Rules of Engagement

 

You can listen to Rules of Engagement here.

 

We look forward to seeing you all at the upcoming EDI IS, EDI ISN’T Virtual Town Hall Debate – Featuring CeLillianne Green to open the discussion, on the 29th of May at 15:00 – 17:00 (BST). To make sure that everyone who is attending can participate openly and freely, we have put together the following Rules of Engagement. These are key points and behaviours to consider, when participating and interacting with others.

In addition, we have put together a suggested Glossary of terms. Whilst many of these terms will come up naturally, we have listed a few here, which will act as prompts and can be drawn upon by the facilitator (or any other participant) throughout the meeting.

 

GLOSSARY (not exhaustive)

 

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

 

o Be courageous

Speaking up can be difficult, especially in a room full of strangers. However, remember why you’re here and know that you’re amongst others with a common goal. The likelihood is that whatever you’re thinking about saying, there’s someone else in the room who’s already thinking it. So pluck up your courage, take a deep breath and speak your mind.

o Cameras

For best engagement, we ask that all cameras are turned on, however we appreciate that this doesn’t work for everyone. If you are blind, partially sighted, neurodivergent or have accessibility needs or are none of the above and just have technology gremlins working on the day, then that’s no problem. Keep your cameras off.

o Chat box

For best engagement we also advise that everyone uses their audio to speak, however if this is not possible for any reason, please use the Zoom chat box feature. The session facilitator will monitor the chat box as best as possible.

o Listen

It’s not possible to think clearly, without listening to others or even to yourself. We encourage you to actively listen to what’s being said before responding. Remember it’s not a race, so take your time, listen and respond.

o Open and safe

We want the town hall to be an open and safe space where everyone can speak honestly and freely without judgment. We appreciate that there will a mixture of people in the room, with different perspectives and viewpoints and so we ask for everyone to be respectful of each other. Feel free to challenge or support what others are saying, but please do so with politeness.

o Prompts

We know how awkward it can get when you have those uncomfortable silences and so to avoid those moments (unless the discomfort is related to a theme or argument, in which case do bring it up in the discussion), we have prepared a list of terms to be used as prompts. Feel free to familiarise yourself with these terms or come as you are, ready to expect the unexpected.

o Raise hands

Please use the raise hand Zoom function when you want to speak. The facilitator will moderate hands as fairly and quickly as possible.

o THINK

If all fails, we encourage you to THINK before speaking. Yes, THINK! We don’t want you to censor what you say, but by utilising the acronym THINK, consider whether what you’re saying is True, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary or Kind?

o Time and response

We know how passionate people can get when wanting to get a point across. We encourage your enthusiasm but ask that everyone is mindful about how long you speak for. If you find yourself speaking over 2 to 3 minutes when it’s your turn, wrap up your point and give the floor to someone else. We won’t be monitoring how often you speak; you can respond as little or as much as you like, but just be mindful of giving the floor to others. The facilitator will also help to move conversations along.

o Transcription

If you are deaf, have hearing impairments or want to aid accessibility and clarity with conversations, please make use of Zoom captions and transcripts. These will be activated at the beginning of the meeting and all participants can control whether they display or not.

 

Finally, we want to remind everyone to have fun and to remember that by participating in the town hall, you’re already contributing to an important conversation.

We look forward to seeing you there and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

 

The Team at PILAA

EDI IS, EDI ISN’T: A Virtual Town Hall Debate

Listen to Event Description here.

Listen to Event Contributors here. 

 

Join this virtual (online) Town Hall for a timely debate on what EDI IS, EDI ISN’T. Featuring CeLillianne Green to open the Town Hall.

 

About this event

“We have to be courageous Reverand. Al Sharpton. We have to continue to make them say the words, diversity, equity and inclusion, not just DEI, because the virtues are in the words. “Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.” Every humane society respects those things.” – US Attorney Benjamin Crump

 

To address the current state of affairs around EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) in the UK or DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) as it is typically referred to in the US, we will be hosting a virtual Town Hall debate to address what EDI IS, EDI ISN’T. Whichever iteration one uses, our understanding of the essence of this work must continue despite some of the misunderstandings, negative rhetoric’s, and scapegoating of initiatives that seek to re-address inequalities and injustices.

In the advent of US Executive orders that are having an impact globally, to the detriment of the many faces of EDI work and its lasting legacies, we invite anyone who is interested in holding space on this topic, in joining us at our virtual Town Hall, on Thursday the 29th of May 2025 at 3 – 5PM BST, for a timely debate on what EDI IS, EDI ISN’T.

