Brave Spaces: Advancing DEI/AR Thinking in True North Boards

As part of our organizational goal to dismantle structural racism and embed Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Anti-Racism (DEI/AR) thinking in our every day practices, we introduced a new probing question to the Coaching Kata in the Our People Pillar: ‘what are the differences by race; ethnicity; and language (REAL)?’.

Our employees come from diverse backgrounds and bring with them rich cultural, social, and intellectual traditions that make our organization great.  However, we know that not everyone has the same access to decision-making, resources and opportunity in our society and our data shows that disparities at BCH are often impacted by our employees’ race, ethnicity and language.

In accordance with our PRIDE values, our goal is to cultivate a culture that encourages collaboration, flexibility, and fairness to enable individuals to contribute to their full potential.  When we advance diversity, equity and inclusion we impact our team members’ sense of Belonging which directly impacts their engagement and productivity.

By introducing DEI principles into our True North Boards and hardwiring DEI into our True North Board thinking, we are developing structures and strategies to equip leaders with the ability to manage diversity, be accountable, measure results, refine approaches on the basis of such data, and institutionalize a culture of inclusion.

In order to advance this thinking, managers must have the capacity to hold Brave Spaces in order to facilitate conversations about inequities related to REAL.  We have included a number of resources in this toolkit to support these efforts.