Although CEEO had a commitment to equity before 2020, we were not putting the necessary resources toward these efforts. Like many organizations, when confronted with the events of 2020, including the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matters movement, CEEO began overdue work on formalizing and communicating our commitment and action to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ). We identified the need to look more closely at the CEEO through a DEIJ lens and assess harm that could be done through everyday decisions, conversations, and actions. We began by pushing ourselves to think and talk about how CEEO needs to become an anti-oppressive organization in our research, outreach, tool development, and internal culture. We realized that we needed to include an expert who could guide us in our thinking and to hold us accountable so we began working with a DEIJ consultant in January 2021. One of the products of this collaboration with our DEIJ consultant has been the creation of the CEEO DEIJ Mission and DEIJ Action Plan. Part of the action plan’s development process was identifying short-term initiatives to reach our long-term goals, informed by surveys, Center-wide conversations and consultations with experts.  

Sample actions include:

  • Holding CEEO-wide DEIJ trainings with external consultants and experts at Tufts with the goal of understanding and disrupting power structures in order to empower CEEO community members to work toward anti-oppressive practices 
  • Making the process for applying to CEEO jobs more accessible by increasing the hourly pay rate for undergrads, reworking the application so that candidates can highlight a variety of skills, and offering flexibility in working hours
  • Reworking our outreach fellows program to partner with a more diverse set of classrooms and spending time at fellows meetings talking about anti-racist practices

Moving forward, we will use our DEIJ action plan to guide our future work and collaborations. We are committed to our plan being a flexible, living document that will be revisited on a regular/annual basis. Part of the plan is for Tufts CEEO DEIJ Committee to continue to meet, pushing CEEO forward as it works to become an anti-oppressive organization by including DEIJ as a regular part of our conversations, actions, and decisions, and to serve as an internal measure of accountability for Tufts CEEO. This page will serve as a public record of the actions taken toward our DEIJ Action Plan.