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A message from our CEO: CCDI builds on integrated solutions and achieves growth

Posted in : Blog
Posted on : January 19, 2017

Michael Bach, CCDP/AP - Founder and CEO

Happy New Year. I hope you enjoyed your holidays as much as me. Before the break, the leadership team for the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI) developed a three-year strategic plan that will guide us for the coming years. I’ve shared this with our team and now, I would like to share it with you, our partners and friends.

This path ahead has been paved by the successes we achieved in 2016. We opened an office in Calgary. We’ve surpassed one hundred Employer Partners (115 to be exact). We’ve achieved significant geographic spread in a variety of industries. We added more people to our team. And we’re poised to release some game-changing tools that will allow Canadian organizations to advance on their diversity and inclusion journeys.

Our three main objectives are to expand our existing offerings, push the envelope and grow the organization.

Expand our Existing Offerings

Supporting our Employer Partners is one of our main purposes. Toward this end, we will continue to provide you with programs and services that help you meet your D&I goals.

Highlights include:

• We’ve increased the number of cities where we offer our Community of Practice Events to 15, adding London, Kitchener-Waterloo and Moncton. We’ve also increased the frequency of events in Saskatoon and Regina.
• We’ve added a new stream of Webinars, so instead of one webinar delivered twice a month, we will have two – one targeting HR and D&I professionals, and one intended for a more general audience. Additionally, all webinars will be available in both English and French.
• We will be recording our webinars to make them available for playback.
• Our signature event D&I: The UnConference will run in six cities, in Mississauga and Halifax, besides Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa.

Push the Envelope

We take pride in the research and tools we develop that help to push the D&I conversation forward. This year is a banner year for that.

Particularly exciting is the Employer’s Inclusivity Index (EII), which pragmatically measures how inclusive your organization is based on Global Diversity and Inclusion Benchmarks. EII will help you maximize your investment in D&I programs and services. After all, effective organizations focus on growth and make the most of its investment to be competitive – locally, nationally and globally.

We are also excited about our new offering to help connect service providers with certified interpreters. Our new tool, Mayagwe, is a mobile application that allows you to access face-to-face interpretation services, either immediately or at a scheduled date or time. This pilot tool is being tested in Alberta and will be available in a few months.

Throughout the year, we will be announcing a significant number of tools and offerings to help your organization with its D&I strategy.

Grow the Organization

It is hard to believe that CCDI is less than 4 years old, but in a short time, we’ve made a significant amount of progress toward being the Centre of Excellence on D&I in Canada. To do that, we must continue growing.

This year, we will add more than a dozen people to our team. We’ve promoted one of our existing team members – Nyla Camille Guerrera – to Director of Client Service. Nyla will be working with Susan Rogers, our Chief Client Officer, to make sure that our existing Employer Partners are supported and we engage new partners.

We have a few other things percolating in this area, but we’ll share more as things progress.

This year is going to be amazing for CCDI. I look forward to partnering with you to make Canada more inclusive. A country free of prejudice and discrimination. One in which businesses strive to create an environment that values and respects the talents, skills and abilities of each employee. And one that recognizes this will help drive a successful workforce into the future.