The Center’s ability to achieve our ambitious mission to improve outcomes for children and families facing adversity around the world depends upon our ability to cultivate an organization that is a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community in which everyone is valued. Diversity helps generate a wealth of ideas and perspectives that enhance our collective ability to solve global problems. Inclusion enables individuals who are part of a minority group to express their whole selves safely and productively. To build a community that is both diverse and inclusive, we must ensure equitable treatment of our community members. We must engage in a sustained effort to create a culture of attentive curiosity, compassionate action, and self-reflection.
Read the Center’s pledge to address injustice, racism, and inequality.
Acknowledging that this journey is ongoing and remains a work in progress, Center staff spent considerable time working on the vision statement below that keenly describes where we envision our organization needs to go. Embarking on this DEI journey offers the Center an incredible growth opportunity, but also brings difficult issues to the surface. Therefore, we have been focused on getting ourselves “equipped” as an organization to do this critical work honestly and productively.
As we continue our journey we will share more about what we are learning and what we are doing as a result, so we can all understand and contribute to the ultimate goal of improving outcomes for children and families and the societies in which we all live.
Our EDIB Vision Statement
At the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard (HCDC) we care deeply about improving the lives of children who face daily adversity. We value communities, context, intentional action, innovation, shared learning, and impact. We appreciate that actionable knowledge comes from multiple sources, such as science and research, practice and policy as well as lived experiences and community wisdom. We generate, synthesize, translate, and disseminate scientific knowledge to enable innovative design and precise thinking and practice across multiple contexts to support young children in reaching their developmental potential. We know that equity, diversity, and inclusion1 matter to our mission and aim to keep it at the heart of all that we believe, value, and do.
As a testament to these stated values and beliefs, we at HCDC are committed to building capacity and leading efforts to create a more representative, equitable, and inclusive organization. We envision a future where:
- We engage in reflection and action to enhance diversity, equity and inclusion, internally and externally.
- We can demonstrate how diversity, equity and inclusion matter in and strengthen our work.
- We can productively and effectively engage across social differences and leverage them to enrich our community and culture and strengthen our work.
1Equity is concerned with the fairness of an organization’s practice and policies. It is not an outcome but a process focused on continuous attunement to ensuring equal access to opportunities for growth, development, and promotion. An organization can have representation but not have practices and policies that enable equal access to promotion and leadership positions for everyone.
Diversity is a term that describes the representativeness of a collective or group and exists in relationship to members of the group. Diversity is not an individual characteristic. One cannot be a “diverse candidate,” though one can be part of a diverse organization. Diversity refers to whether the Center as an organization represents among its membership different social identities. Social identities are reflected in race, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, ability, age, socio-economic status, religion, veteran status and worldviews to name a few.
Inclusion refers to a person’s experience and sense of belonging and value in the workplace. Like diversity, inclusion is an outcome that reflects whether the culture and climate of an organization is welcoming, trustworthy, and respectful.