 Our final keynote speaker this morning is the Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at Freightart and Medical College of Wisconsin, where he leads Diversity, Inclusion, Strategic Initiatives. He'll be speaking with us today on equity, diversity, and inclusion, the benefits, the importance, and the best practices. For over 20 years, he's been instrumental in creating culturally and linguistically competent programs in the non-profit sector and receives certification as a Diversity Professional Advanced Practitioner from Cornell University's ILR School. Please help me to welcome Andreas Gonzalez. Alright, so good morning everyone. I think I'm going to have the same challenge that Dr. Moutry had of having to be logged here to the podium, because I'd like to move around. It's actually where I do my best work, but I promise that I will stay put for the sake of being recorded. So good morning everyone. Thank you so much for the invite. I was joking, but I really meant it. This is actually probably one of the most phenomenal events that I certainly have participated and that I have been asked to certainly be a speaker at. And quite frankly, as every speaker spoke, including the panel, I'm thinking, alright, ditto that, so not sure what I will be providing other than I'm going to actually share my journey, or our journey at Freydard, and hopefully you will be able to glean some nuggets there this morning. But before we start there, I want to get you kind of hone in and anchor into this particular topic. So we're going to do a quick exercise here. I don't know how many of you have seen the or have participated before and have witnessed or have experienced the business illusion, but we're going to go ahead and do that. I promise it will not take more than maybe a minute or so, but it will be pretty powerful. The monkey business illusion. Count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball? How many of you counted the 16, by the way? Alright, so at least half of the room. That's pretty good. How many of you saw other things happening in that video? So what? Alright, good. What what else did you see on that video? Shout it out. The gorilla? Okay, how many of you actually did not see the gorilla, by the way? Alright, thanks for the honesty. Alright, and all right. And besides the gorilla, did anyone else see anything else happening in that video? Any other changes that you saw? The current color change. You are sir the winner, because actually oftentimes people will not see that one either. So go ahead and if you can play it all together. The correct answer is 16 passes. Did you spot the gorilla? For people who haven't seen or heard about a video like this before, about half missed the gorilla. If you knew about the gorilla, you probably saw it, but did you notice the curtain changing color or the player on the black team leaving the game? Let's rewind and watch it again. Here comes the gorilla and there goes a player and the curtain is changing from red to gold. When you're looking for a gorilla, you often miss other unexpected events. And that's the monkey business illusion. That's right. So you may be thinking, why is he bringing that video and what does that have to do with diversity, inclusion and equity? One of the key principles here is what we call inattentional blindness, which means that we focus so much on a specific thing or set of things that we miss the obvious. And quite frankly, that happens to us every single day. How many of us can attest that we have been working at something and because we live in the weeds of that work, we often times will miss some of the most basic things or concepts attached to that work. And so that actually speaks to how we think, how we act, how we behave. It actually also denotes a little bit of our blind spots that we have as well. And we can actually argue in our unconscious bias and things of that nature. So my point here is it becomes really important for us to be aware. It becomes important for us to do this work. And I think one of the things that I picked up along the way this morning from all of our speakers is that this is actually not only hard work but hard work and we have to work at it. This is actually part of what we need to do to gain competencies, to gain skill sets, to hopefully get us to that point of becoming culturally competent as either business leaders or educational leaders. So my hope this morning is that I will be able to illustrate and make the compelling case more importantly for why leveraging equity, diversity, and inclusion is not a nice to have but a have to have. How does that become a business imperative? And if so, what are the benefits that will reap around those strategies? And so I'm going to share with you what I know best, which is actually the freighted health strategy. So that's what we'll do. It starts obviously with our journey. I'm going to also share some of our strategic efforts, initiatives, and metrics because I wholeheartedly agree that you have to have metrics. What doesn't get obviously tracked or monitored will happen and we know that. And then I will actually land on lessons learned and maybe giving you a flavor of what we have gathered as some of our tips and pitfalls along the way. So at a minimum, this should actually either be encouraging for all of you for sure, but maybe for some of you that have already started your journey as we had some panelists here and I know we have a couple of other corporations like Sargento that already have started to go down their path where hopefully this will continue to inspire them and affirm their journey. I always like to start and I think all of you know who freighted and the Medical College of Wisconsin, who we are. We have eight hospitals. Certainly we are now, I used to say actually when I joined, we were in a five contiguous county geographical area serving our community. And as you can see, we have actually added Sheboygan County because now the Marshall Clinic physicians are part of our system and they will be launching under freighter and the Medical College on November 8th. So certainly we are in Sheboygan. It's our newest acquisition and certainly managed to walk with Holy Family Memorial Hospital also became a reality for us. So certainly it's actually nice to be able to drive from a gridder from the gridder Milwaukee area on a lovely fall morning up here. And by the way, this is my first time in Sheboygan. So I was telling a couple folks this is honestly pretty country. I really love actually we have fallen in love with Wisconsin for sure. So let me tell a little bit about my team because one of the key takeaways is in order to do this work, you have to invest. There's no question about it. This work could not be relied upon or added as a 16th job duty and someone's job description. If that is the case, the work will never get done. I've been there and done that early in my career. And so at freighter what I love about freighter is not only that our leadership senior leadership starting with our CEO, our fearless leader, Kathy Jacobson. She has actually invested in our strategy, but she's also models that behavior. Actually, I tell her jokingly, but it is very true. Kathy Jacobson is truly our chief diversity officer for the health network. When she can not wear that hat, then she has me and our team to be able to do that. But that's who she is. That's how she believes, how she advocates for this work. And she has also invested in this work