Supporting DEI as a Membership Association

If you're a leader of a membership association or network committed to advancing DEIB work, you can be in a bit of a tough spot. You want to be supportive of strategic work around diversity, equity, and inclusion (and perhaps even mandate it for your team), but you also want to remain sensitive to your member organizations -- who might be in very different places from both you and each other.

What's a membership association leader to do?

Building a strategic learning journey

Building a strategic framework around DEI is the logical beginning place for a single organization. The problem with a strategic framework or plan, however, is that it presupposes a single starting point... one which may not work for every member. 

In contrast, a learning journey can be a great solution for membership associations. Let's take a look at our recent learning journey deployment with B Lab, the network supporting benefit corporations in the United States and Canada, to see how we were able to address this issue to create a dynamic, supportive experience for all participating organizations, no matter where they were at in their DEIB journeys.

Multiple entry points

As you know, a membership organization or network supports its members by providing a general strategy. In this case, B Lab issued a general statement standing against racism and all other forms of oppression. In doing so, they identified DEIB as a strategic priority, but did not issue a requirement to their member benefit corporations to achieve a certain metric by a certain time. As you know as a member association leader, doing so is often at best ineffective and at worst alienating, as different member organizations have different levels of resources available to address strategic initiatives.

Instead, B Lab worked with us to create a DEIB Learning Journey, open to any member benefit corporations who aligned with their DEIB viewpoint. We worked with B Lab to understand the context and needs of their member organizations, and the topics that a learning journey would need to cover based on the outcomes they wanted to see from a learning journey, and then designed a curriculum that would be flexibly responsive to the different entry points from which prospective organizations could be joining us.

This required some upfront investment and planning from the B Lab team, who needed to be able to articulate a complex stakeholder analysis to us. From there, we were able to take their analysis and craft a pilot learning journey that rolled out to over 30 organizations... and which will expand throughout 2023 based on an extremely positive initial response. 

Supporting organizations of all sizes

Providing a learning journey that organizations can opt into based on their strategic alignment with their membership or network association can be a great way to provide concrete support to your member organizations without onerous requirements that may not take into account their size, structure, or resources. 

Membership associations have a unique task in supporting their member organizations. Our goal is to support these associations in creating a shared understanding of equity and antiracism... and to move the needle with kindness. If you're reading this as a membership association leader, reach out! We'd love to share more with you about our playbook for working with membership associations!