!
Co-Creating Inclusion is hiring an Administrative Coordinator!

I am excited to announce that Co-Creating Inclusion is expanding and we are recruiting for an Administrative Coordinator (remote) to help support our amazing team in the impactful DEI consulting work we do for our clients.

Do you know someone who is detail-oriented, thrives on structure and optimization, and who loves to improve internal systems, structures, and processes?

Please pass along the job posting and share widely among your networks - we would love to get your referrals and recommendations!

View the job posting here or on LinkedIn.

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Co-creating inclusionAlethea FitzpatrickComment
The design studio model for DEI
The design studio model for DEI

As a former architect, some of the most engaging and enriching educational experiences I ever had were in my design studio classes in architecture school. “Project-based learning” is a concept people are more familiar with now - in fact, my kids have been in schools with project-based learning since kindergarten - but for me it was a revelation that my actual academic courses could be more interesting than extra-curriculars.

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Co-creating inclusionAlethea Fitzpatrick#equitycouncil, #iida, #designthinking, #jediactionlabComment
Collaborating with rather than deferring to HR
Collaborating with rather than deferring to HR

As DEI consultants at CCI, we are very clear that we are not HR. We are equally clear that DEI and HR need to closely collaborate - it is critical that DEI be integrated into HR practices, just as it is critical for DEI to consider the role that HR plays within the organization when it comes to creating a culture of equity, inclusion and belonging where diversity can thrive.

What we have found though is that HR is often seen as and therefore functions as the culture keepers, in other words, responsible, to varying degrees, for culture.

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Co-creating inclusionAlethea Fitzpatrick#HR, #workplace, #workplaceculture, #fearofopenconflictComment
White people gain from dismantling white supremacy culture too
White people gain from dismantling white supremacy culture too

Something that has been particularly striking to me recently in our work is how white people often have a hard time understanding what they have to gain from dismantling white supremacy.

There’s a certain approach to DEI that is about white people recognizing their privilege and that they need to give it up in order to “do the right thing.”

Often white folks have no idea what they themselves have given up or how they have been harmed in aligning with whiteness.

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Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#whitesupremacyculture, #privilege, #harmComment
Accountability rolls downwards
Accountability rolls downwards

Something that happens so often that we generally accept and take it for granted is the way that accountability rolls downwards.

What do we mean by that?

What we mean is that individuals in an organization are often held accountable for things they don’t actually have any ability or power to control and should really be the responsibility of those further up the organizational hierarchy.

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Co-creating inclusionAlethea Fitzpatrick#accountability, #hierarchy, #performance Comment
Leaders still need to lead
Leaders still need to lead

Something that often happens when leaders, white leaders in particular, “recognize their privilege” is that they react by concluding that what they need to do instead is step back, be quiet, listen to others, and let other lead.

While well-intentioned, the impact of this approach can also be harmful. When those who align with systemic and institutional power fail to use it, it leaves those who are less aligned with that power to do the work, often while feeling tokenized, unsupported, and under-resourced.

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Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#inclusiveleadership, #silence, #circlenotladderComment
Should hard work be rewarded?
Should hard work be rewarded?

For those of you following along at home, NYC public high school decisions came out this week (on Thursday after school). Miraculously and unexpectedly, decisions were released in a relatively thoughtful and orderly fashion although not without various mishaps - I’m just saying, it could have been a lot worse after going through what was for many a harrowing, complex and inequitable application process.

One discussion struck me today though and reminded me that I feel like what is often not taken into account is that some kids work hard and don’t get good grades, and some don’t work hard and do get good grades

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Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#hardwork, #impact, #schools, #education, #capitalism, #whitesupremacycultureComment
People pleasing should not consistently traumatize the people you are trying to please
People pleasing should not consistently traumatize the people you are trying to please

Lately, we have been diving into the impacts of people pleasing, and there is a lot to unravel, especially when you consider that we have all been socialized into people pleasing a little bit differently, depending on our various and intersecting identities.

We’ve been having conversations with each other on our team at CCI as well as with our clients about our identity stories through the lens of people pleasing asking questions like:

How has people pleasing shown up over the course of your life? To what extent are you or are you not a people pleaser? Have you been around people pleasers? How does this show up now in your role at work?

