OF organizations reflect the diverse perspectives of the community.
Do your staff, board, and volunteers look like the participants you want to attract? If not, you may want to focus on diversifying your team to be more reflective OF your community.
Becoming OF your community will help you make stronger programmatic and strategic decisions. It will help you build cultural competence, awareness, and empathy for target participants. And it will strengthen the sense that your organization is representative OF the diverse needs, interests, and abilities in your community.
There are many concrete ways to diversify your staff, board, and volunteers. It starts with setting a goal: naming the ways you want internal composition to change, and how much. Then, you can modify recruiting, hiring, and retention practices to make more diverse people feel welcome and supported. When your organizational leaders are OF the community, you'll do a better job being FOR the community.
A few favorite OF resources:
Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment [book] by Dr. Leticia Nieto, Seattle, WA, USA
A Step-by-Step Guide to Cultivating Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace [article, part 1 of 10] by Jennifer Kim, San Francisco, CA
Challenging Assumptions and Practices in Board Diversity [article] by Josephine Ramirez, Los Angeles, CA
Operationalizing Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion in your Nonprofit [article] by Alvin Schexnider, Chicago, IL
Museums as Sites for Social Action [toolkit] by various, coordinated in Minneapolis, MN