We’re the anti-training-DEI trainers.
We’re comfortable embracing our role as outliers in the DEI training industry because we think most of the industry is utterly full of shit. Delivering mandatory, recycled, one-off, theory-laden lectures to the whole organization is a bad idea, no matter how compelling or polished the presenter. It simply doesn’t work, but organizations continue to train this way because that’s what DEI companies tell them to do in a transparent attempt to run up the bill.
As soon as you become a White Elephant client, our goal is to make you a former client. We do that by helping you design custom, embedded anti-racist business practices that work for you . And we produce actionable outcomes in as little as 60 minutes— no lectures, no schtick, no theory.
Read the room, define your audience.
Are you trying to shorthand large chunks of social science theory, hoping to slowly wake up white folks who already work for you? Or do you want to make your workplace materially better for you BIPOC employees tomorrow? White Elephant’s position is that you can’t do both. We believe all DEI initiatives should start with an audience-of-one — your existing BIPOC employees. Our entire theory of DEI work begins and ends with the needs and wants of those employees.
We can’t succeed without defining success.
Defining an objective and understanding how you’ll measure your progress is a requisite component of successful DEI initiatives. You need benchmarks, cultural change measurement instruments, and ongoing feedback and evaluation systems. And you need tools before you start because that’s what you’d do in any other area of your business.
White Elephant comes to the table believing that every organization should have a unique DEI journey. That’s why we create bespoke tools, custom-built for each client — developed precisely for you by us, not by us for anyone and everyone.
Everyone’s time is valuable, don’t waste it.
Most, if not all, “diversity training” participants would rather be elsewhere. Systemic racism forecloses on a brighter future by convincing us that “cultural change” has to be painfully slow. It doesn’t have to be. The world won’t change overnight, but do you know what can? Your policies, processes, and procedures. White Elephant’s position is that time spent trying to get white people to agree on theoretical concepts is time wasted.
Wouldn’t you rather engage your employees in productive, timeboxed, design exercises engineered to produce measurable DEI outcomes in as few as 60 minutes? Anything else is an unquantifiable, sub-optimal use of finite time and energy.