In 2021, after years in the community development space and exploring my passion for social justice and entrepreneurship, I joined the team at the Halifax Chamber of Commerce as Community Engagement Specialist. My work with the Chamber focuses on making our business community more inclusive, equitable, and accessible. I’m excited to share our goals, initiatives, and progress with you all in this issue of Business Voice.
Our goals at the Chamber
In 2020, the Chamber, our membership and our community identified that we needed to create a more diverse and representative business community here in Halifax. The Chamber made five goals related to equity, diversity, accessibility and inclusion.
Goal 1: Communications
We will ensure that at least 25% of all communications content is representative of the diversity in our community. To accomplish this, we will actively reach out to our growing membership to feature stories about businesses owned and staffed by members that represent the variety of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual orientation, and ability in Halifax. We will also encourage more member-submitted content from historically underrepresented groups in Business Voice.
Goal 2: Membership
To build a more diverse membership, we need to make our spaces and services more welcoming to more diverse businesses that exist in and contribute to our economy here in Halifax. The goal is to obtain 100 new members in the next two years. Our Surge program, dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion among the membership, will offer 100 complimentary memberships. In my role, I seek out potential members to join the Chamber community as part of this program.
Goal 3: Board of Directors
The Chamber has been an early adopter and long-time participant in the 50/30 challenge, released by the federal government to ensure that all Boards of Directors in organizations have at least 50% gender diversity and at least 30% racial diversity. The Chamber has been hitting that goal for a while, and we have committed to maintaining that moving forward.
Goal 4: Events, Speakers, and Suppliers
We will ensure that we host events that focus on helping certain marginalized and underrepresented communities take centre stage. It’s about making space so that these communities feel welcomed and feel like a part of the broader business community, which they may have been left out of previously. It’s about ensuring that they're not only at these networking events and getting these opportunities to access the business community, but also about the Chamber planning and organizing events that are designated to address specific and systemic needs of a given group. Each underrepresented group has a different path, a different history, and a different set of barriers and systemic issues that they're battling. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach. We’re working toward ensuring that each community has the support and resources needed to battle those systemic barriers.
We're also committed to ensuring that our speakers follow the same 50/30 rule of the Board of Directors. We try to maintain at least 30% racial diversity and 50% gender diversity in our speakers.
Goal 5: Education
We will provide educational events and resources to our members. There are two main issues this addresses. First, underrepresented groups lack access to resources and educational opportunities in the business community. The study released by the Black Business Initiative (BBI) last year showed that 78% of Black business owners said that a barrier to business is social attitudes towards Black entrepreneurs. That is real and still happening in our community. It has to do with natural bias, and it's the reality that most of these underrepresented groups face.
There is still lots of room for growth. Our education goal ties into this, and a lot of our initiatives work towards educating ourselves and the broader business community. We’re helping them to not only be better allies and supporters, but also learning together how we can create welcoming work and networking spaces and how we can escape old practices – the “old boys club” practices that exclude racialized and gender-diverse people.
Growing diversity in your workplace
One of our initiatives to help with education is the Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Toolkit. Our membership is 83% small businesses, with most of those businesses having less than five employees. If we put ourselves in their shoes, we recognize how busy they are. They want to enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts within their workplace, but they don’t know where to start. What we want to do is create a road map for business-owners. The Toolkit will include a glossary for terminology and a list of organizations and businesses that work with underrepresented communities through consulting or community engagement. Those connections can help business owners implement their equity, diversity, accessibility, and inclusion commitments and goals.
There are so many ways for the business community to address the perception of racialized entrepreneurs in Halifax. It will vary based on the size and industry of your business. It could include more representation in your communication channels. Procurement is also great opportunity, meaning you ensure that your suppliers are local and diverse.
The onus is on the business community. Whether you outsource, hire consultants, or leverage your connections, it starts there. It starts with business owners being open-minded — open to dialogue, open to new communication channels, and open to new policies. Then, business owners should ensure that this is an effort that is not only maintained, but also reviewed every year like any other policy or procedure your company has. You want to review this policy every year to make sure it's actually working.
My work at the Chamber
My role applies community engagement principles to underrepresented communities. The first steps have been to really connect with diverse business owners, making them aware of our commitment to equity, diversity, accessibility and inclusion. It’s also been providing access to the tools and network for underrepresented communities. We provide them with programming and supports, or we connect them with folks who are already out there doing the work. As you find yourself working with these communities more, you start to have conversations about these barriers and these conversations can lead to finding solutions.
Ultimately, my goal is to help funnel information and resources from the Chamber to underrepresented business owners and grow our membership. I hope to see more diverse businesses grow and prosper here in Halifax. I want to help in creating a more inclusive business community. ■
To learn more about our Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion efforts, connect with me at:
josh@halifaxchamber.com
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