The Town Hall is open to everyone, irrespective of role or position. We want the space to be free of barriers (and ego), so that all participants can deep dive into exactly what is at stake, in our pursuit of the meaning of EDI. Whether you’re an EDI practitioner, work in HR, an academic, student, researcher, activist, creative, a thought leader, a leader in a leadership position, a staff network chair, a network member, or are just curious and passionate about EDI, without any work affiliations – we want to hear from you.

From the anecdotal, to the real, to the lived experiences, and best and worst practices in this area, we invite you to participate in some real talk!

We are honoured to feature CeLillianne Green, poet and lawyer, who will be opening the Town Hall debate. In 2016 CeLillianne Green wrote The Present, a poem to commemorate the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The Present is now a poetic reaffirmation of the importance of the NMAAHC in response to the 3-27-25 Executive Order of the current U.S. President about the NMAAHC. Such orders undo many decades of work that museums, galleries and other educational and non-educational institutions have done in the decolonising project and in making these spaces inclusive to all. You can watch the present here.

We hope that at the end of the Town Hall, we’ll be able to create a 21st century PILAA visual guide on EDI, which we’ll be able to share with all participants. So we welcome you to be part of this diverstory.

 

To register your spot to participate, please visit Eventbrite here.

We will share the joining instructions and Town Hall rules of engagement closer to the time.

We look forward to seeing you there, for what we think will be a timely and open discussion!

 

Event Contributors

 

CeLillianne Green

CeLillianne Green (opening Town Hall) is an internationally known poet, as well as a lawyer, teacher, and speaker. She is a graduate of Drexel and Howard Universities. She was Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Law Journal, and is admitted to the Bar in PA, NY, DC, and MD. Her legal career includes a federal clerkship, Wall Street law firm associate, and an AUSA who tried cases from misdemeanors to 1st degree murders, and presented appellate arguments. She was a partner in a private law practice, served as a legislative counsel, a mediator, and as a law school instructor. In 2003, Ms. Green published her first poem, Because I Love You. In 2005, more poems started, and in 2009, the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity recognized her as a Social Justice Thought Leader for her poem, Lifted. Her first book, That Word, an epic poem was published in 2010. The recording, CeLillianne Says and her poetry collection, A Bridge were published in 2011 and 2015. She has been interviewed on radio and TV, quoted in newspapers, cited in law journals, and in online publications. She has contributed to anthologies, documentaries, and presented at public schools, universities, and organizations. Her 2023 production, CeLillianne Green’s Evening of Poetry & Jazz and other works are on YouTube / www.CeLillianneGreen.com. She is currently an Adjunct Lecturer in the English Department of Howard University teaching Technical Writing Professional / Pre-Law. Ms. Green continues to write poetry and prose about life, love, spirituality, relationships, history, and politics. www.CeLillianneGreen.com

 

Photo credit: Dr Ope Lori by Ajamu X

 

Dr Ope Lori (PILAA Founder & CEO)

Dr. Ope Lori (Town Hall facilitator) is the Founder and CEO of Pre-Image Learning and Action (PILAA), an Arts & Diversity company she founded in 2017. Some of their clients include, ACME, Tate, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, the Courtauld, the Open College of Arts, Corps Security and GamCare. She is also a practising visual artist; specializing using video and photography in her political practice. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at La Fondation Blachére, France; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning and at Autograph in London.

She was a Lecturer at both Chelsea School of Arts and Leeds Arts University between 2009-2019, and continued to guest lecture at the Royal College of Arts until 2021, amongst other leading institutions of Art. She completed her PhD in Fine Art in 2013 and held one of the first Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships at TrAIN (Transnational, Art, Identity and Nation) Research Centre UAL between 2016-2018, before fully utilising her knowledge and training in the diversity and Inclusion industry.

She is the author of “Should I, shouldn’t I?’: A self-reflexive study in unpacking ideologies of race while devising a critical studies fine art programme”, in Hatton, K. (ed.) Inclusion and Intersectionality in Visual Arts Education, (UCL Institute of Education Press, 2019). She is also the author of her first solo forthcoming book, Beyond The Feminine: The Politics of Skin Colour and Gender in Visual Culture (Bloomsbury, 2025) due to be released on the 24th of July 2025.

Dr. Lori featured in the first ever UK Black Pride (UKBP) The Black Lesbian Power List 2024, brought together by UK Black Pride CEO Phyll Opoku-Gyimah and supported by DIVA.

“DEI or EDI that is not the question.”

