Diversity, Equity, Access, & Inclusion

Workforce

• We strongly value diversity: each person brings different lived and professional experience that informs their work, and that experience varies with our social identities and their intersections. These include not only race, ethnicity, and gender, but also age, nationality, religion, (dis)ability, sexual orientation, class, socioeconomic status, caste, skin color, education, marital status, language, physical appearance, and more. We also value differences that may be present but less visible. Our differences empower both individuals and the team.
• When we hire, we review job postings for inclusive language and actively promote our postings to historically and persistently excluded groups.
• We seek every opportunity to engage with our cohort of Fellows, who represent considerable additional diversity beyond our core team, and we prioritize partnering with organizations that complement our strengths and team.
• We approach our staff from an asset perspective, striving to create conditions where team members can take on work that plays to their strengths. This means focusing first and foremost on employees’ existing strengths and skills. Our annual process combines supportive employee reviews with an employee-led development plan, which helps people continue to grow professionally.
• As a small organization, we do not currently quantify our team’s diversity due to concerns about identification and privacy.

Workplace

• The team has considerable flexibility in our schedules. While New York staff are generally expected to be present in the office during shared hours to facilitate collaboration (approximately one day a week), the team includes fully remote staff and most of our processes and communications are online-first to ensure they are included.
• We encourage staff to take as much (paid and unpaid) leave as needed for health and life events. Everyone pitches in to make that possible so that the flexibility will be available when needed.
• We have clear policies in place for reporting barriers to in-person participation so we can remove them. For example, we're prepared to offer interpretation services. Our office is physically accessible; our kitchen meets all staff and visitor dietary accommodations; and we incorporate these needs into off-site offline interactions as a matter of routine.
• We aim to be explicit about “hidden curriculum” concerns, like dress codes and norms of professionalism, which are often used to exclude workers for reasons unrelated to their job performance.
• The team shares DEAI-related content and thoughts with one another through an opt-in discussion channel.

Work Products & Practices

• At every stage of our products and practices, we aim to ask: what voices are not represented yet? We root our methods in culturally responsive approaches.
• We work closely with stakeholders across project teams, encouraging broad representation from the people who are most impacted by an intervention or topic.
• We prioritize recruiting research participants who vary demographically and attitudinally.
• In writing, we typically use singular they to refer to all participants if gender is not relevant to our analysis; similarly, we use a series of epicene names from around the world as pseudonyms when ethnic and cultural backgrounds are not considered in analysis. Doing so has a dual purpose: it further protects participants’ anonymity and encourages readers to consider their own assumptions about identities.
• We regularly review our frameworks for participant compensation and identity terminology and invite feedback from partners. We attempt to keep current on resources developed by identity affinity groups themselves (e.g. the Native American Journalists Association’s terminology guide).
• Reporting should be accessible to the people most impacted. We avoid jargon in our public-facing writing and communications, and where we cannot avoid it, we explain it. Most pages on our website include a short section titled putting it to work that foregrounds implications for practitioner audiences. Where appropriate, our goal is to make summaries available in languages widely spoken by participants.
• Whenever budgets allow, we pre-test our research tools (e.g. surveys, interview protocols) with intended audiences.

Annual Updates

We conduct an annual audit, at which point we also set goals for the next year.

2022 DEAI Audit
2021 DEAI Audit

Definitions

The Knology team uses the following operational definitions for diversity, equity, access, and inclusion. We developed these descriptions collaboratively based on a discussion process, leveraging both the team’s personal experiences and external resources such as the American Alliance of Museums’ Facing Change publication. They form the foundation of our ethics as an organization.

Diversity

We strive to embrace diversity at Knology. Diversity includes all the ways in which people differ, and encompasses the different characteristics that make one individual or group different from another. While diversity is often used in reference to race, ethnicity, and gender, we embrace a broader definition that includes but is not limited to age, nationality, religion, (dis)ability, sexual orientation, class and socioeconomic status, education, marital status, language, physical appearance, and more. Our definition also covers diverse thinking: ideas, perspectives, and values. We recognize that individuals live their lives through multiple identities that are informed by context, and that an important part of embracing diversity is through regular encounters with different ways of being and knowing.

Equity

We strive to practice equity at Knology. This means that we support the fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement of all people. Addressing equity issues requires an understanding of the historical and root causes of disparities in society. This makes it possible to identify and eliminate barriers that have prevented the full participation of some individuals and groups. Improving equity does not mean treating everyone the same way. Instead, it focuses on ensuring that fairness is at the heart of procedures, processes, systems, and distribution of resources.

Access

We strive to give equitable access to everyone at Knology, regardless of ability and experience. Accessibility refers to how we make space for each person to participate in our work. It includes creating conditions that ensure all people can participate and contribute to our work as well as benefit from its outputs or outcomes.

Inclusion

We strive to empower everyone at Knology with the tools and opportunity to contribute to meaningful work. An inclusive culture is marked by an intentional, consistent respect for and embracing of diversity, equity, and access. Prioritizing inclusion across multiple contexts––the workforce, workplace, and work products and practices––enables each person and our collective group to thrive.