 I have five panelists here today from very different backgrounds. I'll point out that in your schedule, in your printed schedule, you might have Dennis Dai from Southwestern Indian Polytech Institute, but he was unable to make it. As a result, we have graciously found someone to fill that spot, James Rattling Leaf, so he's not in your printed program, but each speaker will have a few minutes to introduce themselves and talk a little bit about where they're coming from, because everybody here is coming from very different places that will help contextualize what we're going to see. And here, I'll start off with some questions, but we'll open it up broadly to the audience. I also want to reiterate that if folks can make sure that if you are speaking, whether in the audience or up here, to use the microphone, both for the benefit of the folks here, but also for the benefit of the folks who are participating via our live stream. Okay. First person up. You can stay there, or you can come up. Well, let me just go ahead and say that. Good morning. Hello, my name is James Rattling Leaf, and I'm from the Amachi Api, in the Dakota language, I greet you with a good heart and a handshake. My name is James Rattling Leaf. I'm from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, and I wish you all a good day, and encourage me a good day. And as a moderate mention that I'm a pitch hitter today to use a baseball analogy, but wow, I'm still reeling from that last talk, to be honest, where do I start? But wasn't that great? I've never heard or seen or been a part of something like that for a long, long time, and it makes me want to get out there in March and do something, that passion. And that's part of what I wanted to share with you today. When I was thinking about this talk, I got the message driving from South Dakota, where I'm from, and I was in Wyoming when Alicia called me, asked me if I could step in, and I said, sure, I was willing to help out. And I thank all the organizers for bringing me in here. Again, I didn't apply, but the circumstances worked out where I get to be with you today, so I want to offer some things to you in a good way. Eleven years ago, I was in this building, and I was part of a group called the Seven Generations Conference, and it brought American Indian knowledge holders and leaders from around the country, and NCAR, UCAR scientists in this building to talk about a changing climate, but also to talk about different ways of understanding and knowing the world. And so it brought back a lot of good memories to be here in this building and a premier science organization and to have the native languages spoke out loud, to have a drum beat, and to have native elders come and share their understanding of the world. But also with another knowledge system within a Western scientist coming and in community and to talk about how we deal with a changing climate. And so that's one thing. So I think there's something special when we gather together like this and to share what's on our minds and our hearts. I appreciate the good doctor talking about not only our mind but our heart. As native people, we consider that and we value that. My work is in cross-cultural training and understanding. And so I live in Rapid City, South Dakota. And so if you know that history of that community and that region, there's a lot of conflict between American Indian and non-American Indian people around all kinds of issues. So there are those of us who are what I call boundary warriors, those who can step into that space between these two cultures and try to find a pathway forward in a respectful and honorable way. And I like what she said. There's no good people, not bad people. I really like that. And that's where I find myself. And so I work with science organizations. I work with tribal governments, tribal colleges, mainstream universities as they come to understand how they can work more effectively with each other. And so I work on something called cultural intelligence framework. And so work that's been developed out of Michigan, I really like it. And so we're getting to practice at in Rapid City, working with the police department, working with the university and working for a utility company called Black Hills Energy who actually has a footprint here in Colorado. So they asked me to come and help them. And I really want to take back a lot of the things I learned here today. And I think that's our challenge here today is what do we do with all these kind of things? And from the Native American perspective I'm hearing more and more of this land acknowledgement. I mean, people understand what that means and have heard that before in this audience. So for me, another part of my role is I started to work with the University of Colorado Boulder and hearing the professor's story about CU Boulder and the barriers and the trials that she's dealing with. I kind of wonder what I got myself into. Do I really want to hit? Well, I think that speaks to this what we're trying to do at CU Boulder. They're asking me to come and work within the institution to help what I would call the Indigenous Academy. That's not my word that's been used before with other leading Native scholars. Indigenous community, just talk about space. Talk about a place where we can come together and look at these two different knowledge systems. Now, we still are as Native people in Native nations. We're still wrestling with what happened to us. And when I come and talk to people about these kind of things, it's a very complicated, hard thing. And so I all start with what is and what has been to establish a context of understanding. Never assume that people understand and know who we are. And there's a study that was done in 2018 on higher educational equity and inclusion and diversity. It was done by a group here in Colorado called the American Indian College Fund. And this was really born out of the incident that happened at Colorado State in 2018 