 

“We have to be courageous Reverand. Al Sharpton. We have to continue to make them say the words, diversity, equity and inclusion, not just DEI, because the virtues are in the words. “Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.” Every humane society respects those things.” – Benjamin Crump

 

The first month of this year has finally been and gone, and it’s safe to say that much has transpired on an inter-national scale. There have been numerous misguided conversations about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) as it is often referred to in the US, and for our brothers and sisters across the pond, we are witnessing a worrying fight to erase the essence of its meaning.

This comes at a time, where this February marks LGBT+ History Month in the UK and Black History Month in the US, both important annual observances which celebrate both the achievements and historical legacies of these communities, whilst simultaneously shedding light on the systemic inequalities faced by each.

Our article simply put, looks at some of the arguments that have proliferated into the public sphere of late on equality, diversity and inclusion, and is our attempt to give clarity, and above all hope, in an ever-pressing inter-national situation.

 

Lost in translation

I’m reminded by my colleague from the US, that how we refer to DEI in the UK, as EDI (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion), has differing points of departure from the US, although at the heart of both, lost in the conversation is often the part about inclusion. The meaning of DEI has been hijacked, used as a smokescreen to illustrate all the ills that have gone wrong in society, or so it seems with the messaging, under the current US administration of President Donald Trump. DEI initiatives or “DEI hires”, a code word for minority groups, centred around the belief that candidates are being chosen by virtue of their identity, rather than on their hard work and merit, have been scapegoated, so much so, that the legitimacy of seeing a person from an underrepresented group in a leadership position now, automatically raises eyebrows. This, however, is not a new occurrence.

 

 

I remember in my earliest years as a student at one of the most prestigious Schools of Art in the UK, that this was what another student had not so subtly implied to me. That the reason I had got in, was because of my race, even though they themselves were from an ethnic minority group. I mention this, because we must recognise that these internalised belief systems in so-called meritocracy, are not as some will point out, colour-blind.

When I think of this argument on hiring the best candidates, being mutually exclusive to seeing underrepresented groups in those positions, I’m reminded of the British journalist and author Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas: The Power of Thinking Differently (2021). Here he outlines rather cleverly the fallacies around meritocracy, whilst making a case for the reasons for diversity.

 

“Pretty much all the most challenging work today is undertaken in groups for a simple reason: problems are too complex for any one person to tackle alone.” (1)

 

The reason for diversity in these instances is to mitigate blind spots. A homogenous group of people on the surface, whether they are all men, women, all learning disabled or between the ages of 50 – 55, will most probably share similar perspectives. They will share in the same collective blindness. What’s even more compelling and something we should remember, is that hiring someone from an underrepresented group, let’s take for example, hiring a woman in a predominately male industry, doesn’t necessarily guarantee an increase in cognitive diversity, as in a difference in the ways people think, perceive or reason within the group. This is due to the process of acculturation, and that when you have been working or living within a particular culture, whether in the workplace or a particular society, more broadly, there can be a tendency for those operating in the space, to take up the dominant mindset over time. As Syed puts it “people who start out diverse can gravitate towards the dominant assumptions of the group.” (2) This is what I call transference without transformation, lodged in the idea that on the surface things appear to have changed, but in essence, the player is still the same.

 

Meritocracy

On the question of meritocracy, this is also not a new argument, that people should get where they get too, based on hard work and merit alone. After all, who would want to be picked for a job, based solely on their identity and not on their capability? However, we must scrutinise what we mean by meritocracy and understand who in fact gets rewarded. To this end, you cannot have a genuine conversation about merit, without talking about class privilege, or what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage’. This is the idea that one is already born with a head start in life, or adversely penalised for not having the right building blocks for success. Meritocracy says that we all operate on a level playing field, and that it is through our own hard work, that some of us climb up the ladder and are rewarded for our efforts, whilst for those who don’t, their failure is down to them. Yet the playing field has never been even, nor neither fair.