heavily. The other point that I will make here and you'll see it in a second is that where you recite matters as well. And so for us, I have been very fortunate. I ended up, you know, I told you a little bit about my career progression. I grew up in HR. So I started as an HR practitioner, ended up again at the Cleveland Clinic getting some really neat roles over time as part of our succession planning strategies there. And one of the things that I learned along the way is that there's nothing wrong in terms of residing within HR or outside of HR. The question becomes is where should this work resides? And I will tell you in my humble opinion, having this work residing either very close to that CHRO, so if you're going to be in HR, you need to be the report of your CHRO. But most high performing organizations will show that living outside of HR is really the way to do it. That's where I live. I actually report to the EVP and our COO for the health network like any other chief officer. So I'm sitting around the same table as our chief strategist officer as our chief medical officer. And what it does is it gives me line of sight to the work. It also gives me the opportunity to coach and mentor and guide my leaders and help them understand how to think through those lenses as Chris was saying earlier, those DEI lenses, that's important. That's a competency that every leader should acquire. Becoming an inclusive leader is critical. And so that's the work that we do. And you'll hear a little bit about our secret sauce at freighter in a second of how we have been able to do that. So as you can see, I have actually, there's one more role that is not here or two roles. We have a director of emerging markets. Unfortunately, this is what happens when you develop your leaders. Someone else is going to come and tap your leaders. I don't mind actually losing my leaders to the system. Unfortunately, lost two of my best leaders to other organizations. Luckily, they're both in the region. But certainly, my director of emerging markets, we're recruiting for that. And then I have a program coordinator that we're also recruiting. But you can see that I also have a director of diversity inclusion. So what we have done at freighter is really created strategy, holistic strategy that touches what we call workforce, workplace, marketplace and community. So we're looking at internally facing efforts for our staff, because we know that if our staff are able to get, obviously they're valued and we invest in them over time, that will not only actually lead to greater engagement, but that also will lead to that sense of belonging. And that becomes important. And I'll show you some metrics that will show and make that case this morning. We also have so we have some people focused internally facing that's the on a Gavin there. And then Eric Guerrero is actually one of our newest members. He's actually dedicated to our patient equity efforts. So he's the person that is working very closely with a lot of our physician leaders around our equity or disparities that exist within the health network. And then this emerging markets role is more externally facing, kind of think about community relations or engagement, our supply diversity efforts, and then truly emerging markets, similarly to what Kohler actually is doing. The person that I had in this role is a former Kohler leader. So it's kind of a connection there to the region up here. I also have language services that reports into my function. So that gives me a little bit of greater teeth into not only the clinical side, but also in terms of from a compliance standpoint, there's actually a number of federal mandates from either health and human services, and or from some of the accrediting bodies like the joint commission of accreditation that actually now stipulates that you must provide culturally and linguistically competent care to all of your patients. And that's important. Actually, I will tell you very quickly here a story of how I ended up in healthcare. The reason why I do the work that I do and passionate about the work that I do is because I was impacted early on by this particular issue. We my mother decided we come from very humble beginnings from Puerto Rico. As you heard, we I we experienced a number of things, including actually a couple of massacres that happened in my hometown of Puerto Rico back in the 80s. And my mom knew that my brother and I love the streets too much. And so she said they have good leadership skills, but they're channeling it in the wrong there in the wrong direction. So she decided because she grew up between Camden, New Jersey and Philadelphia to take the leap of faith and bring us to the United States of America so we can actually achieve the American dream. That was mom's point all along. We did that back in the 80s and we landed in Cleveland, Ohio of all places. So as we joke with mom, we say you miss the weather memo mom by a whole lot. But old jokes aside, Cleveland became home. Cleveland was actually really great. But I remember early on mom having to go to get or access care. And back then in the 80s, we didn't have a little standards. So basically, they grabbed anyone that was around including the folks who were sweeping and cleaning the hospital, you know, your EBS folks. And what happens with that is that you know, the challenge that you have with that is those folks are not equipped to be able to do that work. And some mom didn't like that. So she would actually take me out of school that day or that morning on I became her interpreter. So imagine when she had to go to the OBGYN and have to rely on me to be able to actually provide her interpreter, how difficult. How you know, it dehumanized her. It was a way of not treating anyone with dignity and respect. And for me, that was a mental note back then of saying, how can I actually prevent someone else to go through this painful experience? So hopefully, no one else will have to do that. Little did I know that I will end up obviously in health care, and that now I have the ability to impact that work in my own community. Interestingly enough, my younger brother was the one because he's a pretty high achiever, became the physician in the family. So we have this this joke running joke about who's really doing the work transformational work in our systems. He actually does really great work. He's a chair for for primary care for a big integrated health system in Florida this day. So he does really good work. So here's what I will say about our journey. And probably one of the greatest takeaways, you know, you have to build a strong foundation and you have to start somewhere. Clearly, a lot of that work is going to start around your diversity and inclusion. That's where we started over 11 years ago. I'm not the inaugural chief diversity officer. I'm the second officer for the health network. But I honestly inherited a great foundation. We already had define what diversity and inclusion meant for the health network. And then what I did as part of building on that particular legacy was that we define what health equity meant to us as a health network. We didn't have that defined. We did not have any efforts in place. And so we ended up that's the legacy work of our second plan. And then as we wrapped up that very successful fire plan, it was two months before the pandemic. And we knew going into the pandemic that there were some things brewing in Milwaukee, being one of the most segregated cities in America