where two Native men were looking at the college and visiting and walking around and they were some lady misunderstood or whatever it was called the cops on those two young men and so they had to deal with that. But the University responded by bringing in these Native leaders to come together to talk about how do we how do we go forward from this? How do we move forward and what do we need to do as an institution? What are we skills and understandings and abilities that we need to grow and to develop? So as Native people we have a culture 550 plus federal nation recognized tribes in the country yet today and we're all aspiring for what's something called self-determination and sovereignty. We want to be who we are yet despite everything that happened to us 500 plus years of assimilation and all these different policies. And I think it's the issue of invisibility. She mentioned about invisibility I love that she talked about it because sometimes in my work 25 years you know somebody said well we want this new initiative and I like this universal design concept but I'm wondering if that's going to happen where it's going to be sort of normal to include American Indian people American tribal colleges in that planning in the forefront of that discussions at the table if you will and not on the menu that we have a contribution to we've made a tremendous contribution to this country in land and natural resources and so that's the question I think that we have in front of us in terms of going forward as tribal nations and tribal colleges and tribal people we need to think about this deeply and I think events like this are helpful again I'm just one person representing myself and a member of a tribe so don't take be careful about how you generalize or generalize my comments and things about it but I think we want to be engaged we want to be a part of the discussion and I think we can make a contribution to going forward so climate change is one of the areas that I I'm involved in and helping and thinking about and bringing young people into a discussion dividing programs so that our students can be successful but there is a gap there is a gap in our education for American Indian people yet and so there are good people working hard on this issue there are people here at the university thinking about this wrestling with it because there's really no easy answers somebody said there's no silver bullet but maybe there's a silver buckshot you know it's kind of systemic so let's put our minds together and see what we can do for our children thank you hello hopefully you can hear me okay my name is Gina Hellfrank I'm director of communications and culture at NUM Focus which is a non-profit that supports open practices in data science and research notably we serve as the legal entity for a number of popular open source projects in data science I thought I would just talk about sort of a few formative experiences in my own life that have shaped the consciousness that I bring to this work I was born in Washington DC I grew up in a quite well-off family we moved to Texas when I started 2nd grade and the town that I am from is called Lubbock I see some smiles recognition I was also bust when I was in 4th grade which isn't a thing anymore as far as I know to an elementary school across town that was predominantly black and Hispanic and so that was probably my first kind of racial consciousness that oh wow I'm not I can't just take it for granted that I'm in the majority anymore so fast way forward most of I think the really key moments in my life happen in graduate school I left Lubbock for college I went to Boston College on the east coast which is a Jesuit Catholic school I studied philosophy I thought it was very interesting to ask big questions about life I had some cognitive dissonance about the fact that I was reading like basically 100% men and largely white men in the canon nevertheless I thought it was very interesting I pursued a philosophy PhD at Emory University when I was there I also got a certificate which is like a minor for PhD students in women's studies and in the women's studies program at Emory I encountered some phenomenal students who were pursuing the women's studies PhD if you have heard the term misogynoir that was coined by Moya Bailey who I was in graduate school with so there was just like some really outstanding people who I had the privilege of learning from and with my dissertation was really a combination of things my focus was in ethics I was interested in the concept of solidarity I was trying to think about what does it mean for people to be in solidarity with one another especially across difference there was an experience I had I served on a few president's commissions one on the status of women one on LGBTQ people and there was a celebration anniversary celebration for the women's commission and it was designed to be held in an outdoor location one of the organizing people passed another one of the long time members who used a wheelchair and was like I'll see you at the celebration later had that moment and then when it actually came time the location was not accessible for her and so the woman was obviously very upset and sort of left in tears when I heard about this I was like how can someone have that interaction I'll see you there later and just it doesn't even click so that was really what I was trying to grapple with in my dissertation work is how do we do this work across difference then I graduated into the recession and I took three part time jobs and one of those jobs was teaching intro to western philosophy at Morehouse College in Atlanta which is a historically black men's university and that was also very formative for me because I thought okay now I have to teach 60 black men the history of philosophy and I already know the version of the history of philosophy that I have been taught and I cannot responsibly teach that same one to them so I really had to think about my