By Kim Kucinskas, Humentum Director of Membership

Twenty-one years into the 21st century, there is clearly a gap between what is and what should be when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in the international development and humanitarian assistance sector. For years, an inability — or unwillingness — to collect public, sector-wide data on diversity hid the pervasiveness of the problem and thus limited the extent to which individual organizations addressed it.

Last summer, Social Impact’s CEO and initiator of the BRIDGE Initiative, Shiro Gnanaselvam, told us she was frustrated by this. “I wanted to benchmark our diversity profile, policies, and practices to something comparable, but that something simply didn’t exist.”

Motivated to bridge this gap, she called her friend and former colleague Alicia Phillips Mandaville, now senior vice president of programs at the International Research and Exchanges Board, with an idea.

Before long, the two had formed a volunteer coalition, led by Social Impact, IREX, Humentum, and the WILD Network and supported by a dedicated working group of partners — Dexis Consulting Group, National Endowment for Democracy, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Solidarity Center, Orbis International, and InterAction.

Read the full article on Devex here. 

Photo Credit: Cottonbro, Pexels