Powered By Diversity

At Powered By Diversity we've been so heartened to see our customers *doubling down* on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) work in response to the direct attack beginning in the USA. Despite the redoubling of efforts amongst our customers, we don't doubt that there will be some companies in the UK in which EDI is challenged - what do you think the main challenges will be for you this year? If you can't see an option that fits, feel free to comment below. If you feel safer responding confidentially over email please do so via lisa@poweredbydiversity.org.

We love the learning and sharing on LinkedIn. Yasar Ahmad thank you for this wonderful post. 📚 Learning 👂Listening 👄Asking Questions 🦸♂️ Allyship 🤔 Being positively curious Cat Wildman Karen Blake Ingrid Tingle Lisa Cater

Following on from yesterday's post about how EDI is going nowhere my second reason it's not going anywhere is *How would you even BEGIN to roll back EDI?* Because the only kind of EDI that can be "rolled back" is rubbish EDI. Rubbish EDI looks like a boring, corporate video about why EDI matters, a few awareness sessions in the year and a meaningless statement on the company website. Maybe a dusty policy. Rubbish EDI definitely *should* be rolled back. Roll it back immediately! REAL DIVERSITY is focussing on bringing in people that think differently to one another so that (amongst other things): ⚽ Instead of creating a postage stamp sized batch of ideas you can create a football pitch sized one.  🧠 Instead of being able to get inside the minds of a tiny sliver of customers you can get into the minds of a huge wedge of them.  😬 Instead of releasing something into the public domain which hits the headlines for all the wrong reasons, those things get caught early, in-house by people on your team who say "we can't put that out". Bringing in 'diversity' with no idea why, definitely should be rolled back, because those hires will enter your business and either be miserable about the non inclusive culture - or exit right out again. Costing you money.  REAL EQUITY is focussing on making sure your employees are on a level playing field because if you don't, they won't be able to work to their full strengths. 👨💼 👨💼 👨💼 Instead of making everyone work in exactly the same way regardless of whether that makes their job 10x harder or not.   💡 Instead of not being open to trying a new idea to help one person that actually ends up being amazing for everyone (revolving doors, text messages, wheels on suitcases...)  🚉 Instead of making everyone come into the office 5 days a week regardless of whether that makes half your workforce immediately get on LinkedIn to look for different jobs - or become completely resentful and unproductive. REAL INCLUSION is recognising people for who they are and what they bring - and wanting more of it. 👬 Instead of moulding everyone into a carbon copy of [their manager, the CEO] in order to get ahead in the company.  🍪 Instead of "hiring for fit" regardless of whether it takes new hires 50% of their energy being a professional actor to maintain the front.  👀 Instead of making everyone get to their outcomes in exactly the same way regardless of whether their way would be way better, faster and potentially lead to better outcomes. This is REAL EDI and it's almost impossible to "roll back". Plus those who are doing it would never want to, because they have an engaged and enthusiastic workforce who want to stay at the company and continue to give it the competitive edge. 🤷♀️ Thoughts on reason 2 welcome. Lisa Cater Dawn Morton-Young Alice Pelton Michelle Gyimah Clare Willetts Dave Williams Karen Blake Lianne Baker Stacey Heanue Leon Walker LL.B Grace M. Kevin Withane (FRSA) Richard Sanders

Quite a few people recently (not from the EDI world) have been asking me if I'm freaking out about what's going on in the USA with regards to EDI - fair, considering that I run an EDI company (Powered By Diversity). There are three reasons I'm completely calm because I know that EDI is here to *stay*. Here's reason 1 (I will post reason 2 & 3 another time because otherwise this post will be too long :-) 1) What's happening in the USA is a temporary backlash driven by a small but very powerful group of people who view EDI as a personal threat. The reason I am not worried, is that this group is driven by capitalism and they'll soon see that money walks. UK businesses are wise enough to know that not only is antiracism the right thing to do, they also know that the Black British community has a spending power of 300 billion pounds and together, the Black, Asian and Multi-Ethnic consumer segments have a whopping £4.5 billion *disposable* income to spend every year. UK businesses are keeping focus on accessibility because it's good to include everyone, but they also know that the spending power of disabled people and their households in the UK is estimated to be around £274 billion per year. Yes they are holding events for women and talking about menopause because it needs awareness, but they also know that women aged 40–60 spend £92bn annually, plus, 93% of them make most or all of the purchasing decisions in their households. That's just the spending power of 4 groups. There are a lot more that will take their cash elsewhere if companies start copying some of the wild behaviour that's happening in America. So that's reason 1 why I am not worried that what's going on in the US will happen here. Feel free to comment - I'm always here for the conversation. Lisa Cater Dawn Morton-Young Ian Timbrell Jo Major (She/her) Virginia Méndez Mesón Suraiya Rasheed Andy Ayim MBE Jo Brassington Alice Hargreaves Mike Mansfield Alice Kinder Veronica Llorca-Smith Solène Anglaret Leon Walker LL.B Data: The Black Pound | bit.ly/3EHLfPh The Purple Pound | bit.ly/3EvRllY Women over 40 | bit.ly/3CLXkT8 The Pink pound | bit.ly/419pgd5 The image below shows the data I gave above but on a white brick wall in more of an infographic style.