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Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#peoplepleasing, #externalvalidation, #psychologicalsafetyComment
Hiring your organization’s first internal DEI leader (part 4 of 4)
Hiring your organization’s first internal DEI leader (part 4 of 4)

A few weeks ago, we started what has turned into a four part blog post series on hiring an internal DEI leader and/or consultant.

Today, we are closing out the series by discussing the process of hiring an internal DEI leader, assuming your organization has considered some of the questions we’ve already raised about the stage of DEI organizational development you’re in, and whether it’s the right time to hire an internal DEI leader.

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Co-creating inclusionAlethea Fitzpatrick#deiconsultant, #internalDEIleader, #DEIskillsComment
Why DEI belongs outside HR, despite being critical to HR (part 3 of 4)
Why DEI belongs outside HR, despite being critical to HR (part 3 of 4)

More often than not, especially for small to mid-sized organizations, DEI is considered to be part of the HR function and initial DEI efforts are lead by HR.

In fact, it is often, although not always, HR that reach out to us about hiring us as DEI consultants, and we have worked successfully with many of our clients this way.

However, we are increasingly of the belief that DEI should not be conflated with HR and that it is beneficial to have DEI as a separate function from HR.

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Co-creating inclusionAlethea Fitzpatrick#HR, #humanresourcesComment
How can the process of hiring a DEI consultant itself be co-creative? (part 2 of 4)
How can the process of hiring a DEI consultant itself be co-creative? (part 2 of 4)

At Co-Creating Inclusion, we often talk about how we believe the process of creating inclusion should itself be inclusive - it’s in our name!

This is no less true even during the process of hiring a DEI consultant.

We have found that organizations often default to standard processes for “vendor procurement” that replicate existing power structures of “the client’s needs come first” and assumes a more transactional relationship where a client outlines a scope of work and then has vendors bid competitively on it.

No more.

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Co-creating inclusionAlethea Fitzpatrick#deiconsultant, #DEIworkgroup, #DEIbudgetComment
What does DEI have to do with operations?
What does DEI have to do with operations?

I know we’re a few news cycles out from the Southwest Airlines debacle over the holidays, but this post from Southwest pilot Larry Lonero titled “What happened to Southwest Airlines?” hit home for me, and I believe it’s important to keep at the forefront of our minds as we move into 2023.

Oooof. I’m sure this situation rings to true to anyone who has ever had to deal with any kind of large and flailing system, whether it’s an airline, cell phone carrier, car rental company, hospital, health insurance company, public school system, bank, or pretty much any aspect of the government.

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Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#workplace, #operations, #frontlinestaff, #feedbackComment
Willing but unable
Willing but unable

Something we encounter in our DEI work with client organizations is what we have started calling “willing but unable” - folks who really want to do the hard work of integrating DEI into everything they do but are unable to do so.

Of course, every time we say that, I find myself thinking, but are they really willing, though?

And if they are so willing, what is getting in the way?

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Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#willingbutunable, #oneofthegoodones, #whitesupremacyculture, #collectiveliberationComment
Willful negligence
Willful negligence

We’re down to the wire in this dystopian process known as the NYC public high school admissions process.

It’s hard to explain exactly how complex and overwhelming this process is, from uncertainty as to whether we would be returning to the pre-covid schedule or the more delayed covid schedule (it’s the earlier pre-covid schedule - but this was only announced two weeks before applications opened!) to the undecipherable hexadecimal “lottery” number that each student is assigned that is a) very hard to find and b) once you find it, impossible to understand what it means based solely off information shared by the DOE.

And that is barely the tip of the iceberg of what is confusing about this process. In fact, I don’t think you could make the process more confusing or stressful if you tried.

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Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#education, #schools, #systemsofoppressionComment
When a culture is designed around its leader
When a culture is designed around its leader

There has been a post circulating about a certain CEO of a certain social media platform who seems to be rapidly running it into the ground, whether deliberately because of a hidden agenda or through sheer incompetence or both.

The post is by someone who was an intern at one of this CEO’s other companies, and they talk about how managing this person was a huge part of the company culture.

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Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#workplace, #workplaceculture, #managingup, #feedbackComment