An Honest and Open Letter to the D&I Community
And an invitation to a panel and open discussion
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Dear Fellow D&I Practitioners and Enthusiasts,
My name is Pema Lin, and I’m the Head of People at Medium. I joined this organization about a year ago, and I’ve had the privilege of working with our employee-driven and cross-functional Diversity and Inclusion Committee whose mission is to increase, promote, and improve diversity and inclusion at Medium.
We aspire to become a more inclusive and diverse company, but we’ve been working largely in our own bubble, and with mixed results. Some of our initiatives have gone really well. For example our book club has led to great relationship and community building within our organization. Other initiatives have stalled out: figuring out productive ways for the committee to get involved in our recruiting operation.
Midway through 2018, I started to feel like I had run out of energy and ideas around D&I. I sensed that my fellow committee members were also growing restless: frustrated by our lack of concrete action and results in terms of increasing the diversity of our employee community at senior levels, particularly when it comes to Black, African American, Hispanic, or Latin representation. See our 2018 Diversity Report here. We have the data, but we need to get better at taking action that yields better results.
There is so much to be gained by reaching out to the broader D&I community, yet we haven’t been tapping into this collective wisdom. During one of our committee meetings, we asked ourselves, “Why aren’t we asking for help? Why aren’t we sharing what we’ve learned with other organizations? Surely others have stories and experiences that we could learn from? How do we reignite our passion and energy around D&I? How do we stay curious when this conversation is so hard?”
Maybe you’ve felt this same restlessness and isolation at some point in your respective journeys. We want to hear from you.
One of my goals for 2019 is to better connect with others who are passionate about diversity and inclusion — people who range from D&I professionals, consultants, researchers, and enthusiast to those who drive change through influence within their organizations (e.g. ERG leads, team members on committees) to share ideas, challenges, and wins, and to learn from each other.
We’re creating a safe space for smart and passionate people to come together and to ask hard questions, share experiences and insights, and to learn from one another. This will be in the form of an event that we’ll host, and we hope it will be the first of many.
The Medium D&I Committee is hosting a gathering on February 13, 2019 at 6pm in San Francisco. If you are committed to increasing and promoting diversity and inclusion at your company or in tech, in general, we’d like to send you an invitation to join our evening of lively yet judgment-free conversation. Please reserve your ticket here as soon as possible, as space is limited. Even if you aren’t able to attend this event, we’d love to be connected. We’ll also make sure to share out any key insights and learnings from our conversations and post those to Medium in future posts.
The format of the event will be as follows:
6–6:45 Networking (there will be food & beverages)
6:45–7:45 Moderated Panel
7:45–8:45 Breakout discussions
Thank you all for reading, and we hope you’ll join us.
Best Regards,
Pema