that were informing and guiding our work. And certainly for us, as I tell the story nationally, I tell folks that it's really unfortunate that it took so many other deaths, including George Floyd's death, to really for us to grapple with the reality of the community unrest and the racism that exists in America. What's interesting is that in Milwaukee, our watershed moment happened in 2016 when a young man by the name of Seville Smith was killed. And that really led to what we know now as the three day community in rest that we call Sherman Park and rest. And for us, I remember having that discussion back with Kathy in one of diversity council meetings and saying to Kathy, if we are not paying attention to this issue, here's what's going to happen. We are going to always be reactive, not proactive. And because we're the economic medical center, we have to be proactive because anything that happens in the community, all of those issues or incidents will spilled over whether we like it or not. They're going to end up at freighter because we're the one level one trauma center that has to take care of our community. So that was actually my compelling want to say to Kathy, we can continue to look through the rear view mirror, or we can look through the windshield and understand what's going to be our new reality. What's going to be that particular strategy for us to be proactive. And that really became catalytic for us to create this anti racism initiative that now is part of our strategy. So a really cool acronym that I have come up with tells you how how less creative I am. It's idea. So we talked about inclusion, diversity, equity and anti racism. But actually, if I use just the three main ones of equity versus inclusion, and actually there's different strengths of thoughts or philosophical thoughts around that, we always lead with equity. We always look through an equity first lens at freighter. So we use the acronym EDI purposely. And I tell all of my leaders, we always lead with equity. Because if we lead with equity, which part of that roadmap is understanding quality for us, then we're going to be able to achieve diversity and inclusion. There's no question about that. But equity becomes our north star for the work that we do. Certainly anti racism guides a lot of that work, which is part of the work that we're doing right now as we speak. Here's our strategy. As you can see put intended DDI for us is the DNA of the organization. We have woven everything into whom we are and what we do. Our strategy does not set aside as outside of the strategy, organizational strategy. It's not one where we're pushing or pulling. We decided we're going to integrate it completely. And we're going to again help our leaders to understand through that equity versus inclusion lens. If we're able to do that effectively, then we're going to be able to have and provide that line of sight to everyone. And then as Kathy likes to say, then we can create leadership accountability. And then we have also tight compensation to that. So now it hits our pockets too, especially for leaders because we have executive compensation. So I'm going to get your attention and your partnership, whether you like it or not, is what I have said to a number of my leaders jokingly. And it's very true. I had some people that were on the sidelines and the minute that we actually build the leadership accountability and then we went that step further of tying the dollars, people said, now you have my attention. Now I need to work with you. Right. And I honestly at this point of my journey, after 26 years of doing this work, I don't mind whether you come willingly or unwillingly, as long as you're sitting around that table. I will actually get to you by understanding what's keeping you up at night. And I don't have to use any of our equity versus inclusion verbiage to help you solve some of your most complex issues. And then after the fact, because we have built trust and camaraderie, then I'll teach you how that actually links to EDI. And that has been one of our secret sauce, points at freighter. That's how you do it. Because, you know, some of us, some of us, including myself, early in my career, unfortunately, became too aggressive about the work that we need to do or allowed our passion to lead the way with a lot of emotion, not so much competencies at the time. And what happened was we created an us versus them reality. And so there's people who may be hesitant to come along this journey, because they just don't know philosophically where you're coming from. And so for us, we have started with, you know, again, I'll rather meet with you and understand what's keeping you up at night. I'll meet you where you're at. And then we'll build it from there. And that has been obviously part of our success story along the way. Here's a little bit about our infrastructure. Maybe a bit complex, but actually has been very successful for us. So I have a diversity council, which is my governing council. All of my most senior leaders, so all of the entity presidents for the hospitals, for the ambulatory, so all the health centers, they'll sit around the table. I also have my chief marketing officer there. The chief medical officer sits around that table. Our CFO and COO of the system, my boss, they'll sit around the table. And the reason why we did that purposely is to fold. Number one, I want to make sure that as we make decisions and we roll them out, that people know that that train has left the station. So we're moving forward. There's no point, right? I mean, we're not going back. We're moving forward in a certain direction. That's number one. But number two, and more importantly, I want to make sure that all of my leaders have a chance to really experience and learn and gain those competencies, to become inclusive leaders. It's not going to happen overnight. So you have to give them some immersion experiences. So this is one of the things that we have built into all of our senior leaders, individualized or executive development plans, that they will be rotating through the Diversity Council. It is part of the mandate. The other piece that we have done is while all of my leaders, senior leaders, they all become executive sponsors to our 5 BRGs, business research groups. So not only now, they have that opportunity to shape and lead, or co-lead our teams, our leadership team, to what that work should be. But now they're also gaining some insights and competencies that makes them a better advocate in the boardroom. And so that has been another key point for us. That Diversity Council has been golden to us, because I get it. I actually, we meet our cadences quarterly. So we have our meeting there. We decide or we tee up a number of recommendations. They get approved. We move forward with the work. So it has been, you know, and again, I'm not saying and advocating that this has to be the model. My point is there should be a structure within the organization and there should be line of sight to your CEO. And the CEO should be engaged and involved in this work actively. Where does your CEO sit in that So she's the chair of our Diversity Council. Cathy actually chairs or co-chairs the meeting with me. So she is actively and I will say that in the six and a half years that I've been at freighter, Cathy has not missed a meeting. She actually treats this as a business imperative the same way that she treats our finance committee and our quality committee, which are the other