Dear DEI, nice to meet you.
Surprisingly for me, as soon as I started to write this reflection I realized that Diversity, Inclusion and Equity as well as Bias were kind of unknown words for me until I moved to the US and specifically to San Francisco. When I arrived I was looking for organizations and jobs I could join, as it is well known, I immediately noticed most of the companies that are based in this city involve Technology. As someone that has always been freelancing and consulting projects involved with Social Impact, Education and Human Centered Design, it was not an easy transition to see myself in a big corporate as I really needed to find a positive and transformative way to how the work was done, in order to actually feel interested in joining any project.
Throughout that period I discovered the meaning of the concepts I mentioned at the beginning, as well as the transformational and impactful possibilities that any People and Social Responsibility team could achieve inside any company. Immediately, I felt really inspired by the roles I came across. Unfortunately because of my migration status for two and a half years I was in a “Change of status” state where I was not allow to get a job, but in the meantime, I had the chance to analyze my personal path, long enough to be aware that most of my career, the pillars of my projects had been unconsciously Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
But why could I have this lack of conceptual awareness? I assumed it was perhaps related to cultural and social differences. This does not necessarily mean that DEI ideas were not a popular concern of the societies and countries I lived in, but the awareness and common knowledge related to them was being communicated and exposed with different words and values such as empathy, tolerance and respect. I used these concepts as my daily tools working as a designer and facilitator focused on social justice and changemaking. Because of these roles, I found myself in a very privileged position to constantly work hand by hand with communities like Middle east refugees in Europe, collectives with different kinds of disabilities, South American indigenous tribes, Black and Latinx communities, just to mention a few.
It was just a matter of time and the combination of the experience working with these powerful communities with the realization of how underrepresented some of these communities were, that my unintended relation with DEI values and power originated. Through each new challenge that involved people with different backgrounds that were supposed to be working and collaborating together, I definitely needed to learn ways to let aside, as much as possible, my own bias to set myself as an empathetic listener to be ready to accept from an equal and fair position anyone’s opinion, idea or suggestion empowering and acknowledging their own unique and authentic experiences and perspectives. Improving this openness made it possible for me, in most cases, to achieve the objective of creating and facilitating safe and trustworthy spaces for all. Creating synergies and meaningful connections between diverse groups of people while they accomplished collective common goals.
I might say my approach to reduce social prejudices in a group, strengthening diversity and inclusive spaces, has been based on collective dialogues. Arranging specific moments for everyone to share their stories, knowledge and voice. I learned about the significance and power of collective dialogues, spending some weeks with an indigenous tribe in the Amazonas, they used dialogue as a community healing tool as well as an empathy creator. Finally, I wanted to emphasize the role of sharing stories to mitigate bias, because my own experience has shown me that the moment someone shares something, in some cases, something that makes them vulnerable with a group, it is more difficult for prejudice and hatred to appear than when there is no other information than one’s limited bias about that person.
Written with love by Valeria Ler.