curriculum that was very formative and then my stars sort of aligned and I was hired on as assistant director at the Harvard College Women's Center so at Harvard I worked with amazing students I was fortunate to work on the committee with Mazra and Banaji who is a really preeminent researcher in unconscious bias that got me really interested in those kind of questions so it was like a continuation of the same thought you know there are aspects of our minds that are in conflict with our explicit values and what do we do about that so after a lot of soul searching I decided I would move home to Texas quit Harvard get into technology and through some twists and turns I wound up at non-focus and I also do some work as a consultant on unconscious bias and diversity and inclusion hello how we doing today good for real thank you man everybody's like listening so intently I'm trying to so I guess I'm the corporate guy so so I'm a founder CEO of jump recruits and so I think the best way to talk about what it is that we do what I do I give it to you in two stories and then I go into very quickly within time what it is that we do so the first story I was working with a client which is a go straight into it so I was working with a client who is a health care technology space and so they were about $1.5 billion this was last year and they've reached this in 10 years so really fast got up there really quickly my team was consulting with this organization helping them with various different things around diversity HR oh there we go whoa I don't like talking to my voice like that so my team was consulting with them and one of the program managers came into the room also a senior leader in the organization and she comes to me and she says hey Cedric I really want you to meet someone on my team they're coming from India next week he knows a lot about what you have going on and I want you to talk to him and I want you to work this stuff out to figure out what you do to make this successful I say sure great can you give me his name she says sure her exact statement was his name is Muk Mukesh I can't remember right now but that really doesn't matter and so I cringe I literally tensed up in the chair because I couldn't believe that someone this high in the organization had that to say in a room of individuals that she didn't know two she didn't know the door was open who was listening and we always say we always say this in a company is that where you are in one place is where you are everywhere and so if this was happening here then what could have happened in other places and so not to embarrass her I let her leave the room she finished talking she left the room I merely went to talk to her and we talked about this idea of humanizing individuals and we talked about it in depth I'm not going to the exact story but to end it I told her that knowing someone's name is so important especially in America with the Milton pot that we have knowing someone's name is so important and it is the first step to humanize someone when you meet them because we are all going to say when someone say who are you my name is Cedric Chambers my name is such and such I told her that it's so important that when you go to prison or you go to jail one of the first things they do to dehumanize you is they take away your name and they give you a number and so I try to get to this idea of humanizing so that's one the second one is met this individual very very smart individual I invite him to a networking event we have a networking event with a client that we had he came in the room and probably a little bit bigger than this and he stayed in the back of the room the entire time he didn't talk to anyone he didn't say anything he stayed in the back of the room the entire time as I started to notice this I went to the back of the room I said hey how's everything going what's going on you don't want to engage he says you know yeah I really do want to engage but the organization only allows 3.0 as a minimum and I have a 2.7 and so I'm thinking for a second because this individual was a mechanical engineer very smart had did two internships before with the same company to where they developed medical device surgical equipment to where it was used on terminal ill patients and he has a website I can give you the website great you can see how it worked and everything and so I'm just thinking in my head like how can somebody this smart this intelligent with all this they have to bring diverse not be included or not be thinking themselves automatically as being excluded from this situation because they don't meet the minimum qualifications and so then I want to ask him so tell me a little bit about the 2.7 he says he's at a top tech school not only am I going to school full time but also work 20 hours part time to help my family pay for bills so when he goes to class he's tired he's drawn out just everything and so needless to say it's funny how minimum qualifications work sometimes needless to say we work with the individual and we ended up not only getting him a internship with the organization but then we also work with the school to get him a work study and work in the department that he was in to continue to build that knowledge but then also still make the needs that he needs for his personal family I see all that to say jump recruits is a diversity recruitment start up ultimate goal is to increase the diversity representation in your company build strategies and execute on strategies that increase retention and engagement and prepare and place diverse individuals in companies and deserving careers the last thing I'm going to say is this we all heard the saying we all heard the saying give him in a fish you feed him for a day teach him how to fish you feed him for a lifetime what we do at jump it would take it one step further to where every candidate we work with every company we work with we say this model of give him in a fish feed him for a day teach him how to