 

Sociologists Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman make this compelling case in their groundbreaking book Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (2024). Building on years of qualitatively data rich analysis, they identify who makes up the who’s who in British society. At the heart of their study is the analysis of the historical database of the Who’s Who. This is the leading source of up-to-date information on autobiographical accounts of over 32,500 influential people, hailing from all walks of life, worldwide. Entrants include ‘senior politicians, judges, civil servants, and notable figures from the arts, academia, and other areas.’ (3). The authors analysed the biographical profiles of all 125,000 entrants since 1897, taking into consideration ‘gender, location, family background, schooling, university, stated recreational pastimes, and occupation.’ (4) 

Their findings reiterate that where you start in life really matters. There are nine most famous, historically male elite schools, the Clarendon Schools, including Eton and Harrow, and twelve most prestigious schools for girls, including St. Paul’s School for Girls and Cheltenham Ladies College. It is worth pointing out that whilst attending the all-male private schools, or the old boys club, remain a powerful head start for the future leaders of tomorrow, identifying whether there is a similar old girls’ network, has been harder to assess. The authors do highlight that there has been a decline in the propulsive power of these schools propelling their pupils forward into the elite, but that they still hold importance, given their connection to elite universities. Oxbridge graduates for example, those who have attended either the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge, remain profoundly over-represented in the British elite.

 

“This, we argue, rests on the hub function performed by elite universities, where students from elite schools use elite universities to further cultivate networks and incubate worldviews that were initially established at school.” (5)

 

 

Closing the attainment gap

Another way of looking at this, is to reflect on a major issue that many universities have faced over the years, in trying to close the degree attainment gap. The basic premise of the attainment gap, is that there is a considerable difference in white Home British students achieving a first or 2.1, compared to non-white British students. Further, when you start to break down the differences in the attainment gap by different ethnic groups, you see that the biggest differential is between white and Black students at 57.5% compared to Whites at 80.9%. This is followed by Other at 67.8%, Asian at 70.5% and Mixed at 77.2% compared to Whites respectively. (6)

This becomes an issue when you realise that not attaining a 2.1 or higher, has a ripple effect, and can indirectly stop students, particularly from ethnic minority groups, from competing in a competitive jobs market. In recent years the Institute of Student Employers (ISE), had estimated that two-thirds of graduate recruiters, set a 2.1 classification as a minimum requirement for a graduate job. Whilst things are changing, how then do organisations who have a desire to diversify their workforce for all the right reasons, do so, when there is no pipeline of students from these communities?

In 2017 Baroness McGregor-Smith published the Race in the Workplace Review, that looked at racial inequalities in the workplace. Concluding the review with a list of 26 recommendations, she emphasised that there was still “discrimination and bias at every stage of an individual’s career, and even before it begins for people from BAME backgrounds. This bias was largely found to be structural, resulting from an unfair system that works only for a select few.” (7)

This is why when the argument that job requirements have been dumbed down, or that certain criteria have been removed, to accommodate underrepresented groups, they fail to consider the forms of indirect discrimination and bias already inherent in the system. This focuses on ‘the Deficit Model’, where it’s the student or employee who is at fault, lacking in skills, knowledge or experience, and not the environment; akin to the way that we have moved away from the medical model of disability to the social model, which says that people are disabled by barriers in society, and not by their impairment or difference.

 

 

So where do we go from here?

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community is the title of Martin Luther King Jr’s 1967 book. Here King reflects on the Civil Rights Movement and what he hoped African Americans should do with their new freedoms and discussed the need for unity in fighting poverty, and in creating equality of opportunity. Where do we go from here was the same question that was asked by prominent civil rights leader and activist Reverend Al Sharpton, as he hosted a special Civil Rights Summit with leaders in the movement, on MSNBC News earlier this month. On the panel was Martin Luther King III the human rights activist, philanthropist and advocate and son of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Also on the panel was Judith Browne Dianis, the civil rights Attorney and Executive Director of Advancement Project National Office and civil rights Attorney Benjamin Crump.

Given the current political and social climate in the US, with a government administration unleashing a war on human rights and social justice, when asking the panellists where they went from there, Crump responds by saying:

 

“We have to be courageous Reverend Al Sharpton. We have to continue to make them say the words, diversity, equity and inclusion, not just DEI, because the virtues are in the words. “Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.” Every humane society respects those things.”

 

And so too must we. This is a call to action. We must continue to do the essential work of equality, diversity and inclusion, and not lose sight of its essence. Whether DEI or EDI, that is not the question.

Written by Dr. Ope Lori

 

Interested in learning more and taking action in diversifying your workforces in the right way? Book our hugely popular staff training session, What’s the diverse in diversity? To speak to a member of our team, book here. 

 

Notes:

1) Matthew Syed (2021) Rebel Ideas: The Power of Thinking Differently
(2) Ibid
(3) Who’s Who and Who Was Who [Available at https://www.ukwhoswho.com/page/946]
(4) Ibid
(5) Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman (2024) pg 134 Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (2024).
(6) Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Student Attainment at UK Universities: #CLOSINGTHEGAP (2019) [https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-student-attainment.pdf]
(7) Ibid