The Greater Des Moines Partnership this week held its ninth annual Inclusion Summit, naming four companies and organizations as winners of 2021 Inclusion Awards, and hearing from a panel of CEOs and keynote speakers who spoke about the importance of the work surrounding racial equity, diversity and inclusion.

This year’s summit was held at the FFA Enrichment Center at Des Moines Area Community College in Ankeny. The summit is designed to raise awareness and to recognize the work being done in the Des Moines community around the issues of diversity, equity and inclusion.

The awards are presented to companies that champion DEI in their businesses, organizations and in the community. Winners must be a regional member or investor of the Partnership. They are chosen by a committee composed of the Partnership team and the Partnership’s Inclusion Council, which organized the summit.

Winners include:

• Hy-Vee for its work to serve the community during the pandemic through its Aisles Online program, by administering COVID-19 tests and vaccines, building partnerships with nonprofit organizations that serve diverse groups, and taking proactive steps to increase its hiring of minorities. It also continues to diversify its vendors and suppliers.
• Wells Fargo for implementing intentional efforts in hiring and retaining a diverse workforce, offering advancement opportunities for people with diverse backgrounds, and providing learning and growth opportunities internally and externally.
• NCMIC for demonstrating an intentional focus on DEI, supporting diverse suppliers and working hard during the pandemic to keep employees engaged, offering resources and conversations around mental wellness and hosting activities to keep employees happy and engaged.
• United Way of Central Iowa for being a strong pillar helping to foster an equitable and engaged community, for ramping up its DEI commitment and leading a 21-Day Equity Challenge last year that attracted more than 30,000 participants who learned about the vast and complex topics of DEI, and for being intentional in its investments with diverse communities and programming serving diverse communities.

Sanjita Pradhan, director of diversity and inclusion at the Partnership, said the award winners all demonstrated a strong commitment to advancing their DEI journey.

“They continue to make their workplaces welcoming for all and intentionally invest time and effort to make meaningful change,” Pradhan said.

Earlier in the day, participants, both in-person and virtual, heard from a panel of three CEOs who spoke about their own personal DEI journeys and what their companies are doing to advance their DEI goals.

Dr. Angela Franklin, the president and CEO of Des Moines University, Renee Christoffer, president and CEO of Veridian Credit Union, and Suzanna de Baca, president of Business Publications Corp., which owns the Business Record, all participated.

During the hour-long discussion, the leaders spoke about some of the best practices their companies have adopted to help guide them on their DEI journeys.

Franklin said DMU’s DEI journey began in 2011 when she came on board as the first person of color and the first woman to serve as president of the medical school.

She said the first thing that was done was the hiring of a multicultural affairs director. The position helped build an environment to not only diversify the student body, but to create programming to help students understand the value of ethnic diversity and prepare them for the changing demographics they would encounter, Franklin said.  

DMU has also enacted implicit bias training, anti-racism programming for students, a social justice series and created a faculty diversity council, she said.

“We are a very different institution today because of those early efforts to begin changing a culture,” Franklin said. “It’s the environment you create. It’s how you nurture, fertilize, enrich and support the environment so that individuals come to us because of the environment we create to make them feel welcome, respected and a part of a culture that’s all about advancing an organization.”

Christoffer said Veridian has been working on DEI topics since the 1990s, but refocused that work in the past couple of years with the creation of a diversity, equity and inclusion strategic plan.

“We really took a look at what we wanted to accomplish,” she said.

The three areas of focus were lending, the community and staff, Christoffer said.

“When we really had in-depth conversations about what actions and what change we wanted to create in those pillars, it was really easy for us to decide how they complement each other and where maybe they were going different directions and needed to realign,” she said. “That’s been a great process to go through. We outline a couple of years and then we go back and revisit and we update and make new changes to that … plan so we’re always focusing on the right things moving forward.”

Veridian also has created roundtables and affinity groups with employees from different backgrounds to share their stories, and they share what needs to be done to improve the work environment.

“It’s been a learning experience,” Christoffer said. “We’ve really focused on listening, but also taking action.”

Verdian also has been doing management training around DEI, and a mentor program, which Christoffer said is made up of about 50% minorities, is more robust than it’s ever been.

De Baca said Business Publications Corp. has done training workshops and become intentional about creating a DEI strategy around culture, communication, recruiting and retention.

“But the easiest thing we could do was to be very intentional in creating plans for how we as a media company cover and elevate diversity,” she said. “We have a voice and we have choices in how we use that voice and [I didn’t] see a great representation in our own pages.”

According to de Baca, Business Publications Corp. put a plan in place so that every issue includes sources and content that better represent the diversity in the community.

“And when people begin to see themselves in our pages, that will create a richer experience for them, and I think a very positive momentum for the community,” she said.

De Baca said that while progress is being made, “it’s a huge journey. A journey that will never be done.”

Participants also heard from keynote speakers: James Wright, who gives presentations nationwide and has developed diversity and inclusion programs that have received national recognition; Kerrien Suarez, executive director of Equity in the Center, an initiative to influence social sector leaders to shift mindsets, practices and systems; and Kenji Yoshino, a Chief Justice Earl Warren professor of constitutional law at New York University School of Law and the director of the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

Recordings of some of the presentations will be available on the Partnership’s website in the coming days.