Building a Fair and Inclusive Workplace
At Community IT, we are a 100% employee-owned company, committed to building an inclusive and welcoming environment, both for our team and for our clients. We believe that a diverse workforce, guided by principles of fairness and empathy, is essential to providing the best possible service to the nonprofit community. What does a commitment to a community of diversity and inclusion mean to Community IT?
Our journey towards this goal is ongoing, and it’s a core part of our mission. Over the past few years, we have been focused on a number of key initiatives to ensure our company culture reflects these values.
Here’s an update on some of the actions we’ve taken and the work that is currently underway:
What We’ve Done:
- Established a clear DEI statement: We created a formal statement to define our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, ensuring these values are at the heart of our operations. We have formalized mechanisms for providing internal feedback and reviewed our employee handbook to ensure fairness and inclusion are at the heart of our policies.
- Introduced inclusive holidays: We have added Juneteenth as a company-wide holiday to honor and reflect on an important day in American history. We also celebrate our staff cultures and learn about our many cultural traditions throughout the year
- Engaged with expert consultants: We have partnered with guides in creating a more equitable and welcoming workplace.
- Launched Community IT Voices: This initiative highlights the diverse experiences and backgrounds of our team members, celebrating the unique perspectives that make our company stronger.
What We’re Working On:
- Ongoing training: We are committed to continuous learning through workshops and discussions on topics such as unconscious bias and creating inclusive spaces. This helps our team better understand and connect with colleagues and clients from all backgrounds.
- Learning from clients and guest speakers: We invite clients and external speakers to share their missions and experiences with us multiple times a year as part of our all-staff activities.
- Fairness in client service: We are always exploring how to apply our values to better serve our clients. This includes ensuring our service delivery is always guided by our company values of trust, knowledge, service, and balance, and a deep understanding of your unique nonprofit missions. We are dedicated to treating every client with the care and respect you deserve, and to meet you where you are in your IT management journey. We think your IT vendor should be able to explain everything without jargon or lingo, and without making you feel like you can’t understand something important to making your IT decisions. We consider ourselves partners with you, where your expertise is your mission and goals, and our expertise is in IT support and strategy.
- Building a welcoming environment: We actively work to create a culture where every team member feels they belong and can thrive. This involves regular reviews of our policies and practices to ensure they support all employees.
Commitment to a Community of Diversity and Inclusion
We know this is a long-term commitment. We are proud of the progress we’ve made and are excited to continue this work. Our goal is to transform Community IT into an even more meaningful place to work and to be a better partner to the nonprofits we serve.
We are grateful for the work of our employees to center this challenge company wide and we have committed ourselves to create a meaningful place to work. Being an employee-owned community of diversity and inclusion has always been an important value to Community IT Innovators, and one of our greatest strengths as a company serving the nonprofit sector.
We strive to live our values throughout our work; with our clients, with our colleagues, and with our internal structures.
We look forward to where we might go next, and we will keep our community informed.
