This has been a difficult year for people who work and volunteer around DEI. State legislatures have pursued rollbacks of DEI training for employees, and many sectors of corporate America (technology, most visibly) have either cut or eradicated their DEI teams. And even at organizations where DEI leadership remains intact, many say forward movement has stalled.

Those challenges are part of the motivation for a session at last month’s ASAE Annual Meeting & Expo on strengthening DEI efforts, “Conscious Inclusion Through Strategic Motivation.” “A lot of organizations start down this path of DEIAB [diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging], and they get stalled,” says one of the session leaders, Rhea Steele, CAE, chief of staff and VP of strategy and governance at the School Nutrition Association. “So we wanted to focus on the motivations that will help them move forward.”

The session organizers identified a variety of factors that typically derail DEI initiatives and invited attendees to discuss them: lack of board buy-in, lack of champions, need for training, limited communication and investment, and more. The weaponization of the term “DEI” itself plays a factor, says another session leader, McKinley Advisors Managing Director Tim Hopkins, CAE (also chair of ASAE’s Conscious Inclusion Advisory Committee). “The challenges can come from many different places,” he says. “There are legal challenges to the work. There are outsized, loud voices within a small group that make organizations hit that pause button.”

One theme that came out of the session was that addressing criticism requires less attention to the political atmosphere or a handful of critics, and more to how DEI relates to the organization’s mission. “Those challenges are often addressed by grounding it all back to what your mission, vision and values are, and truly setting priorities based on that,” Hopkins says. “A lot of the time it comes down to, what does it mean to us? If we truly are going to be an inclusive, consciously inclusive organization, what does that look like for us based on our values?”

The answers to that question are going to be unique to each association and require soul-searching around mission and values—which may be one reason why the efforts slow or or stop. 

“It’s not a math problem—there has to be discussion around the nuances of the issue you’re facing, and the possible lever you have within your organizational context to actually address that particular situation,” Steele says. “Everybody wants the easy solution—see the problem, see the fix, do it. And for this particular topic, the nuances really matter. Those are going to be what supports or doesn’t support motion.”

In addition to focusing on organizational mission and values within that conversation, Hopkins noted that showing the positive bottom-line benefits helps. “Conscious inclusion is about proactively embedding this work throughout an organization and demonstrating that conscious inclusion has positive business outcomes,” he says. “Practitioners understand that it’s the right thing to do, to be constantly inclusive of different groups, especially historically marginalized and underrepresented groups within our industry, the fields we represent across the board, and it also makes business sense.”

And even if progress is slow, it’s worth remembering that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Rodneikka Scott, MSc, CAE, VP of member and state engagement at the National Society of Professional Engineers, another leader at the session, says leaders should “take time to celebrate the achievements, even if they’re small, even if it’s as small as a statement.

“This is work that is very similar to advocacy,” she adds. “It can take years to get legislation passed, to get things moving in a direction where you feel like you can see progress, or you can see that light at the end of the tunnel. If you don’t celebrate the small steps, it feels like you’re not moving.”