Five Good Ideas to create a sense of community and belonging at your workplace

Five Good Ideas Podcast

Silence around questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the workplace has started to sound more like complicity. Now people can’t talk enough about EDI. But how do you put all you’ve read and learned into action?

In this session, recorded live on March 31, 2023, Dr. Tanya (Toni) De Mello, Vice-President, Equity and Community Inclusion, Toronto Metropolitan University, shared the ways in which feeling like you belong, knowing you’ll be included, and seeing your work community as “your” community matters. She provided some advice on how you can achieve this sense of community and belonging at your organization and shed some light on what you may be doing to hinder it.

1. Reflect on who’s in your group [6:05]
2. Belonging is more than salary and job location [12:33]
3. Representation is a major part of systemic change [19:22]
4. You need to do the performative and substantive work [22:51]
5. If this work is done meaningfully, then it’s messy [28:14]

Q & A [35:21 ]

Download the session handout. Follow along with the transcript.

Presenter bio: Toni is Vice-President, Equity and Community Inclusion, Toronto Metropolitan University.

With a background comprising finance, management consulting, and law, Tanya (who we call “Toni”) De Mello has spent much of her career focusing on, and researching, equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). She is a human rights lawyer and a certified coach and mediator. She has taught at University of Toronto and University, Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and several Colleges. She worked at TMU as the Director of Human Rights and then Lincoln Alexander School of Law, which is Canada’s newest law school the in 2019. She is currently the Vice President, Equity and Community Inclusion. She has worked with over 100 organizations in training, consulting, and supporting them in the EDI journey.

In addition to founding two NGOs, Toni has served in the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the World Food Programme in Geneva (Switzerland), Senegal (West Africa), and Columbia (South America). Toni holds a dual Bachelor of Economics and Political Science from the University of Waterloo; a double Master in Public Policy and Urban and Regional Planning from Princeton University; and a dual law degree from McGill University and a Master of Counselling and Psychotherapy from the University of Toronto. She also completed her doctors at the University of Toronto, where she was looking at bias in hiring in Canada.