fish feed him for a lifetime but if you show him his family will never struggle again and so that's what we do with candidates is if they jump all in with us we show them how to buy the pond through their careers and through their purpose and then we give great talent to organizations that are there for the long haul for them to go thank you I am in the STS department that stands for science technology and society at the Rochester Institute of Technology it is one of the largest private universities in the U.S. it has about 18,000 undergraduates and 2,000 of our students are deaf or hard of hearing so a lot of what I'm going to talk to you about today is really thinking about accessibility as one of the angles of diversity and inclusion we just talked about I saw some great stickers out there that say disability is part of thinking about diversity and inclusion so I fully support that sticker whoever brought it and I want to tell you a little bit about the work that I do I'm not sure everybody else has positionality in their career on the panel I'm not in the room but I'm a very recent Ph.D. graduate and I'm starting a tenure track position in the fall as a part of my positionality in engaging this work is recognizing that there are things that I can do as a harmless looking young white woman but also recognizing that I often don't have as much power in particular institutions and thinking about the points of leverage that I can engage in that space so the university that I work at has this unique aspect of having over a tenth of our students have sensory disabilities more than that actually when we count other students and in general deaf and hard of hearing students are one tenth of one percent of the population and globally people with disabilities are roughly maybe twenty percent to one third of the population so a lot of the work that I do is really focused on helping people who are teaching and mentoring students and colleagues with disabilities to get out of their way or be better mentors to them it's not about thinking about individual disabilities as having a deficit or needing us to foster them I wrote down what Dr. Finney said about communities need to see working with you as a privilege so working with all of my students and collaborators is an enormous privilege and so it's thinking about how do we foster that mindset in my colleagues in my department in the people above me it is an enormous privilege to work with the students I work with and that needs to be the starting point of thinking about what am I going to learn from them but also not in an extractive way when I was first asked to be part of this panel I was like oh I shouldn't be the person sitting here because I'm generally part of teams that are doing this work and they very much include disabled scientists of all kinds of identities but they're exhausted from being on panels like this right so part of it is recognizing this tension that especially in disability spaces we refer to as nothing about us without us which refers to making sure that work about people with disabilities is led by people with disabilities but the tension is that it's not the responsibility of people with disabilities to make accessibility happen and so that is intention so all of the work I do is in teams I want that to be very clear because I'm talking to you but I'm parts of teams that do this work together I'm part of an HHMI inclusive excellence program at my university and I'm a mentor in both the research and teaching programs there and I'm part of the unique program that's funded by the national institutes of health called RISE there's different programs across the university that's focused on mentoring disabled scientists and I mentor students who are deaf and hard of hearing in bioinformatics and ecoinformatics the other thing I want to say in terms of thinking about this, many of us who sit here are thinking maybe with adults or university students so there's still adults maybe in the K-12 space but a lot of the work that I do outside of my normal responsibilities as a faculty member are really focused on age 0 to 3 and that might sound very strange to you but especially again when we talk about the disability advocacy space there's something called the school to prison pipeline maybe some of you have heard of that and it refers to this intersectional pressure that's on especially children of color with disabilities that routes them to basically not the places that we want them to be not the places they deserve to be because they are basically experience punishments and not the same opportunities and it starts from birth I want to be very clear about that so as a professional when I decided where do I put my outreach efforts where do I put my community engagement it starts literally from the point that they are born because I do not believe starting that work at the university level or the K-12 level is enough and so there are multiple points of engagement to think about and babies are very very cute so Dr. Vinnie also mentioned talking about affinity space and one of the things I want to be really clear about is the two programs that I work on one of which is focused on thinking about faculty and basically how do we train them to be better mentors for all of our students and all of their identities also recognizing that they shouldn't be practicing on our students we want to get them up to speed to be good mentors before you go put a student in their lab space so the programs we have that are putting students in particular lab groups we want to know that those are supportive spaces of them and visual representation of people who look like our students especially if they have a visible disability is so so critical so thinking about how do we grow that but also not putting that responsibility on saying oh you're a disabled student and there's a disabled mentor and so you're going to go work with them because the reality is that two thirds to 80% of