two that she chairs within the organization. So again, you know, it shows commitment and it shows that, you know, she cares and that this is an imperative for us. So why the increased attention to diversity? You know, I think most of most of you actually know that by 2042 and number, especially our superintendents made that compelling case this morning here that our demographics have changed. Now we have certainly a very different realities in our communities. Actually, I would argue that global is here. We think about global somewhere else. Global is here, you know, and if we're not instructing and helping, especially our students, our next generation of the workforce to think globally, we're going to actually, unfortunately, they're going to be trailing behind. I remember actually in 2004, I'm a German Marshall Fund Fellow, and I remember going to Europe and visiting a number of countries. And the one piece, the big takeaway for me was whether it was Germany, whether it was Sweden, whether it was actually Spain, all of the high schools were teaching and requiring their students to be multilingual. Actually, I remember interfacing with a young man that his parents were or are Spaniards. He was born and raised in Germany. So he spoke not only Spanish, his German, so he spoke German, of course. He also spoke actually English. He was learning Japanese and Mandarin. You know, they asked him, and I said, so you're graduating this year, what are you going to do? He says, I'm going actually international business. And I remember kind of thinking and saying, boy, if I put myself in your shoes, I will not, I did not stand a chance to compete with you. That's the reality for a lot of our students elsewhere. And so my point here is, the better that we can actually position our students and provide them with those experiences and skill sets, the better off they're going to be. And certainly our community as a whole is going to gain because it will be a thriving community. So certainly here you can see that that has been made as a compelling case. I also will say that part of this compelling case is becoming culturally competent. And I think that what Dr. Motri developed or the five dispositions, if you layer those dispositions here, bless you. And one of them actually spoke to cultural competence that personally acting, the reality of it is, you can go from left to right, right in this journey. You know, for us, this has become extremely important. Because if we actually allow some of our, imagine this, if I have any clinician who tells me that they're in this culturally unaware area and they do not see color or they don't see differences, imagine the, imagine the danger that that actually represents for some of our diverse folks. And we know out of this pandemic, one of the, one of the key things that we unfortunately, it was really unfortunate to experience. Again, Milwaukee was on the, on the, on that national stage was that our African-American males were losing their lives. Originally. That was the, the story that came out of Milwaukee. And I remember going to Kathy and saying, what are we going to do about this? This doesn't actually, honestly position us well in this market. So how, how are we going to be a differentiator in this market? And so we decided to actually activate a number of efforts around our health equity efforts for COVID patients that proved to be the right steps, the right strategies. Not only for us to start, you know, delivering our commitment, but more importantly to save lives in this community. And that's what becomes important. I tell everyone that, you know, whether fortunately and fortunately, I don't work in a field where people are really excited about coming and interfacing with us, right? We're not Apple that people jump up and down right about walking through those doors because they're going to get the latest gadget, right? I can tell you that one of the most heart-wrenching experiences that I have faced is having, and I actually parked. And the other day, my wife actually was asking me, this is, you know, you typically park in the Cancer Center. Why do you do that? And I said, I'll tell you why I park in the car center, in the Cancer Center. Because I have, A, it gives me the greater distance between parking the car and getting my stops. So that's part of my healthy why. But more importantly, as I ride that elevator and it opens up on the second floor, that's actually as it opens those elevators, that's actually the clinic where all of our patients who are receiving chemo are sitting. And just to see what they're facing, to see how worried they are, to me that becomes my mission moment. Doesn't matter what type of day I'm having, that grounds me right away. And I know why I'm there and the work that we must continue to implement. And so that's my why. And so I tell my wife it's like, you want to be there. I've been several times in the bathroom where someone is throwing up. Because they just came out of chemo and they're super weak. And they just can't stand, they cannot bear that any longer. To me that's my why. Because if I can make their experience a little bit better, by way of making sure that my staff understand how to engage from a dignity and respect standpoint, then that will make a world of a difference for them. And for us at the end of the day, quite frankly, it doesn't matter whether, again, to my point earlier, whether I work for Apple or not, it's all about that experience, customer experience. Because we're going to get rated on that by our patients in the surveys. And either we provided great experience, irrespective of their symptoms, right? And the outcome sometimes? Or didn't we? Some of the best and greatest accolades that we have received are from very grateful family members that their loved ones have passed away in our facility. And it's great to hear that, yeah, the outcome was not optimal. But yet we lived up to our commitment to dignity and respect. So that's part of what we do from a cultural competence. Also, leveraging diversity as an as innovation, you know, I'll show you here actually a really cool example, or a set of examples that are pretty cool that I have been involved with. So, you know, when I was actually in my in my global role with the clinic, one of the things that I learned as I was in the Middle East, there was actually a project that's the East Gate Center. They're on the right hand side in Zimbabwe, Africa that was built. And you might be wondering, so what is the that termite mound has to do with it on the left hand side? And what it does is, it's actually shows how if we're culturally competent and we understand the power of innovation and leveraging diversity and inclusion, how we can actually learn from principles from other industries or from other areas that could be applied. So I don't know how many of you might be familiar that termites are probably the best at creating cooling systems. They do. They live obviously they're in the desert, very heat. And because of how they build their mounds, if they did not have a way of exchanging air into the mound, they will actually suffocate and will die. So they had to become pretty innovative on creating that HVAC or cooling system. Well, there were actually some architects that learned about that. And obviously being in Africa, where sometimes you might not have that technology, right? To support you, they decided, well, we're going to use that concept. We're going to create a similar