Balancing Act
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Liminal
By Alicja Peszkowska and Ella Weldon
PHOTO by John Schaidler on Unsplash
Bringing together a diversity of people and information, can result in better ideas and outcomes than through a more homogenous community or via any single individual. Yet we know that fostering diversity is only valuable in so much that inclusive and equitable practices foster the space for diverse perspectives to be heard, valued and included.
The Liminal community was founded upon this concept of collective intelligence and so we have wanted our community to have a high degree of diversity on many different dimensions - not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is the best thing to do as well. This post outlines our process of reflecting on diversity, equity and inclusion within our community and includes some of our lessons learned.
Our Starting Point
Within any group of people, be it a community, organisation or business, it is worthwhile reflecting on and confronting the broader societal inequalities that are inevitably visible and present in these spaces.
Zooming in on the UK, the country in which the majority of the Liminal community resides, the pandemic and the current energy crisis , are bringing income inequality into sharp focus for example.
The predominance of ‘in-work’ poverty, means that even full-time wages are not always enough for many people to meet their basic needs. The UK wage gaps shows us that you are more likely to be living under this threshold if you identify as a woman, if you are disabled, if you are black, asian, or from a ethnic minority community, if you are a migrant, if you are queer or trans, or if you come from a working class family.
Workplace and organisational diversity, equity and inclusion strategies are important in shaking up these entrenched power dynamics and redistributing resources towards a more equal world.
A few of us here at Liminal wanted to apply a lens of diversity, equity and inclusion to the community - as an act of civic responsibility. We had been feeling for a while that we could be doing better.
Photo by bamagal from Unsplash.
Who we are
We started by researching the strategies of other organisations, communities and consultants who are vocal about these topics.
But we got a bit stuck - Liminal is not your average organisation and requires a different approach. We exist without the typical structures that make up workplaces. At its core, Liminal is a community of 107 people from a range of different professions, largely united by the fact that their careers exists in the spaces inbetween, beyond clear definitions and whose interests are far reaching. Most of us are freelancers, but not all. Most of us live in Europe, but not all. Liminal has an active consultancy business, in which a bespoke team is pulled together for a project, largely in the realms of net-zero, climate-action and inclusive innovation.
It is the learning community side of Liminal in which most people are actively involved. We connect with each other on Slack, we discuss global happenings, take deeper dives into interesting topics, share music, quotes, things that inspire us, ask for advice and support and pool our networks. We get to know each other through monthly group calls and 1-on-1 coffees (if this still sounds of interest - please do get in touch and we’d be happy to share more).
Starting off in 2019 as a group of people connected in different ways to the founder Roland Harwood, the community has grown organically as a self-selection network, with community members bringing in others or by people signing up on Patreon.
What we did
These conditions meant we had to think differently about what diversity and inclusion mean here. Having worked with community building and movement-driven change in the past, we wanted to listen and listen some more, being realistic and humble about what we could achieve and commit to. This is what we did over the course of a year (please click on the + to read each section):
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As a first step, we set up a small task force who began meeting regularly to talk about these topics. One thing we felt strongly about was that it was important to work on the culture of inclusion before actively seeking more diverse voices; to try to ensure the diversity that already exists is heard.
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We ran a group activity with the purpose of exploring and recognising the value of the different roles in Liminal, asking people to share the roles they felt they played in the community. These were some that came up; Connector, Provocateur, Listener, Resistor, Quiet observer, Coach, Sponge, Sharer, Guest, Relationship builder. We did notice, as hoped, that more and different people began contributing to varied conversations on Slack.
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We set up an internship opportunity for a talented young person to grow their skill sets by working on a project, aiming to prioritise those from groups underrepresented in the professional world that Liminal works in. So far we have created one high-quality job placement and it has been a really successful initiative for both parties.
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Next, we created an anonymous survey to understand who makes up Liminal; to better grasp the different needs, experiences and expertise in the community. We also felt it would be useful and important to ground the potentially challenging conversations about diversity and inclusion in data. 43 people took the survey; 37% of the total community but more than 80% of those that are actively engaged.
Firstly, we asked people to describe themselves on dimensions of diversity including gender, race, heritage, class, sexuality, education, disability, languages spoken, profession and employment status. We purposefully kept the questions as open as possible, allowing people to define themselves instead of choosing from pre-assigned categories.
We thought particularly hard about the social class question, which is typically asked using a proxy, eventually deciding to ask ‘How would you describe your class identity?’ This was difficult and complex for many; 15% expressed not being able to or wanting to describe this.