the world is not disabled and it's on all of us to do the work to make sure that we are doing the work and our better mentors and collaborators to our students and our colleagues so I will stop there great thank you good morning my name is Clyde Crisman and I identify as an old white guy and I think it's sort of interesting because one of the reasons I'm here is it's sort of cool to feel what it feels like to be a minority in the room and as I look around the room I acknowledge that as an old white guy I'm a minority but let me talk to you a little bit more about why I'm here I'm the director of a state agency that employees about 450 full-time employees and somewhere between sixteen and eighteen hundred part-time employees so have over two thousand employees we are constantly hiring we operate thirty-eight state parks soon to be forty state parks for two under construction now so we're going to be hiring some new staff to staff those parks in the near future we operate sixty-three natural area preserves and we have one of the internationally recognized natural heritage programs we have some of the best scientists in the fields of biology botany and a lot of the pure sciences in the country we operate our floodplain management and dam safety program we regulate over two thousand dams in the Commonwealth of Virginia that's one thing that keeps me up at night we've had more dam failures in Virginia in the last year then we've had in the last decade we offer operate the office of land conservation our planning and recreational resources division our designing construction division that does the building of our facilities in our state parks and I am here because I've been the director of this agency now going once I've completed my fifth year starting on my sixth year thirty-six years I've been in Virginia state government and five years ago I started on an effort to better diversify my workforce our workforce and I'm here to tell you that despite some really robust initiatives we've made no progress as a matter of fact if anything we've gone backwards a little bit so let me just give you a couple of statistics first of all Virginia's about fifty-one percent female my workforce is sixty-three percent male Virginia is about sixty-two percent white and I will tell you that that number is going down just a few years ago it was about sixty-six percent white where it's sixty-two percent white anybody want to guess what percentage of my workforce is white let's try to guess seventy-five I wish it was seventy-five ninety you're really close ninety-three and that's despite five years of what can we do better the population of Virginia is about twenty percent black about seven percent Hispanic about three percent Asian again our total minority population in my workforce is just a little over seven percent so we definitely are not representing the constituents that we serve and again it's frustrating because we've done a lot of efforts as a matter of fact two years ago we started on our DCR diversity and inclusion initiative and interestingly enough that was to focus around people with disabilities our governor issued an order back in 2017 then Governor McAuliffe and said each agency was tasked with developing and implementing and evaluating an annual plan around getting more individuals with diversity into the Virginia State Government well it didn't take less long to figure out that diversity is just a subset of other underrepresented populations and so we decided to make it a much broader effort certainly focusing on things we could do to attract folks with disabilities but also focusing on how we could better attract all unrepresented groups so we sort of came up with three objectives objective number one was how do we attract a robust and diverse applicant pool five years ago I promoted the first division director we have seven division directors in my agency I promoted the first African American division director thinking that would be a positive step I was thinking about one of the bullets that was on that slide that was up there for a while after a couple years my African American division director hadn't hired anybody of color he had hired several people I went to him and said what's up with this I thought that made and he said you know what when we get in these applicant pools they're all white mostly white males and so coming up with a way that we need to work to attract more robust and a more diverse applicant pool and I think that starts with working with folks in K-12 and certainly in higher ed and I hopefully have the chance to talk a little bit more about that of course the second step of attracting is then recruiting that workforce but then an important thing is retaining and one of the things that I've really worked hard personally myself to understand is the difference between diversity and inclusion and that is something that we work hard to do in terms of creating an environment where we get good people and then they leave after a couple years well why are they leaving after a couple years obviously it's not the right fit for them why is it not the right fit for them continuing to look inward at ourselves as we speak here today we have made some great strides and I think that and one of the things that Carolyn said earlier and we had Carolyn speak at our land conservation conference in Williamsburg Virginia two years ago it was a great message to hear but one of the things I think is that that she made a good point and that I need to understand that because I do lose my patience in that it is going to take time particularly in a state like Virginia we're changing long standing institutional bias and it takes a long time just to recognize that let alone come up with affirmative strategies to address it so I'll stop there and look forward to being able to answer some questions okay thank you so hopefully you have a sense of all of the different places that our panelists are coming from we'll start