structure to the termite mounds. And we'll see that building is 90% much more efficient than any other building in the world by using a concept that you use from nature. My point here is sometimes to the unintentional blindness that I talked about earlier, sometimes we fail to look at innovation in the right places. And so it's important to understand that and understand how to be aware along the way. The other one that actually, this is a really cool one, I'm a foodie. So maybe some of you might like this one even better. So how many of you know about Frito-Lay? We all do. How many of us love those chips? I do. I will not admit that to my wife in front of my wife, but it is very true. So back in the back in the early 2000s, Frito-Lay started actually losing a lot of their business ground. And certainly they did not have any emerging markets. I was actually doing consultancy work. I was actually part of the team that came into Frito-Lay to help them and to work with them. And one of the things that I early on said is, all right, so you have BRGs or business research groups. Have you actually asked your own employees? Because they're your customers as well. Have you asked them about ideas? And so we started actually having focus groups. That was actually mentioned this morning here as a great strategy. We did. And one of the things that in the Hispanic-Latino group was mentioned was that in some of our countries avocado is a staple. And someone said in that meeting, what about if we actually created the guacamole chip? And it sounded crazy at the time. And I remember that I jetted that down and I went back to leadership when we were doing some of the ideation summit. And I said, you know, one of your members of your BRG suggested the guacamole chip. And they looked at me like, you must be crazy, Andres. You're losing your marbles here. And I said, no, I'm serious. And I said, and I think they're onto something here. I think that, if anything, just put in your R&D team. Have them try it, right? I mean, what do you have to lose? They did. They created the Doritos guacamole chip. That became their new product. And within one year, it was a $1 billion revenue for Frito-Lay. So what does that tell you that engaging and listening to your staff, to your folks is powerful. It's valuable, right? So benefits of an inclusive culture, again, and I've talked a little bit about this. Obviously, you're going to see increased patient satisfaction, productivity, profitability, turnover decreases. This is actually all stated by Gallup, which is one of the big climate survey companies out there. I will tell you as well that it will also give you a greater sense of belonging to your BRGs. Actually, we stratify our data for our business research groups, for the members. And we do comparison between those who are involved with the BRGs and those, like. So African-Americans who are involved with the BRG and those who are not. Or Lanix who are involved with the BRG and those who are not. And what we have found for the last three years consistently is that it is at least a 45% higher engagement and sense of belonging for those who are participating in the BRGs than those who are not. So certainly, the BRGs are a source of engagement and can help you to also, again, it's another added benefit here to having an inclusive culture or striving to have that inclusive culture. I also like this particular slide here quickly, and I covered it very quickly because I think most of you already know this, which is when you look at your workforce, whether it's actually on the corporate side, on the school side, anywhere, it's typically kind of the same break than about 28% who are highly engaged. 55% the bulk of them who are not engaged. And then those who are actively disengaged is about 17%. And the question, because we in a previous role, actually the two previous roles, so at Cleveland Clinic and at Bay State, we actually use Gallup. I remember asking my consultant and I said, so tell me what are your thoughts about where we need to spend the time? Where would you think that we should be spending the time? Is it with the not engaged or the actively disengaged? What are some of the thoughts here? The what? The not engaged. That's right. That's honestly your sweet spot. That's going to be the folks that are sitting on the sidelines, so to speak, that you can't get them engaged. They might be actually one step away from becoming disengaged, but they're not there yet. So that's where you want to actually spend your time. And then I remember asking that senior leader, and I said, so what should you do with the actively disengaged? And he looked at me and said, start outboarding them. Because those folks, you will never get them back. And research has shown that. So his point was, they're going to come in, they're going to be collecting a paycheck, but they're going to be toxic within the workplace. And his point was, you spend the time and energy there, then you're not focusing on the not engaged, and then certainly you're also not becoming a cheerleader for those who are engaged. So you need to double down on these folks as well, right? To continue to keep them engaged. So my point here is, is how do we create a culture where either we are continuing to engage or keeping folks engaged, or where we can actually start attracting some of those folks that might be on the sidelines. And that becomes important for all of us. So our business case for diversity is fairly simple. It's about the workforce for the future, and that was actually already mentioned here. It's about providing culturally competent and linguistically competent care for us. It's about organizational performance and outcomes. If you don't have metrics and you're not measuring this stuff, it all will become anecdotal at best. And that's not a way of certainly leading this effort. And it's about also leveraging creativity and innovation. So I actually asked D-Dra to give me this stats because I wanted to actually see where we stood here in Sheboygan. And certainly I will ask for forgiveness from some of the other school districts that are here. We actually went with Sheboygan area because it's actually the largest. But look at that last row there where you see the increase or decrease in population. The only area that it's decreasing is white composition. African-American has state flat. But look at Asian-Americans, Latino and two or more races all spiking, right, trending up. Which means this is a diverse community. So the question then becomes how do we harness that and ensure that everyone gets that equitable educational opportunity, right? So then not only that, so they can thrive but then more probably that our city or our communities can thrive. And that really becomes the great opportunity for us So let me quickly here cover a couple of journey things and I wanna be mindful of 10 because I know that I am the individual that certainly stands between you and starting your morning here. So I'm gonna go fairly quickly through the slides but just wanna illustrate a couple things that hopefully will affirm your journey. So the first thing that I'll mention is you'll see that under our mission there's a few words that were highlighted of the communities we serve, right? Of the diverse communities that we serve. And the reason why we highlighted that is not only because that's important in our mission but that was actually the added wording to our mission this past year when we refresh our