How to Create a Nonprofit Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan

When mapping your strategic planning process, make sure to consider all the ways you can meaningfully involve as many people as possible at each stage of the process. Everyone within your organization should be involved at some point.

When I work with clients on this process, here are the steps I use to create a DEI plan.

Step 1: Internal Audit

I start the process with an internal audit of their policies and systems. This gives me an initial look at what’s happening inside the organization. I can learn a lot from what is and is not documented in writing. Check out my blog post on this for additional information.

Step 2: Empathy Interviews

Next, I conduct “empathy interviews.” These empathy interviews show me the human experience of working at the organization. (You can read more about these interviews here.) These empathy interviews are one way I use Liberatory Design Practices from the National Equity Project. Incorporating these practices from the beginning of the process is a way to root a DEI plan and begin shifting toward liberation. 

Step 3: Considerations for Nonprofits

Nonprofits often live with the realities of being tied to grant funding, having employees who care deeply about the particular area, and those same people likely have more on their plate than they can reasonably get done. In order to care for these realities, we need to account for them within the plan we create. We need to:

1. Include areas that are necessary to an employee’s job and keep track of what goes beyond the bounds of that job description. We need to notice and document where someone is doing the work of more than one person.

2. Take inventory of grants, deliverables, and funding connections–and have a place on the strategic plan to account for current and possibly incoming grants and deliverables. If there are future grants in the pipeline that would allow for growth, consider including how that might affect the organization one to three years out. 

Step 4: Start Building the DEI Plan

Then we move into building a plan. I have two systems I like building plans in: Google Sheets and Airtable (database software).

Google Sheets are easy to navigate and share–and multiple people can have access to them for ease of updating. The drawback is that visually, a Google Sheet can start to feel a bit overwhelming, and they have limited filtering capabilities for easily hiding lower-priority tasks and information.

For most clients, I recommend using Airtable. It’s more than a spreadsheet (it’s a relational database) with a variety of views, so you have more control over how to filter and display information and data. For example, it’s easy to set up a view of just projects/tasks/initiatives that are happening currently. Plus, the layout is a little less clunky.

Once you decide where you’ll be building your plan, I recommend organizing your DEI plan based on the following criteria:

• Actions that need to be taken

• Objectives and purpose of those actions

• What values within the organization those actions align with

• Timeline for when/how things will get done (quarterly or monthly?)

• Specific tasks that need to occur to complete the action

• Who will be responsible for those specific tasks

• Budget needed

• Indicators of success

• Status (that can be updated and filled in)

• Notes and questions

Here are two templates to help get you started:

• Sample Template for DEI plan in Google Sheets

• Sample Template for DEI plan in Airtable

Credit to a former client, Foodwise, who introduced me to this framework, which has informed the process I use to help clients build their DEI plan.

If you have any questions or need assistance with this process for your organization, please contact me.