WORKING FOR YOU
Working for all communities Focusing on diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion at the Chamber We will also encourage more member-submitted content from historically underrepresented groups in Business Voice.
Goal 2: Membership
JOSH CREIGHTON COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT SPECIALIST
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n 2021, after years in the community development space and exploring my passion for social justice and entrepreneurship, I joined the team at the Halifax Chamber of Commerce as Community Engagement Specialist. My work with the Chamber focuses on making our business community more inclusive, equitable, and accessible. I’m excited to share our goals, initiatives, and progress with you all in this issue of Business Voice.
Our goals at the Chamber In 2020, the Chamber, our membership and our community identified that we needed to create a more diverse and representative business community here in Halifax. The Chamber made five goals related to equity, diversity, accessibility and inclusion.
Goal 1: Communications We will ensure that at least 25% of all communications content is representative of the diversity in our community. To accomplish this, we will actively reach out to our growing membership to feature stories about businesses owned and staffed by members that represent the variety of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual orientation, and ability in Halifax.
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To build a more diverse membership, we need to make our spaces and services more welcoming to more diverse businesses that exist in and contribute to our economy here in Halifax. The goal is to obtain 100 new members in the next two years. Our Surge program, dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion among the membership, will offer 100 complimentary memberships. In my role, I seek out potential members to join the Chamber community as part of this program.
Goal 3: Board of Directors The Chamber has been an early adopter and long-time participant in the 50/30 challenge, released by the federal government to ensure that all Boards of Directors in organizations have at least 50% gender diversity and at least 30% racial diversity. The Chamber has been hitting that goal for a while, and we have committed to maintaining that moving forward.
Goal 4: Events, Speakers, and Suppliers We will ensure that we host events that focus on helping certain marginalized and underrepresented communities take centre stage. It’s about making space so that these communities feel welcomed and feel like a part of the broader business community, which they may have been left out of previously. It’s about ensuring that they're not only at these networking events and getting these opportunities to access the business community, but also about the Chamber planning and organizing events that are designated to address specific and systemic needs of a given group. Each FEBRUARY 2022
underrepresented group has a different path, a different history, and a different set of barriers and systemic issues that they're battling. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach. We’re working toward ensuring that each community has the support and resources needed to battle those systemic barriers. We're also committed to ensuring that our speakers follow the same 50/30 rule of the Board of Directors. We try to maintain at least 30% racial diversity and 50% gender diversity in our speakers.
Goal 5: Education We will provide educational events and resources to our members. There are two main issues this addresses. First, underrepresented groups lack access to resources and educational opportunities in the business community. The study released by the Black Business Initiative (BBI) last year showed that 78% of Black business owners said that a barrier to business is social attitudes towards Black entrepreneurs. That is real and still happening in our community. It has to do with natural bias, and it's the reality that most of these underrepresented groups face. There is still lots of room for growth. Our education goal ties into this, and a lot of our initiatives work towards educating ourselves and the broader business community. We’re helping them to not only be better allies and supporters, but also learning together how we can create welcoming work and networking spaces and how we can escape old practices – the “old boys club” practices that exclude racialized and gender-diverse people.
Growing diversity in your workplace One of our initiatives to help with education is the Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Toolkit. Our membership is 83% small businesses, with most of those businesses having less
