Note from the Associate Editor: Help us make CDI a more inclusive world
by Carolyn Riel
September was an exciting month for ACDIS between CDI Week, the Curtain Call virtual event, opening of the application period for the ACDIS CDI Scholarship, a survey about your travel plans for the upcoming year, 2021 conference speaker applications, and the 2020 Salary Survey.
We’ve been asking a lot of you over the past few weeks, but I do have just one more small, but extremely important, ask.
At the beginning of October, the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force released their first survey looking for insight on the demographics of our membership and your take on ACDIS and the field of CDI in relation to inclusivity.
In the past two weeks, we haven’t broken 50 responses, which is significantly lower than the typical hundreds we’d have for a survey by this point. I’m wondering if this survey being so different from our usual topics might be keeping people from answering.
The information we can gather from these survey responses, though, is imperative to the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force’s mission:
To strive to make CDI a community that embodies social responsibility through promoting a positive environment of greater diversity and inclusion across all cultures, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, gender identities, ages, and educational backgrounds, to break the silence that accompanies discrimination and inequity, and to ensure that all feel valued, empowered, and welcomed.
For us to make CDI inclusive and welcoming of all people, we first need to know what our community looks like and how inclusive people believe it to be.
Any and all responses, regardless of whether you identify as a minority or not, are imperative. We need to see the full picture of everyone in the ACDIS membership and CDI community to tackle on the Task Force’s mission head on.
The survey will only take you a few minutes and all answers will remain anonymous. If you would like to share your story in more depth, we also have the opportunity for you to do so; if you don’t want to, just simply leave the contact information blank.
Editor’s note: Riel is the associate editor for ACDIS. Contact her at criel@acdis.org.