About Us

Why A Global Diversity Institute Now?

Why A Diversity Certification Now?(Click)

In our efforts to create and develop champions to advocate for and nurture social justice issues, interculturalism, and ethical citizenship, we look to the workplace as the strongest leverage point for the efficacy of our work. Workplace diversity is not only a wellspring for organizational creativity, energy and innovation. It is the foremost potential source for the autonomous critical thinking and civic toleration skills that are vital to both businesses and the societies we live within. Globalization is proving to be a two-edged sword. The cutting edge benefits of lower-priced, high quality products and broader options for materials and resources are counterpointed with the ragged edge of relentless disenchantment and increased anxieties brought about by being required to exist in an incessantly shifting landscape with a constantly expanding world of faces, voices, and ideas. Educational and socialization processes, largely designed for a less precarious, more homogeneous world that is fast disappearing, fail to equip the vast majority with effective skills in confronting this disenchantment and anxiety constructively. This failure leads to renewed conflicts as issues of citizenship and justice become distorted.

Once they leave formal schooling, where do most adults turn to improve upon and increase understanding and intercultural interaction skills? Work is the primary venue where adults spend most of their out-of-home lives. Work is where socialization and education continues after primary schooling. The pursuit of voice, communicative competencies, and constitutional citizenship skills grounded in ethics and justice have become critical. Crucially, there is a disheartening inadequacy in the resources, tools, advice, and literature available to those internal and external professionals, (HR, Senior Management, Diversity and Intercultural Champions, community leadrs/facilitators, outside consultants), who are struggling with these new and increasingly complex diversity and cultural issues as they arise in the workplace and in society. GDI has been created to be a source and a repository for resources, tools, advice, and literature on praxial issues related to diversity and identity.

In spite of vast strides made within many companies, problems and difficulties arising from diversity among the employee population continue to trouble numerous firms, including several who have been recognized for their commitment to creating a diverse workplace. In many organizations, diversity efforts are only beginning to focus beyond the most prevalent concentration on issues of race and gender to include other aspects of identity such as sexual orientation, age, management styles, and physical differences, much less the more complicated issues emerging today. And yet, things appear to be getting even more complicated. As we move further into the 21st century, we are seeing previously latent aspects of employee identity such as language, ethnic assertiveness, xenophobia and religious fundamentalism become more visible and more vocal. With issues from multimillion dollar lawsuits to persistent marginalization and fragmentation unabated, it is clear that we have far to go before all of the potential benefits of a truly inclusive organization can be realized by the vast majority of businesses, and hence to the societies that we work and live within. It is imperative that we move beyond the civil rights model of oppressor-oppressed to embrace pluralism informed by a relevant ethical framework.

Our Vision: The Global Diversity Institute unifies the rigor and depth of a think tank with the immediacy and pragmatism of an activist agent, offering the latest progressive research, theory, methods, training, and applications available for societal and workplace practitioners serving human emancipation, justice, autonomy, and dignity.

Our mission is to provide practitioners with an alternative source of education, certification, and collaboration for their diversity and intercultural praxis such that workplace and societal issues of ethics, justice, pluralism, humanism, identity, autonomy, and dialogue, including communicative competencies, are made central. This praxis entails advocating a socially responsible stakeholder balance between employee autonomy and customer, supplier, financial, and community responsibilities. Our praxis orientation involves the latest theory informing the best practice methods directed at workplace intercultural social justice and intercultural dialogue.

Our aim is to educate, train, and certify a new generation of diversity, intercultural, and multicultural champions. We provide the only professionally recognized diversity praxis certification in the field.

GDI is the single praxis oriented diversity think tank offering the practitioner community a viable source of continuing education, dialogue, orientation and certification to meet the complex challenges of globalization, identity militancy, and multicultural social justice. We provide useful information for the business practitioner synthesized from the rapidly evolving fields of multiculturalism, critical social and identity theory, postmodern organizational theory, complex adaptive systems and globalization. This synthesis makes current research and events, otherwise unavailable, accessible and useful for the busy practitioner - including managers, educators, consultants and workplace champions. The synthesized material will be a 'translation' of otherwise opaque academic language into easy to read and useful information that informs their HR-Diversity & Organizational Development practices when addressing, alongside the above stated challenges, workforce retention, utilization and recruitment in the face of upcoming skilled labor shortages.

We provide a safe space for critical thinkers to share their thoughts, research and experiences on workplace cultural improvements directed at the themes of social justice, multicultural equity and postmodern organizational forms. Our focus is with Education, Healthcare and Corporate Workplaces, although our intercultural societal resources will continue to grow. As globalization continues its relentless disenchantment via instrumental reason, issues of citizenship and justice become distorted. We seek to redress this in those places where people spend most of their lives - at work, in school and with healthcare services. Pursuing voice, communicative competencies and an organization based constitutional citizenship grounded in ethics and justice have become crucial. We will help contest the claims of both relativists and assimilationists with ethical pluralism.

The Global Diversity Institute publishes for subscribers a quarterly journal to share this information. It will provide for an ongoing dialogue and counter-narrative to oppose the reifying and overly-simplified (reductionist) Human Resources programs and diversity practices and reactionary voices that presently disenchant workplaces by viewing people as things, numbers and categories to manage. This journal, Diversity Praxis, constitutes an ongoing communicative praxis for dedicated practitioners to dialogue with and learn from one another.