diversity & inclusion

44 &diversity & The academic year 2020-2021 has seen new challenges and priorities rise up to the top, the most important one being promoting equity and social justice. This is why we decided to add a section about our impact on the community’s diversity and inclusion. While IDEA doesn’t officially keep track of the demographics of our community, we were able to make meaningful changes in the organization in order to make it a safe space for anyone who joins and promote creativity among people with different backgrounds. RECRUITMENT FOR MANAGEMENT TEAM • Changed language for recruitment to be more approachable. We reduced language suggesting firm requirements needed from candidates and increased language about attributes that would help someone in the role. • Included information about our values in all role descriptions and applications to show candidates that a culture of inclusion and belonging is important to IDEA. • Reached out to a significantly wider pool of organizations with a variety of cultural backgrounds and specializations at Northeastern to share our Management team applications and encourage minorities and non-business students to apply to our program. inclusion

&COMMUNITY

• We utilized Northeastern’s resources and collaborated with organizations such as CIE Social Justice Resource Center (SJRC), The Office of Prevention and Education (OPEN), and The Women’s Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship (WISE) in our early brainstorming and for continuous support, to learn how to better listen to our community and properly highlight community members. • Included requesting pronouns, and preferred pronunciation of names as part of onboarding, in our efforts to be more thoughtful and respectful of our team members, and to avoid making assumptions on someone’s identity. • Replaced one of our monthly management team meetings with a Title IX session hosted by the Office of Prevention and Education at Northeastern (OPEN) to educate members and promote awareness around sex-based discrimination. • Created a #diversityinitiative channel on Slack to foster conversation and organize meetings about diversity and inclusion. • Formalized and facilitated inflow from different accelerators on campus into the IDEA Program, such as E-Club’s Husky Start-up Challenge, and WISE’s WeBuild Program. This helped ensure that anyone interested in taking a step towards entrepreneurship was able to continue their journey with minimal roadblocks - no matter their background. • Launched the campaign #OnceUponanIDEA on our external platforms, which aimed at telling and amplifying the stories of IDEA entrepreneurs that come from different backgrounds, with the goal to celebrate the diversity in our community. While we are proud of the efforts made to make a difference within IDEA and the wider entrepreneurship community, we stay aware that this is only the beginning of a long path that the organization will need to follow in the upcoming future, and we are optimistic that the new team will keep making incredible efforts to promote diversity and inclusivity in the community.

our resources

resources

48 funding 50 coaches 52 advisory board 54 a thank you to Ron Caplan 56 partners 60 20/21 management team 62 thank you to our donors 64 join our team