mission and our values. And I was really glad that that's where we landed because I remember telling Kathy and our most senior leaders, I said, are we gonna acknowledge who we serve? Are we gonna continue to do what we have done which is we serve really well some parts of our population or community, not everyone necessarily. And so this is actually around intentionality on our part of saying not only are we gonna put it there as a reminder to us of our commitment but we're gonna actually live up to that commitment. And then you can see there are the values, our great values, valuing people is our first value and I love that. Because it starts with your greatest asset which is your people. If we don't do that, there's no way that then we can ask people to drive the patient experience. It's not gonna happen, all right? Equity, diversity and inclusion for us, again, it's pretty well-defined. You can see on the right-hand side that we have now a definition for health equity that also ties in social deterrence of health for us. Things like housing and food deserts, right? Or food security, for example. How are we doing that? Because we know that if we can tackle some of those upstream issues, then downstream, we're gonna have a better chance of having a healthy and thriving community. So it's all about the well-being of our community. And so that's what I love about that particular one. Here's just to show you the alignment. These are 11 organizational goals for the health network, for our health network. And as you can see, as you read them, you can start seeing how we have embedded diversity, inclusion, or equity into those goals. Again, it's all hardwired into who we are and how we're actually holding ourselves accountable to that work. Whether it's actually on the staff side, again, to provide that exceptional employee experience, or whether we're talking about equally important how we're delivering on that patient experience within our health network. So that becomes important for us. Did you invent those like in a midpoint of any kind of strategic plan, or did the project go through? We're done with this strategic plan, now we're gonna vet it. Good question. So what do we do is we have a five-year plan, but every year, and certainly I think that this triple crisis is last year, especially with the pandemic, showed us that you needed to be strategic, that you needed to also be intentional, and that you needed some agility here to do this work. So what we did is that every year, our VP of strategic planning and performance excellence, so she sits with all of us around this, our chief officer round table, and we have the discussion about here's the goals that top leadership want us to consider. And so then she leads us through the exercise, looking through again, the CMO through that clinical lens. I look at it from the equity versus inclusion lens, I was saying, all right, so those are the goals, given our full strategy, and given these goals that have been right now proposed, here's where I think that that connection exists, right? The intersectionality of this work, and then we build it in intentionally. And that happens every five years? Every year, we do that every year. We go through that exercise because even though we have a five-year plan, there's things as we learned last year that because of the disruption, they might never get either implemented or you might have to fast-track, as we did, our virtual care platform because we're forced to do that, right? Of leveraging technology. So those would be examples of that, yeah. And quite frankly as well, I'm gonna be very honest with all of you, there's some things that we still miss around those. So good example this past year is, I remember getting a phone call from our chief innovation officer on a Thursday saying tomorrow, Friday, we go live with our virtual care platform, and I said, well, that's well and good, that you talk to my director or director of language services to understand how are we gonna be embedding our four, one of the four, all four capabilities, their language capabilities, to support our limited English proficient patients. And he looked at me, dears and headlights. He was like, forgot. And I said, all right, so now we have a total order. We need to scramble right now and get it done in the next four hours because this is going live tomorrow morning. So luckily we're able to do that. It was not a huge overhaul. But again, it shows again the importance of thinking through those lenses or involving the right leaders and having them sitting around that table. And I will tell you that that has become one of our greatest differentiator. We are the ones who are getting the market share in our regions, all the other hospital systems unfortunately are losing it because they're all relying on telephonic interpretation which is the most basic one. We have decided to go to a much higher standard of providing live interpretation. And then we also do the video remote. We do telephonic, of course. And then we also augment with outside agency as well if we need to. So here's a little bit of, I'm not gonna go through a lot of this stuff but just to show you the things that you need to track that are important. So we do workforce diversity. Actually, one of the things given this discussion and being actually held or hosted by the chamber, I know that some of you might be familiar that the Metro Milwaukee Association of Commerce, the MMAC launched two years ago in the region of choice pledge. And their commitment there and the history behind that is that Tim Sheehy as a CEO there did a polling of all of our CEOs. And that's kind of the wrong table of the who's who, right? That sits around that table. And he asked, what is the most critical issue that you're facing right now? And all of them, all of them, there was actually no honestly differentiation at all in terms of the answers. They were all in lockstep said what's keeping us up at night is hiring and retaining our diverse staff. We're losing them. That was the major issue for everyone, for everyone. So that then led to focus groups. We were involved with that. Kathy Xler CEO is the incoming chair for that board. So you can imagine how she's fast-fucking all the stuff and holding our system accountable actually chair the steering committee for all of us who are the ones implementing this effort. And I will say that this will perhaps will be the game changer for Southeastern Wisconsin. And we'll only, we'll get one chance to get it right. And this is actually our time to do it. So what we have done is we have come up based on all the assessment and all the, certainly all the research that has been done both in terms of data from other sources plus also polling all of our employers that we needed to actually lend or have some goals. So the B-Hack as I call them, the bold, hairy, audacious goals that we came up with for a region is we're gonna actually go with a 15% workforce diversity and then a 25% leadership goal. They're both growth goals though, which means based on the data that you submitted then you have to factor in where 25% will put you by 2025 for leadership and the same thing for workforce diversity that 15%. But it's a great start. And actually I will tell you that through the pandemic there's been a lot of discussion especially some of our CEOs saying well I can make this happen and Kathy and a number of other leaders have said if there was ever a time for us to deliver on this this