Equity | Diversity
Inclusion | Belonging
Elevating Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging in the Workplace
Supporting our Culture. Advancing our Mission.
Our Imperative: What We Mean by Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging
The Child Center of NY is committed to excellence, delivering the highest quality services to those who need them most. Integral to this commitment, and our ability to fulfill our mission, is a dedication to sustaining a culture of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) — starting with our team.
While we look like the community that we hire from, what matters most to us is that we enable the community to reach its potential every day. Through our mission, we strive to empower equity by aligning our goals with the priorities of the communities we serve. Our vision is to build shared individual and collective understanding and shared language about equity in the workplace by operationalizing Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
We serve children and families facing significant challenges, including poverty, immigration, homelessness, teen and foster/kinship parenting, and trauma. Last year alone, 48% of families served were Latino/a, 32% Black, 11% Asian, 5% white, and 4% other. Our team reflects our families, collectively speaking two dozen languages and serving as master’s-level social workers, educators, physicians, bachelor’s-level caseworkers, nurses, child care workers, youth advocates, other professionals, youth tutors, and counselors — many of whom began as our clients.
In July 2020, The Child Center created the Organizational Culture and Talent Development department, dedicated to promoting a culture of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. We have a real opportunity to think about what a culture embodying these values means and to continue building it; this is a top priority of the agency as a whole. Together, we seek to expand our capability to better benefit from a diverse work environment across six operational divisions. We recognize the competencies brought by the variation of work styles and preferences that exist throughout our multiple, talented cultures that make up our daily shared work experience. We focus on the development of goals, designing working plans, and manifesting efforts to leverage self-awareness and foundational understanding in our cultural intersections.
Our Current Plan Elements
All strategic plans for EDIB include the following elements.
On Juneteenth 2020, The Child Center launched an agency-wide survey to better understand individuals’ experiences as team members and to provide guidance on what The Child Center has been doing well and what it could improve upon. Through this survey, we were able to discern the organization’s current strengths, challenges, opportunities, and needs about EDIB issues, and lessons learned from past efforts that have influenced our operational processes that impact our ability to be most effective in these areas.
Here are our commitments, dedications, and values for aligning our programs and services with our Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging imperative:
We will support our team members’ commitment to The Child Center by focusing on Equity through:
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Expecting and inspecting the application of fair access, opportunity, and advancement for employees across all divisions throughout their work life cycle.
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Eliminating the barriers that could impact employees’ ability to reach their full potential and participation in their unique work experience.
We will validate and work to protect the unique contribution of the Diverse identities that make up our workplace through:
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Exceeding expectations in hiring, developing, and supporting the advancement of the representation of NYC throughout all the communities we serve.
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Ensuring a dedicated, inclusive strategy for talent cultivation, talent strategy, and professional development exists in each division.
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Deliberate intentional focus on and attention to how we address the work environment impact accounting for differences in circumstances, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and geographic region.
We are dedicated to creating a culture of Inclusion where everyone feels welcome, supported, and respected through:
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Inclusive application of our strategic and operational goals across all divisions to achieve a positive work experience for everyone, no matter where they are in the agency.
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Assessing and addressing the workplace organizational culture for opportunities to promote Inclusivity.
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It is disrupting and dismantling the impact of bias within the culture to sustain an authentic environment.
We value, appreciate, and understand the significance of Belonging to a work community that supports your values through:
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Removing barriers that impede employees’ access to needed resources and support to reach their workplace potential.
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Examining the habits and norms of our work environment for alignment with our work values.
We seek transformational shifts to support the agency in growing leadership at all levels by ensuring success agency-wide and is representative of our under-represented populations.
Our Strategic Planning Committee, inclusive of team members at various levels of the organization, is actively assessing our goals on Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging to support divisional planning efforts.
Our commitment is to fulfill our imperative by looking broadly at programs and services, workforce and client demographics, hiring and advancement practices, professional development opportunities, and workplace environments — all about the range of identity groups and communities that we serve. We do not take this task lightly. At this time in our history, we are steadfast in our realization of the need to celebrate and expand on our employees’ successes in these areas, as well as to identify ways in which all of us can grow into more of an EDIB learning community throughout the upcoming months and years.
