Standing Up Inside

Our Equity Impact 

The dire events that occurred this year have opened our eyes to the growing inequalities that our nation’s outdated, and often unjust, systems fail to address time and time again. To create real and critical change in our world, it will take hard work, perseverance and willingness to change our daily behavior—and at Bulldog Drummond, we’re committed to doing just that. Over the past several months, we have been working to identify the ways that we can do better, and be better, both as individuals and as a company.

Our Internal Impact 

We partnered with the team at BILD to complete a deep dive into anti-racism and race equity spaces, pulling out several key themes that helped guide our Bulldog team to learn together. We used the resources they gathered to compare and contrast our current processes, and it helped us create a guide for evaluating and improving Bulldog’s equitable outcomes. In addition to BILD’s recommendations, The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Race Equity and Inclusion Action Guide provided us with an essential framework to apply a race equity lens to our organization.

Using both frameworks as a jumping off point, we initiated a collaborative discussion with each of our departments to understand how we could do less harm and how we could do more good in our everyday work processes and products in practical and tangible ways.

The insights and learnings we gained were gathered and synthesized to create an internal guide that focuses on actionable areas and the most impactful changes we have the power to make. Our goals are to start shifting our approach and our thinking throughout every one of the department’s processes to ensure everything we do and say supports our overall diversity and inclusion initiatives, as well as being able to help our clients start to broaden their perspective about their offerings and audiences. 

Collectively, we’ve created specific guidelines around what we do every day—how we approach strategy, write, design, choose our outside partners and facilitate workshops. When it comes to strategy, we make sure to enlist perspectives that differ from our own to ensure a broader understanding of the project at hand. When it comes to how we write as an organization, we’re providing a range of resources and tools so that our content is inclusive, inviting and thoughtful. In our design work, we are thinking outside of our own biases to create work that is accessible to as many people as possible. We are broadening our scope of go-to collaborators to ensure we are choosing partners with a more diverse representation of the marketplace, such as small businesses owned by women or people of color. And when it comes to facilitating workshops, we look for gaps of missing knowledge and experience and bring in those differentiating perspectives. While individually some of the ideas and tactics may seem small, they have incredible power to effect change when they’re used collectively and consistently. 

As we continue to expand our own education about diversity, inclusion and equity, our guide will also continue to evolve and grow to reflect our new learnings. We will be sharing this tool with our team internally on November 10, 2020 and plan on making it available for the world at large on January 5, 2021. We’re incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made to date and are excited to implement everything we’ve learned to help create even better products and services for our clients—and ultimately, a better future for everyone.

Our External Impact 

While we are working on impact within our own organization, we also recognize the important work being done by experts in other fields and sought to collaborate with some of them and amplify the work already being done. 

After carefully considering all facets of systemic racism and a careful evaluation of our areas of expertise, we agreed as a team that education is the area where we can make the greatest immediate and long-term impact. 

We have just started the process of exploring how we might come alongside a non-profit organization in the high school education space. We will share our path forward as it continues to develop. 

Our Ongoing Journey 

The People and Culture team of the Envoy Group has been spearheading learning sessions, workshops and monthly challenges to continue the entire team’s learning journey that impacts ourselves, our business and the people around us. An ongoing partnership with TOSHA Consulting has led to Inclusion Labs training for all team members to extend company-wide education. The People and Culture team have been evaluating, reassessing and revising HR practices to better address the racial equity gap across the entire organization. 

We are moving forward, committed to doing our part both in this moment and as a part of this ongoing movement, taking everything we have learned with us. Together, we know we will do better every day.