is the time. So this is a non-negotiable. You sign the pledge you're gonna have to live up to it. So these are actually some of the metrics that show up here and as you can see here's actually our transparency. These are the same dashboard that we show our staff. Our whole staff have line of sight to this metrics. Our community is gonna actually get line of sight for this mid-November. We're gonna go roll it out in the same landing page where externally our DNI and the racism plan resides today where it lives. Again we want actually and we promise the community that we're gonna be fully transparent about a number of metrics and I'll be honest with you if you look at some of this metrics we're making anemic progress in some cases. But at least it's a good start and it's our ability to say listen we're figuring it out as we're going but we need your help as well. So what we have done is seeking that help from the community. So we have been involved in what we call community conversations all along to make that happen and to really land on the co-creation of those strategies that are gonna help us to get there. As you can see there's a number of them here our health equity ones and then down here is also our supply diversity. So our spend gets wrecked from both the supply chain and construction and we just don't do percentage. We also do boots on the ground. So we have pathways for students that wanna go into construction, apprenticeship programs, we have those partnerships and we actually track the hours of all of our diverse folks who are building or renovating those facilities. So quickly here what are some of our best practices from a people's strategy standpoint it's all about educating it's about cultural competence it's about engagement of our staff. Here's a number of things that we do that food for thought. I know it sounds a little bit cheesy but it's really good actually that was our launch of having culturally competent conversations or series where we provided obviously all of it pre-pandemic some lunch or dessert but it was a way of engaging people right and bring them in. I will tell you that has been the game changer for us. During the pandemic leveraging technology we actually were able to actually increase that by five folds. So now because people can stay wherever they are whether they're working remotely or in another facility but we have the right capabilities I can now offer the same webinar or education to the whole system and then record it on top of that for those who might not be able to attend right. So there's actually some silver lining out of this particular pandemic especially when we're looking at leveraging technology as part of your equity strategy. Certainly there's some digital divide as well so I'm not naive enough to know that but we are actually resolving that issue especially for a lot of our remote workers as well. In terms of our culture here shows a little bit of some of the partnerships some of the designations there that we have received again we are extremely committed part of what we have done and I think it's going to be part of the transformational work for us is looking and I heard that again thematically mentioned this morning it's about looking at your policies your processes and your practices. You got to start there. One of the things that I love about Kathy's Kathy acknowledges that our system as most systems in America have played a role in terms of their systemic racism in our communities of color. And Kathy doesn't shy away from owning that but her point is that's part of our legacy but how are we going to change that reality moving forward? And so her point is there has to be a path forward after we acknowledge this. And so she decided we're not going to sweep it under the rug we're going to address it head on we're going to own it but part of what we're going to do as part of recognizing this and then moving again proactively forward is then developing those strategies that will help us to dismantle that systemic racism. So that's what we're doing. Here's a couple of cool things that we get to do we're obviously the partner of the Bucs so we really have enjoyed this past season with our Bucs but one of the things that we do with the Bucs is we do a number of series educational series in the community. They're extremely committed to this we have aligned strategies. So one of the key takeaways here is how do you amplify your work through your partners? And that has to be part of your strategy we cannot do this work alone because you don't have either the bandwidth the resources we'll have finite resources so you need to actually look for ways of amplifying that so that's what we have done this is the one that really excites me a lot this is about building the future of the of actually of our state here's what I'm showing you is inroads goodwill Hispanic professionals Chris Turay these are all workforce development pathways for us this is where we actually get to do cool things with our schools with our school systems with some of the high performing choice schools and I know some of you might not want to hear that but we need to actually be equitable around that because we have a lot of high performing students in some of those choice schools as well like Chris Turay and so we're working with everyone and what we're saying is how do we selfishly provide an opportunity for students to have the ability to learn more about healthcare roles professions in the right level because most of you know this better than I do if we wait to engage our students when they're in high school and they never build that foundation stem foundation they're playing catch-up let's be honest they're playing catch-up I was one of those kids that had to play catch-up along the way to be able to make it so my point here is if we can actually have our even elementary school students engage and aware and we actually expose them then in middle school we can start actually actively working with many of them which we do and then we get them in high school and then when they go to college actually what are the neat things that we're right now discussing is can we provide full scholarships to a number of our students with a caveat that then they will actually sign a contract to come and work for us for five years right our legal department is saying might not hold a lot of water but maybe it's not a bad idea to go down that path actually at the end of the day for me even if they actually leave us and they go and work for advocate Aurora or Ascension to be honest with you it's still a win for our community because we're creating now pathways for students who are going to go in and be culturally and linguistically relevant to the communities that they serve and they're going to ensure that they're providing that equitable care so this is really cool work that we're doing here we track that we actually track not only the internships because it's nice to give opportunities but it's a conversion how many of those students are then getting jobs at freighter that's our litmus test for all of our workforce development programs here's another cool thing that we do through emerging markets there's actually our events and I said about four years ago I said hey those are actually movable billboards for us how about if we start putting actually some of our key messages there so this one actually is the one in Spanish for our Latino community saying respecting every single individual that we care for in our