05/23/2022

Lower Your Built-in Barriers

Widen your organization's DE&I reach

Ideas in organizations die all the time—not because they’re bad ideas, but because they lacked an owner. One thing that became clear to me as I was working on the latest Associations Now Deep Dive on diversity, equity, and inclusion is that the success of any program depends heavily on intentionality: Organizations need to commit to concrete goals and make sure that there are people who are held accountable for them.

At the Commission for Case Manager Certification, that process accelerated in 2019, when it created a DEI subcommittee. According to CEO MaryBeth Kurland, CAE, volunteer leaders were concerned that certain communities were being shut out of the profession on a number of fronts—because CCMC had defined its membership pool too narrowly, made access to its credential too difficult, and wasn’t doing enough to reach out to diverse groups of potential certificants.

"We were asking, what should we be doing in this space as a credentialing body?," Kurland said. "We wanted to make sure that there weren’t any barriers to certification or recertification or taking the exam."

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.