off with a seed question and then we'll go through some Q and A from the audience itself we'll throw the thing around maybe not throw it, carefully pass it so just to get us started we'll demonstrate just to get us started I want you to think about some of the things that you all have really learned about this kind of hard work and what were some of the impactful experiences in terms of not just things that happened to you that you observed but change that you felt a part of creating or failed at creating that you took home a lesson about why and instead of just sort of picking first I'll sort of go to the person that has that maybe experience ready to share I don't want to contextualize it only in successes even though we would love to share successes but some of the things we learn are through our failures so yeah think about one experience to share with the audience so think about a success or failure of your initiatives in doing this work that you really took something from you learned it's going to impact the way you do things in the future I'll take that first crack at it in my work I look at leadership because I really think leadership matters and in my work with leaders of organizations I want to work more effectively with American Indian people and cultures changing the social institutions is very difficult that's what I learned right off the bat change is hard I guess from my community in South Dakota I didn't realize I didn't realize the embeddedness of these values from our community and how you look at it from an everyday perspective and you think that they understand we're here we're not going nowhere let's figure out how to work better together but it's hard and also look at it from the leadership perspective so guiding change is difficult one of the hardest challenges for a leader is guiding change so what we try to do is figure out how to work with leaders in terms of relationships giving I guess strategic and helpful feedback as we talk about issues he can't control it he can't control incidences people will do what they do and so in some ways we go one step forward two steps forward then we go one step back or two steps back and how do you can't control that I'll give you one example I'm in South Dakota we have a reconciliation between American Indian people and the non-native people have you guys ever heard of DAPL Dakota Access Pipeline well that's my people that started that and so we have another one that's coming along called the Keystone XL Pipeline that's starting up this summer so there are those of us who are these boundary warriors trying to figure out how to move forward on these kind of things in a positive way and you're saying this is going to take us again because the governor is saying there's no outside money to help support the protesters she's passing laws ACLU is getting involved in suing the state because that so you can just see how boy how that gets convoluted it gets complex very fast there are those of us who are working day in day out trying to bridge this understanding so I keep going back to the fact that American Indian people are the least understood and the most misunderstood and that wasn't my term that's John Kennedy in 1967 so we still have to do a lot of work I guess one of the things that happened early in the career real fast glad to happen was that I came into situations early with the one thing that I tell people now to never do and that's a soon and when coming in and working with organizations who talked about DNI, who talked about inclusion who talked about what they wanted to do and going and assuming that those same individuals cared about what needed to happen the people that were going to be affected X, Y and Z I found out really fast that that wasn't the case and I found out really fast which is the sad part is that companies pay a lot of money to these diversity initiatives and say that they're doing all these X, Y and Z things to get on the next human capital rights report or however it may be and then turn around and when it's time to actually do the work don't want to put their hands to the plow and get it done and so coming in for me that assuming piece made me go into situations to where you're hopeful, you're inspiring you're talking to employees and this is what we're trying to do this is what leadership is trying to do and then go back to leadership with a plan this is how we need to execute and then they say well we'll push that off to Q4 or we'll push it off into 2020 or however it may be and so that created for me because like I said it is a very emotional piece because a lot of this is personal around what I do and why I do it so coming in and assuming is one thing that wasn't very successful because what happens is you're bumping heads with the company or with the individuals that you need to ultimately to move for and you're starting off on two different planes to begin with right and you can never get anywhere if both people don't see the problem the same way and so that's one of the things I would say from like a failure piece I realized early on is that when you come into situations assuming that the other person has the right intent or you assume that they're looking at it from the same viewpoint as you are it's going to bite you at the end of the day and so when you're coming into these situations the one thing we talk about and we realize right up the gate is what's the appetite and before I come in and work with your organization I need to know what you've done because if you haven't done anything up to this point it's a reason why you haven't done anything up to this point so and I can't be the saver to come in and say you know hey look we're finna make this change happen do this and do X, Y and Z because I can only assist what goes on so I think that assuming piece I would say is a big piece that prevented a lot of or caused a lot of failure but yeah I think that I'll continue on the assumption as a kind of failure