Take a load off your plate and plug into Cultural Calendar Club today - your year of live EDI events: sorted for just £2000 for the year (limited time only). Check out some tasters here: https://lnkd.in/e-KUjc4C or get in touch via cat@poweredbydiversity.org today. #Events #Equity #Inclusion #Speakers #Calendar #CulturalCalendar #InternationalWomensDay Lisa Cater

Later in the month we will be hosting the fantastic Khushboo Patel Monks to raise awareness of Endometriosis, for Powered By Diversity Cultural Calendar Club. Have you heard of endometriosis? Neither had Khushboo until a few years ago, and it turns out she’s had the condition since the age of 9! Drawing from personal experience, Khushboo will navigate through the complexities of living with endometriosis, shedding light on the physical, emotional, and social impact of this often misunderstood condition. Wednesday 19th Feb 2025 12:00 - 13:00 https://lnkd.in/e7apnptE

"People that come from these underrepresented communities, we've been able to dream about a place in these organisations that our parents couldn't..." Thanks again to our good friend Leon Walker LL.B who took the Cultural Calendar Club mic this week for #RaceEqualityWeek - he filled everyone with his optimism! We are so proud to be working with so many amazing customers who understand that the way to run a great business is different ideas, fairness and employees who feel wanted in the company. This is EDI and we LOVE it! 🫳 🎤 Transcript of the video: I spent a long time looking for role models and then I figured that when I couldn't find them, I'd just be that for someone else. You can become cynical but I would say, you can also come out of it and become incredibly optimistic I mean the fact we're having this conversation...and hopefully you'll share my optimism about what we can be - because every one of these people on this call can be a leader of a change - if they're given the right guidance. I think the rhetoric has become more negative as in 'what do I get out of investing in the work?' and yet, if you ask us, people that come from these underrepresented communities, we've been able to dream about a place in these organisations that our parents couldn't - and then you say 'actually the organisation's getting nothing' well from a Black person's perspective, you know, it took us 400 years to get here, give us some time'.

If you've ever had the pleasure of meeting Jamie Shields you'll know what we mean when we say his energy is infectious. We're so proud to have had him as our opening speaker for Cultural Calendar Club way back in January 2023 - and his event still gets mentioned to us now! Some of our Cultural Calendar Club events make people want to stand up and shout "NO MORE", most make people want to do something - *anything* to help change the world, and some of them make something like disability inclusion seem so easy - and exciting - that you can almost see the smoke coming off the audience's pens and they make notes. To unlock a whole year (of 24+) incredible events like Jamie's for your whole organisation from just £2000 (for the YEAR) get in touch today via lisa@poweredbydiversity.org today. Jamie packed SO many tips into his amazing event that we made a crib sheet for Cultural Calendar Club members (and friends) to take away and implement. You can see it here 👉 https://lnkd.in/ezcpBnpf About the video: After the title stinger which shows our 2025 Cultural Calendar Club speakers and logo popping in to some jaunty tunes, Jamie Shields appears talking to camera. He is a white man with short, brown hair and a brown beard. He's wearing headphones and a blue shirt, sitting in a cozy-looking lamp-lit room. Transcript of the video: Jamie says: "And I was registered as blind. I know there's a Zoom in front of me but I could not tell you what's going on on that camera. If there's something on the screen, I'm going to come up to the screen like this [Jamie gets right up to the screen] and you're going to see that I need botox. I genuinely believe that the best way to share the message around anything DEI is to have people with lived experience driving those conversations. People with disabilities...we go through our daily lives, and we face barriers that you possibly wouldn't imagine if you don't have a disability yourself. I tell people I'm disabled by society and when I say 'society disables us' it is everything from online to your social media to your marketing to your environments that you've created in organisations and to the very culture that we talk about being inclusive. It disables people with disabilities because we don't invite those people into the conversation we don't bring them to the table and we don't say 'what barriers do you identify here?' 98 per cent of the world's top 1 million websites aren't accessible."

We Start February and Race Equality Week with the amazing Leon Walker LL.B on Monday the 3rd Feb, 12-1pm. DM if you would like to attend or sign your whole company up! #CulturalCalendar #LiveEvents Cat Wildman Ingrid Tingle Karen Blake

We don't do "echo chambers" or "surface level" here at Powered By Diversity. 🤨 Is there anything worse than giving your time to an event which is just an ego flex for the speaker - or where they stay in 'safe mode', just aiming to get through to the end with no feathers 🦅 ruffled? We only hand pick the speakers who actively want people to walk away from their events having really ❤️🔥 felt 🧠 something. We're still thinking about Hillary Reay's Cultural Calendar Club event from yesterday...how an event all about telling your story 📖 can deliver such a sucker punch to the feels, we may never know - but Hillary delivers it every time. Check her out in the video here 👇 and if you're curious about Cultural Calendar Club for your organisation, give us a shout in DMs - or check out our lineup at https://lnkd.in/eVDEi7N7. If you hurry you can get in in time for Race Equality Week with Leon Walker LL.B which is definitely going to be one not to miss. The Transcript of the video is: "I'm Hillary Reay and since 2009 I have been getting up on stages, telling stories from my own life. When I started doing that I realised, not only did I find my voice and find the stories I wanted to tell, but I saw how story telling changed my life - and can change other people's lives as well - when they have the opportunity to understand who they are and figure out what story they want to share. That phrase "Tell your story; Change your life" can feel like, really, overwhelming, or a big ask or a big transformation that can take place, but personal storytelling really has the power to do that - especially in a professional setting. Once you get to know yourself and get to know the stories you want to share and build that trust in who you're communicating to, it really can change your life. I believe it. I've seen it. I've experienced it." #Storytelling #events #HR #EDI #CulturalCalendar Lisa Cater Jo Major (She/her) Fab Giovanetti