healthcare system actually it's interesting because actually I get from a number of our Latino leaders they take the photo or the selfie in some cases and then they'll text it to me and say hey I was actually here your van was here picking up something and I just wanted to give you a shout out so really neat it pays attention here's probably one of the things that I'm probably the proudest about is we came up with our anti-racism declaration but here's the difference we decided and here's where I love Cathy where we did not stop with the flowery words we said what are the actions that we're willing to commit so we put four actions there that on the right hand side is actually now a banner that we have in all of our facilities because we want to make sure that our staff, our patients, our community when they cross those doors irrespective of where they're at in whichever community that they know where we stand for and against and more importantly where we're committing to and then there's actually a banner on I-94 that says here's where we stand against and if you want to learn more check us out at further.com slash in racism that's actually where our plan diversity plan lives and again we're being as transparent as we can in terms of here's who we are are we perfect now but we're willing to actually go and be courageous about what our journey will be and here's what we want to work and again we're working with a lot of those diverse communities through the community conversations so I'm gonna land here this morning couple of pitfalls that you should know and I think they have been mentioned the first one is about in terms of our culture we have embraced being comfortable with getting uncomfortable that's paramount you have to have courageous conversations and one of the things that I have told the number of my leaders is hey we need to agree to disagree but we're gonna do it diplomatically and respectfully in this organization and what I'm interested in seeking right engaging in conversation because I need to seek understanding from my leaders because maybe they have a great point and maybe they are right and I may be the one who's wrong so I need to hear but at a minimum what we have committed to is building common ground in our process and that then gives us a path forward for the efforts accountability executive commitment is paramount as Kathy will say you know it starts with us actually I have a quote on a different slide deck that I typically use that I'm kicking myself because I didn't bring it for this one where Kathy actually said to our BRGs because she rounds with each one of our BRGs and she said we cannot be organizationally successful if we are not successful with our DEI strategy so our point is it's one in the same and if we do not deliver here we will not be able to deliver on that one this is not an or it's an end strategy from that perspective office of diversity structure I mentioned that organizational investment I will tell you we have gone through a huge overhaul again to Kathy's testament and our senior leadership they gave us two and a half million dollars as we were entering the pandemic to right size our language services department because we were not right sized before and we made the business case we took the business plan to our operating steering committee and I said here's what we need here's what we need it and here's how it aligns to strategy and our commitment and we were able to get that we're actually going through one more step around that on our DNI side for the our center of excellence on the corporate side to be able to right size that and be able to support all of them and this work and again it has been mentioned this morning is about coalition building this is about work that we need to do collectively not individually I tell folks that the DEI work is not for Mavericks doesn't work I've been there and done that and you burn bridges this is about creating coalition it's about the amplification of those strategies success factors as well CEO commitment and support senior leadership buying having a strategic partnership internally and externally is critical but then having also a roadmap having a strategic plan where you have smart goals that are certainly measurable attainable right the essence for specific realistic and time bound it's critical and then tying those metrics to it that has been again part of our secret sauce sharing lessons learn and leading practices you know one of the probably one of the greatest energizing things that this work will allow you to do is actually then share either your pitfalls or leading practices with others you know from my perspective you know the greatest work that we can do is really sharing with one another our journeys because you know what might be working for me and again this may not be completely transferable but there may be some nuggets there that you can actually glean and say that could be something that as I'm connecting that's could work for us but at the minimum it gives you a little bit of that line of sight for the work that is being implemented and then someone mentioned this we got a celebrity accomplishment we work in an organization that is consume about hitting their goals and I have said to Kathy and others we got a boss and we got to celebrate because what gets rewarded will get repeated we know that and so it's important to celebrate those accomplishments so my call to action to you this morning is based on what you have learned all along this morning how can you serve as a diverse and equity influencer ambassador again it could be as Dr. Moutry actually covered earlier this morning one of those five equity dispositions that might be the best work that you can do and that's great or it could be something here that you might actually say hey I want to become better at that think about those opportunities also related to your work first workplace or marketplace or community you know one of the greatest things that I get to do as well representing freighter is serving on boards in my community and I always reserve the right to serve in one of our Latino serving organizations in my own community because of my background and understanding that that's actually how a great way of paying it forward and so we have an ability to do that because we have now an expectation at freighter of doing at least a minimum of 12 hours a year in the community and in your work board work, community-based board work counselors that and then getting involved in EDI efforts whether in your organization in your community so I think all of you of course I'm preaching here to the choir but my point is look and glean what was it about the threat this morning between all the speakers that spoke to you and how can you actually then decide to work on that to harness right and continue to certainly develop those skillsets and competencies if you do that I truly believe that we're going to be able to live up as Mahatma Gandhi said that you must be the change that you want to see we can do this we can become change agents but it starts with realizing right having that awareness or acknowledgement and then doing something about it so think about your your something your why as I like to say and go forth and develop that thank you so much for uh... listening to me this morning uh... I hope that there were some nuggets here that you glean uh... it certainly will be around for a few more minutes in case that someone have any questions thank you