What we do
The Diversity Institute provides consulting services to support organizations in building equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) awareness and embedding EDI into processes. We provide tailored support that recognizes the sectoral differences and the unique needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large organizations.
How we do it
The critical ecological systems model
Understanding that organizations have unique needs, we provide tailored support that links societal, organizational, and individual barriers and actions for change, aligning them with organizational goals and priorities.
Our work takes a systems approach to understanding barriers and what is needed to make workplaces more inclusive and diverse. We use a systematic, ecological approach that considers the complex interactions among societal factors, such as policy and stereotypes; organizational factors, such as governance and human resources; and individual factors, including beliefs, skills and behaviours, in driving change.
The Diversity Assessment Tool (DAT)
We recognize that context matters and organizations are often at different stages in their inclusion journey. We ground our work in an approach that focuses on continual improvement. Our proprietary, data-driven approach uses our Diversity Assessment Tool (DAT) (external link) to provide an in-depth view of your organization’s practices, processes and policies benchmarked against global best practices.
The DAT is a digital tool that assesses your organization's equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies and practices and helps you develop a customized strategy. It is an easy-to-use tool designed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that provides examples of best practices to help you move forward.
Our DAT moves beyond human resources to consider all aspects of an organization’s operations. It will help you assess your leadership and governance, human resources, culture, performance indicators, value chain and community engagement and compare them to leading practices. To date, more than 370 SMEs have used the DAT to advance their EDI strategies, policies and practices. It has been used across sectors, including information and communications technology, financial services, education, health care, policing, innovation support services, government agencies, federally regulated organizations, nonprofits, arts and culture, and others.
