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However, we’re going back to the first principle here - doing the same thing hasn’t yielded very good results in community consultations. So maybe it’s actually costing us more money than it should, and it’s time to try something different.

In the last post, we talked about how municipalities tend to default to the same mechanisms for public consultations - online call outs for engagement which results in the same people showing up again and again and again. We identified some of the barriers that other community members may face. In this post, we talk about what happens when attempts are made to expand the consultation reach and how this can perpetuate harm.

We’re not here to kill the vibe, but when done without an equity lens, public consultations or engagements run by government are at best, perfunctory and ineffectual and at worse, perpetuate harm. How? We’ll explain.

Creating strong naming principles, policies and frameworks that are embedded in equity are an important step to reducing the likelihood of future renaming. Places reflect the lives of the ever changing communities around them, and the changing nature of the world and celebrate everyone, not just a few. 

We are rapidly moving towards a future where the ability to assess the outputs and process of your work, understand who it is serving, who it is disenfranchising, and how to course correct - will no longer be a nice to have niche, but a necessity. At QuakeLab, we call this equity as a technical skill.

Much like science, technology, math, and STEM in general, finance and accounting has often been positioned as an industry and discipline that exists in a vacuum untouched, unobstructed and unaffected by power, oppression and inequity. The going argument is that this field sits on a mathematical foundation that cannot be biased or inequitable. But if you’ve been with us a while, you know that inequity doesn’t respect our organizational boundaries and more importantly, our workplaces often (if not always), reflect the inequity of the world.

In an effort to inject workplaces with the kind of equitable systems that we at QuakeLab champion, those who are doing the work have become scared and dismissive of the hard things that are normal and ok in the workplace. This does not mean that we rid ourselves of the critical analysis of our workplaces that ensures that even when we are doing the hard things, they are done equitably. Rather it means that we must be solid enough in our efforts for justice and equity to understand that there is a difference.

In this blog, we’ll be walking you through what to look for before diving into DEI work, where we recommend jumping in enthusiastically, and when to seriously consider being deeply cautious whether or not you go forward.

Unfortunately, if your DEI approach has been focused on diversification (recruitment), economic instability and hiring freezes means you’re left with a DEI plan that's all bark no bite. 

But not all is lost, here’s what DEI in a recruitment-light world looks like!

At work, we have many competing priorities, and it can seem like putting a small section of our limited budget towards an annual unconscious bias training can be a small action moving us in the right direction. But we promise, it’s not. The truth is that substantial changes to behavior and biases do not occur because of a mandatory learning session once a year. Change in behavior often requires a lot more commitment to sustained learning than most workplaces can commit to or are equipped to deliver.