GMO Promoting Diversity in Dressage USDF task force’s mission: increase diversity, equity, and inclusion
USEF website (usef.org), range from marketing efforts and DEI training for USEF employees to the creation of a grants program for community riding centers, especially those that serve underrepresented and underserved communities.
USDF Develops a DEI Task Force During her term, USDF immediate past president Lisa Gorretta established a USDF DEI Task Force, to build on the USEF’s efforts and to hone a USDF-focused approach to DEI. “As a USEF affiliate, we wanted to follow their lead and leverage their
ALL WELCOME: New USDF task force aims to welcome all kinds of riders to the dressage community
systemic racism and have strived to learn more about how to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their communities, workplaces, schools, and other milieus. US Equestrian (USEF), our country’s national equestrian federation, began by examining 20 years of member-demographic data. Its statistics indicated that the percentage of members who self-identified as white—95% in 2000—was still the overwhelming majority in 2019, at 91%. Clearly, changes needed to be made. In June 2020, USEF announced its intention to create a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Action Plan. Strategies developed as part of the plan, which is available on the
resources,” says USDF marketing and communications director Ross Creech, “so that, once USEF’s DEI efforts began and their working group was established, we were able to better identify USDF’s role and specific goals.” Creech, who is the USDF staff liaison to the task force, says that the group’s objective is to “evaluate USDF’S current state regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion, and make suggestions that could be implemented to improve its position.” The economics of scale give more weight to the USEF’s endeavor—“USEF is in a better position than USDF, as an affiliate, to truly impact diversity in equestrian sport,” says Creech. But “to try to measure the perception of our
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members regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion within USDF and the dressage community,” the USDF plans to conduct a membership survey “and to follow that up with another survey after the implementation” of its first round of initiatives, he says. Chairing the USDF DEI Task Force is Colorado-based USEF “R” dressage judge, “R” dressage sporthorse breeding judge, and “r” Westerndressage judge Gwen Ka’awaloa. The other current members are USDF Region 7 director Carol Tice, elite dressage competitor and 2015 Special Olympics World Games dressage judge Lehua Custer, and adult-amateur rider and high-performance horse owner Wendy Sasser, all of California; New Jersey-based para-dressage athlete Alanna Flax-Clark; USEF dressage technical delegates Andrea Davenport-Himel of Mississippi and Michelle King of Virginia; Floridabased dressage trainer Lisa El-Ramey; longtime Northern Ohio Dressage Association member Gwen Samuels of Ohio; and USDF bronze medalist and USDF L program participant Patrick Wolfe of Indiana, who also serves on the USEF Member Services Council. When Gorretta approached Ka’awaloa in January 2021, “I kind of picked her brain about why she chose me,” Ka’awaloa says. “There are a lot of facets. When you talk DEI, you’re talking people who are worried about racial appearances. The big thing that I told her from day one was that we were not going to make this just about race. I’m a mixed race. I was raised in the Hawaiian islands, where being of mixed race is normal. Nobody cares. Actually, being white is less normal there. That being said, we’re very, very aware of racial problems. But I told Lisa that I would not play the game if I had to make it all about race.
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n ongoing challenge for many of USDF’s group-member organizations (GMOs) is to expand outreach in order to grow membership. In recent years, this issue has taken on additional significance in the wider equestrian world. It’s not only about dressage clubs reaching out to equestrians in other disciplines; it’s also about finding ways to attract people who historically have been underrepresented in our sports. In the wake of protests sparked by the May 2020 murder by police of a Black man, George Floyd, both organizations and individual citizens have grappled with the concept of
By Penny Hawes
