At Experience Institute, we believe transformational learning is for everyone. Diversity of thought and experience is what leads to better neighborhoods, cities, companies, and institutions. Part of establishing experience as a credible form of learning is making sure that our work itself is helping to transform the education and learning landscape, and that our programs welcome and empower people of all backgrounds.
We want to build a place that has anti-racist bones, and is accountable to BIPOC communities. That means evaluating, and asking experts in this field to evaluate, our own policies and ways of working. When inequities within our policies, systems, programs, and services are revealed — which will happen — we’ll roll up our sleeves and address them.
Here are things we are doing, and things we are working to do more of:
We believe anti-racism starts with leaders. Our core team, which is presently majority white, spends time each week and quarter learning about our own biases and how they show up, consciously or subconsciously. This initiative is spearheaded by three leaders in the DEI space who’ve agreed to not only help us further our learning but hold us accountable for integrating that learning into changed practices.
We are purposefully expanding our community so we can build a more diverse team of educators and company leaders. And we’re developing a system for being more intentional and conscious of our own biases during the hiring, promoting, or evaluating process. Finally, we take time to train our facilitators on equitable practices within education contexts.
We work to create an environment where everyone on our team can thrive. One of the things we’re focusing on is perfectionism. We believe that perfectionism is a dominant cultural value that centers a “right way” of doing things, perpetuating a white supremacist status quo and keeping us from being able to explore new ideas, learn from our diverse experiences, and bring our full creative selves to our work. We acknowledge that mistakes are part of the creative process, that feedback is best delivered on projects in draft form vs the final cut, and that no one person has all of the answers.
As a small company, agility is important. Still, we are working on moving more slowly so we can do thoughtful work that takes into consideration the impact of our actions and decisions on the communities we’re striving to be accountable to.
We price our programs to be accessible to all learners while also enabling us to care for and compensate our incredible team well.
Most print and visual materials project whiteness as the norm. We work to reflect an array of diverse examples, stories, and characters in the materials we use and produce.
We don’t want these efforts to just be words on a page. We’re committing to generating and aggregating quantitative and qualitative data to track progress toward tour diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.
We advocate for policies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. And we’re going to raise our voices when we see systems and policies that create inequity, oppression and disparity.
We give to organizations that are on the front lines of this work. And we hope to pool resources to expand educational offerings for marginalized communities by connecting with other education organizations in our community committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.