By Tessa Sullivan
Did you know that April is ‘Celebrate Diversity Month’? This past Monday, April 8th, our very own DE&I Chair Karolina Bermudez delivered a quintessential DE&I presentation. Bermudez touched on some key points in our meeting, fostering an open space and a sense of inspiration. The key takeaways from her presentation were the importance of properly defining DE&I, DE&I in the field of Public Relations, Deconstructing DE&I’s hits and misses, and strategizing possible solutions.
Burmedez first established what DE&I stands for: diversity, equity, and inclusion. She described how each component is different from the other and they work together to encompass what it means to champion DE&I. DE&I is something that has to be considered at all levels of the PR process, according to Bermudez. She explained that these considerations need to be attended to in all campaigns, pitches, and content. From consideration of color blindness to awareness of representation, companies have to ask themselves if their content is accessible to all of their consumers. Are they living up to their promises?
The presentation took an interactive turn when Bermudez encouraged all of us to chat with those next to us about different PR issues. We discussed brands' best and worst moments and what made them so bad and so good. From there we were all able to craft our game plans as to how these companies could either recover from a mistake and/or build on their success.
These kinds of conversations are necessary in education spaces. Just from this one presentation all of our meeting attendees participated in an open repertoire as to how society, the world of PR, and ourselves, can be better at implementing DE&I. The meeting was filled with tangible conversations and plans surrounding existing crises. This provided us all with a real-world perspective into DE&I.
Most notably, this event allowed us all to look inwardly and consider how our persona shapes our reality. Further, how we can use that reality to make informed decisions and consider our biases. Thank you Karolina for giving us all that space.