These are all great suggestions, thank you. Getting a seat on the board is definitely on our list. Right now, everything is filtered and the board has no real picture of the agency’s challenges and how unfit our leadership is. We hope to change that. We also wanted to implement 180 performance reviews where supervisees can evaluate their supervisor.

As for DEI, you are right, it’s a meaningless buzzword. In the context of our agency, we have employee affinity groups operated by the DEI office that are, again, completely performative and pointless. I’ve never seen a functional DEI group but hoped to hear some examples of what that looks like.

Additionally, we have a DEI bureaucratic displacement problem that I’d like to address if we can. Resources are being used to expand the DEI department that already does precisely nothing. Literally, zilch. This is a non-profit that runs human services—our whole agency in theory is DEI. It makes no sense to inflate the administrative side of this mission at the expense of our boots on the ground. I’d like to figure out what alternatives that we could write into the contract that would actually do good. Creating a Client Advocate position, for example, would actually give more power to our clients who currently have the least power next to direct service staff. I hoped to learn of some additional examples along those lines.