Having totally open-ended answers resulted in pretty arduous analysis. But we thought it was worth it. One of the most interesting findings was that only two respondents used the same words (social innovation) when asked to describe their professional field. It was interesting how these seemingly different answers pointed out the liminality of people’s professional experiences which, in a way, is precisely something that brought us all together.
Secondly, we asked people to rate how diverse and inclusive they thought Liminal was and to share any other comments. We found that people were very open in sharing their experiences and feedback, which we interpreted as a real tribute to how passionate and engaged our community is.
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Once we coded, analysed and interpreted survey results, we set up some calls to include people who might have wanted to engage in a different way than a survey or say something they haven't already said. As two people who are by no means experts on these topics, we positioned ourselves as enablers. A Miro board was another way for people to participate in the conversation anonymously and asynchronously.
We found it challenging deciding how much of the survey results we should share. We didn’t want to make people isolated by displaying how much they were in a minority, or expose people to others’ potentially harmful scepticism. This is tricky and needs to be handled with grace but shouldn’t be a reason not to try.
These sessions were a mixed bag; some people shared openly, others expressed they wanted to learn more, others were sceptical. Not many people came to the sessions we organised: it might be because people felt they had already contributed in the way that was most comfortable to them via the survey.
The conversation is in no way finished. We are fans of purposeful pauses and taking the time and space needed to reflect which is what we are doing now.
What we learnt so far
We learned that many in the community perceive Liminal to be quite homogenous on many dimensions of human experience; predominantly professionally established, white, middle-class, university educated, and the data captured did largely confirm these perceptions.
This is a reflection of overlapping and systemic reasons; structural inequities across the societies and industries that we draw from, heightened by the fact that Liminal is a self-selection network and it tends to centre people who have the time and capacity to engage. It is also understandable that in professional environments certain experiences (higher education etc.) are highly valued.
But what we do think is that it's important that we acknowledge who we are as a group and the limitations that it brings to our collective worldview. Coming up with a strategy for diversity and inclusion for an organically free flowing learning community is hard, particularly one with an amorphous and ‘liminal’ purpose.
We are trying to balance aspiration and realism - acknowledging that we are not where we want to be and also open to challenging the status quo in a number of ways.
Thinking there are quick short-term fixes doesn’t do justice to these challenges. The momentum of the conversation requires everyone’s participation - this is something that doesn’t happen organically but at the same time, we can’t force it. In fact, what we have done is just the first step in an on-going trajectory that needs to be supported with time and resources. What makes committing them to a cause harder is the lack of easily quantifiable and tangible results which opposes the conventional ways of working.
What’s next?
There are a few things we want to try. In terms of Liminal as a business:
we are expanding our internship programme aimed for young people underrepresented in the professional fields we are working in
we are working on making the business project team selection process more transparent
proactively recruiting new members from underrepresented groups/communities
We have also decided to focus on the changes we could enact to Liminal culturally, which doesn’t just require leadership action but is up to all of us. These include:
diversifying the times of our regular meetups to make them more accessible for people with different responsibilities
amending the code of conduct and outlining a process for responding to issues that arise
making it a good practice to add gender pronouns and name pronunciations to our Slack profiles
expressing solidarity for important social issues which are likely to significantly impact certain people in the community
piloting a programme where younger community members could be mentored by ones with more experience
Photo by Jon Tyson from Unsplash
Ongoing reflections
As well as bringing in more seats at the table, we need to change the table we sit on. It is not only the people in positions of power that are often homogenous in organisations, but it is the way of working itself, the language used, the norms, the tone, that can be exclusionary and means that not every voice at the table is heard. How do we get people to bring their true authentic selves to work? This is where inclusion comes in and actually enables genuine diversity in an organisation.
The psychological feeling of tokenism is also something that must be considered. How does an organisation combat that? What does genuine support and solidarity look like in such contexts?
Having worked with this topic for over a year, we have learnt that conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion are not easy to have. By design, they make us question and face inequalities: both the ones we have fallen victims to and the ones we have been perpetrating. However, we believe that being self-reflective is the only way to try and bring change to the community's culture and that kind of change is the only way of making a diversity, equity and inclusion strategy into an authentic and sustainable, long-term commitment.
Get in touch.
If you are an online community or an innovative business with a non-traditional structure and would like to explore this topic further, we are open to connecting with you too.
Please send us an email on hello@weareliminal.co and let’s talk.