By Marisa DeSalles and Michelle Flores Vryn
As DEI professionals will tell you, one way to assess the authenticity of your workplace culture is to take stock of the types of messaging that circulate around the office. Are they overwhelmingly positive? (“We received this grant!” “Enrollment goals were exceeded!” “We can make payroll!”)
Seriously though, consider whether you are perpetuating a tone of toxic positivity. If you are, it likely flows over into your external messaging. Like your annual report.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my first decade of parenthood is that I have so much more to learn from my children than they will ever learn from me. They are curious, kind, and optimistic. They feel their feelings in a big way and have not succumbed to shame and self-doubt. They are excellent at speaking their truth and voicing their own needs. They could probably use some work on their boundaries (who needs privacy in the shower, anyway?), but, if there’s any force that can teach us to be the best, most unapologetic versions of ourselves, it is our children.
I spend a lot of time engaging with the world virtually these days — especially on TikTok. In addition to viral dances and meme-ified sounds, my TikTok “For You Page” offers videos of creators dancing, making art, sharing their pains and joys, telling jokes, and engaging in political education and discussion. Although I’ve felt particularly isolated during this last year and a half, TikTok has helped me find community and confirm that I’m not the only one frustrated by capitalism. 
I think we’re all a bit prone to thinking that accessibility is tied to technology — like a website’s coding, the structure of a PDF, metadata, whatever — and so we think that accessibility is an ‘expert’s domain,’ like we kinda assume it’s the web developer or graphic designer’s job. But actually, accessibility comes in really varied forms, including how we write. And this is cool because just about everyone writes and reads, which means everyone can play a part in creating more accessible content. 
We, as a world, take pride in our data collection abilities and the evolving technologies at our disposal. However, when we look closely, we often realize that especially in our nonprofit sector, the data we have is flawed. 
Are you a member of a racial justice team at a white-led organization? 
We all know that white men are at the top of the career food chain when it comes to earning power — with white women being a close second. (You need one more sentence, something giving an opinion or more info. Right now, it reads as two separate observations. So you need to supply the “so what” bitty 🙂 )
If your work environment and culture are inaccessible from the get-go, it is unlikely that disabled folks would feel encouraged to apply for or accept a position within your organization. With the continued impacts of the pandemic, our generation will grapple with disability at increased frequency and greater complexity than ever before, relying on already under-resourced and over-burdened support systems that are wholly unprepared for increased demand. This will only be exacerbated by the support needs of an aging generation of Baby Boomers. Accommodating disabled employees may be on your organization’s backburner, but any non-disabled member of your team can become disabled at any time. 
After a rough year in the nonprofit job market, I’m finally starting to see full-time research positions popping up regularly. That’s exciting, because I do miss working for an organization. In the ‘before times,’ I would have felt like I knew exactly the right approach to applying and interviewing. But in the before times, I didn’t know that I have an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). And now that I do know, I’m thinking about our working world very differently.
Have you ever wondered what it is that makes art so powerful?