Beyond Training: Creating Learning Experiences for Lasting DEI Impact

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you to achieve engagement for hosting this event. I'm Elise Smith. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Praxis Labs, uh, at the highest level, Praxis Labs. As an immersive learning and development company, we're focused on helping build inclusive leadership skills across large and small enterprises. Um, and like Zach, I am so excited for this conversation. I'm glad you've joined us. Uh, and I am going to make an assumption if you're on the line or listening to the recording, you're here because you care about driving DEI outcomes, and you are a believer that l and d has a role to play in helping achieve those outcomes. Uh, and what's beautiful is you are not the only one. I agree with you. So do your brilliant panelists, Lisa and Jarvis. Uh, but I also think what makes this webinar and this community, everyone who's watching live and later so special is we are in this together. We're coming out of a year where we've seen pushback, we've seen questioning, and we're still here. We're still doing the work. And like Zach said, we have the opportunity to learn from each other, to support each other, and helping to create more inclusive workplaces and communities, helping develop our teams to celebrate different perspectives, to see each other, and to solve the, the most pressing business challenges in front of them. So I echo Zach, please keep adding your name, your role, your company, uh, your LinkedIn, in the chat, say, hi, what brought you here, what you're working on, so we can all continue to grow our network. We can all support each other, all of the folks who are doing this work day in and day out. So with that said, let's dive in. Uh, we have two wonderful humans with us today. I have questions for these folks, but we'll open it up to q and a, so add those in the chat as well. Uh, I think the best place to start is always to just learn more about, uh, the panelists that we have. And so, uh, I would love if Lisa and Jarvis, you could both share a little bit more about yourself, your career journey, what brought you to this work, uh, at the intersection of DEI and L and D, and maybe I'll start with you, Lisa. Thank you, Elise. Good. I got it set up. Usually I'm talking and I'm on mute. We got that figured out early. That's one of my greatest talents, by the way. Anyways, um, thank you for having us here. So pleased to be a part of this conversation. Um, I work for westat. I've been with WESTAT for almost three years now. We are headquartered in Rockville, Maryland. I am one of the remote employees. I'm actually located in Long Island. I saw someone mention that they're from Ottawa. I'm, I'm from Toronto, so we're neighbors welcome. Um, but, uh, like I mentioned, I've been with the company just for a little while. I will say that last year we actually celebrated our 60th anniversary. That was exciting. Uh, it was a great year for us overall. Um, in general, as a research company, our mission at a very high level is really just to improve lives through research. And that's what we really are committed to doing. Um, we are largely a government contractor and everything that that implies, um, but also I think worth noting is that we're are an employee owned company. Um, I had never worked for one before. So pleased to be working for one now. Um, I just think that it helps us to prioritize our employees because our employees are our stakeholders. So it's a very unique environment in that sense. Since, um, I will also note that we are very new to our DEI journey. Um, I would say we started formalizing, um, DEI within WestEd, probably around 2020. Um, and whereas 2020 may be a reasonable amount of time for companies that started maybe two years earlier, you know, like I said, we've been around for 60 years and have started to, to kind of formalize this. So we're, we're new on our journey, so we're learning a lot of lessons. Um, and I think that really starting this journey was driven by a few different events, um, or factors rather. Um, I would say the George Floyd event for like, a lot of people really had people stop and think, sit back and think about, okay, how are we gonna approach our work? Um, also we have very vocal employees. I think that's related to the fact that, like I said, we're an employee owned, uh, company. Um, I love the amount of engagement that comes with being a part of an employee owned company and, um, a change in leadership. So we had some changes and just leaders who were particularly, um, committed to DEI and, um, how to, how that should be defined within our company. Um, and I'll stop there. I don't have to take up all the time. You're dropping so many gems we're gonna pick up and to like the exact later. But I'm curious, you personally, what brought you on this journey? How did you get to DEI and L and D? Um, I began really in l and d. Um, but I will say early on I had, um, interests in, in, in just in DEII mean group. As a black woman, how could you not? You see things from a certain perspective, you wonder do other people see it? Um, and if they don't, how do I make them them see it? Um, I did, uh, my doctorate at Rutgers University. My dissertation topic was on, um, interviewing and negotiation skills among black professionals. I knew that in general, you know, black professionals make less money than white professionals. And really just trying to dissect that, get a sense of why that is, um, to what role do we maybe play because we don't have certain connections or we don't have certain knowledge, or we're not maybe as, as, uh, as connected in terms of learning how to negotiate and so forth. So what role does maybe the organization play? What role, you know, can we ch change or, or what dynamics can we change in order to kind of get ourselves up on a le a level playing field? And that, that's really what drove that. And so I've always kind of had a foot both in, in l and D and in DEI, and this is really the first time that I've had the opportunity to bring them together. And it's just been something that's been happening, I think, for a long time. Oh, Lisa, thank you so much for sharing. And it sounds like it's both personal, it's intellectual, um, and it's the work you do now. So excited to dive in. Jarvis, will you share a little bit more about yourself, your career journey, what brought you to the intersection of DEI and L and D? Absolutely, Elise, it's such a great pleasure to be joining you. So thank you so much to you and the practice team as well as the team at Achieve Engagement. So I currently run a DEI consulting agency called the Rainbow Disruption, where we partner with a number of Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, and nonprofit organizations to help them recognize the capability and potential of what happens when diversity, equity, and inclusion and belonging are truly integrated and embedded in systems and processes within organizations. Uh, I've been in the space for a little over a decade now. So prior to launching my own firm, I served as the Chief Diversity Equity and Inclusion Officer for Nike, where I was for about five years in a variety of different roles. Uh, before that I served as Snapchat's very first head of De and I out in la. And then prior to that was at Google as part of their diversity and recruitment teams. Uh, but ultimately started my career with Deloitte as a strategy and operations consultant. I'm originally from the great city of Houston, Texas. I see a couple of shout outs, uh, in the chat there. And currently they'll reside both in Portland, Oregon and la. Uh, for me, my passion for this work, uh, is really threefold. First, I did a lot of coursework. I I did my undergrad degree at Rice and then my grad degree at Brown. And as part of my coursework there, I was looking at academic approaches to how we apply elements of DEI to certain industries. I saw a gap though, in the way academic institutions were talking about the work, how society engages with

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