thread and I want to talk specifically in terms of thinking about disability and accessibility about the assumption that accessibility is for disabled people and not for everyone and I mean this in two very specific ways so I work often with a lot of people who use American Sign Language as their primary language and so the assumption for many people who work with an individual who if they speak English and someone else is an ASL user as their primary language they say oh we need an interpreter and it's for my ASL using student or it's for my ASL using colleague no it's for you as an English speaker so that you can understand all the knowledge and the contributions of your colleague right so that assumption that framing is a failure and that framing is what's called accommodations accommodations is a deficit mindset it isn't of itself a failure it presumes that the disabled person is going to be welcome to the table but they're lesser than I need to get up to speed and not that we need to do the work to make the space accessible now when we say the accessibility benefits everyone one of the failures in the assumption is that it must benefit everyone one of the challenges for example of working with communities where very few people have the disability whatever the disability is people can write it off and say well nobody needs that or only one person needs that are we really going to do all of that work for that one person for those few people so I can give you the example of captioning a lot of times now when we talk about captioning people will say oh it benefits all these other people and that is well and good but you should not be doing it because of all the able people that it benefits also by a product you shouldn't have to justify all the able people that it benefits in order for it to be worth doing your time to create that space so I'll pick up on I'm sort of a simple guy and I always look for simple solutions and I guess one of the things that that I find challenging about this issue of diversity including is that there is no simple solution but I'll give you an example of something we tried that didn't work there are several of our parks particularly in northern Virginia area where we have very large populations they love our parks come in large groups have large picnics and we were having some law enforcement challenges that were probably centered around the inability to communicate effectively with folks things that could be relatively minor such as you need to put that beer in a plastic cup so we can't see it those kinds of things I don't any anyway so we decided in about 110 of our folks are sworn law enforcement so we decided that we would do a special recruit where one of the preferred requirements for the job was fluent in Spanish I wanted to make it a mandatory requirement but my HR people told me that would be reverse discrimination I don't quite understand that because I didn't say what ratio had to be I just said you had to be fluent in Spanish but nonetheless so we went through this interview process and we had a Hispanic who was obviously very fluent in Spanish on the panel and we got you know partway through the interview and all of a sudden we changed the interview to Spanish in order to get an interview you had to check the box fluent in Spanish and one of the scenarios was a woman said in Spanish my son is drowning in the river I need you to come help right away not one of the applicants not one could respond appropriately so I just offer that up as to say I thought it was very simple it wasn't because we need to do more where we need to start recruiting folks at a much earlier age now the other challenge with that is I start out at Park Ranger at a whopping $36,000 a year and finding folks that have special skills that want to come work for that kind of a salary is also a challenge so just throw that out because that is one of the many factors that makes this all more complicated than we like it to be and I'm just thinking about what to say um I want to try and kind of talk about it both sides so I think on a failure side of things one of my colleagues likes to limit what she refers to as the weaponization of diversity equity and inclusion which means it's in marketing um so you know it's a PR thing it's a marketing thing you know they're using as part of their talent but it's not there's no real rubber hitting the road on the inside so I think that's a big risk and a frequent failure I think one of the reasons that that happens is that the folks who have the most power, the folks at the top are not bought in um typically the people in organizations who really are bought in and care a lot and want your help are calling on you because they need your support to convince the person with the power to put some resources behind this and that it's something that matters um and you know to just reference earlier um what Caroline Finney was speaking about was stories I think that is really really important um one of I guess my personal successes has just been about being able to tell a story so that a white male executive can see his role in advancing diversity inclusion at his company um just I just want to emphasize that it is so often what I want to do is come in and like help people figure out okay what do they need to be do how are they going to measure it you know like what are criteria for success but then I realize you can't do that because first I have to reconvince all the people who are in charge that this is what you should be doing so I guess that's like a failure slash success is that I always think I can be done having that conversation and I never can so um if you can have but that being said if you can have that conversation in a way that makes a connection that gets kind of a click moment from the person who has the most power the you know people who really are at the top and are the gatekeepers and uh have the power of the purse that is really uh really make or break