EIA Roadmap Update: The Strategic Plan is The Plan

Summary: The Strategic Plan is the plan. Watch this short video of Dr. Kari L. Jordan and Tara Robertson discussing the EIA Roadmap’s alignment with The Carpentries’ Strategic Plan for 2020-2025.

Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (EIA) has always been at the forefront of how The Carpentries operates internally, and serves our community. Work on the EIA Roadmap started in 2018, with the final version of the roadmap being published in 2019. Our Strategic Plan for 2020-2025 was released in January 2020. In an ideal world, these two plans might have been released in the reverse order, but EIA was too important for us to wait to have a Strategic Plan in place. EIA is not new for us and we needed to ensure that the important pieces of the roadmap were captured in the Strategic Plan.

In 2020 we worked with ReadySet, an external consulting and strategy firm that helps nonprofits with their unique diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) journeys. ReadySet carried out an organisational assessment of The Carpentries and recommended we “take steps towards strengthening the existing strategic approach to DEI goals, and increase transparency of the process and progress across the organisation.”

From a practical perspective, it is important for us to have the Strategic Plan as the singular document that community members reference to learn about what we are doing for the next 3-5 years as a community. This increases transparency and accountability too. Therefore, we set out to streamline the EIA Roadmap and Strategic Plan with the generous support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (see grant announcement).

Streamlining the EIA Roadmap and Strategic Plan

I worked with Tara Robertson, a DEI strategy consultant, to map the EIA roadmap over the Strategic Plan. Most components of the EIA roadmap are neatly mapped to the Strategic Plan. For example, “maintain a high quality and accessible lesson stack across each lesson program” from the EIA Roadmap mapped to strategic plan Goal 4: Facilitate the creation and maintenance of relevant, high-quality, Community-curated curricula. Four of the 37 items from the EIA Roadmap were not mapped to the Strategic Plan as follows:

• Apply a human-centered design to technical Infrastructure and documentation. This goal is not specifically called out in the strategic plan, however our team has worked very hard to apply human-centered design to our technical infrastructure (e.g. The Carpentries workbench). Learn more by reading the blog posts tagged “infrastructure”.
• Assess The Carpentries services and subscriptions to ensure they align with our values. Though not specifically called out in the strategic plan, the Business Team has done an assessment of our vendors and contractors to ensure alignment with The Carpentries Values, and we assess our alignment on a regular basis. Learn more about our Values Alignment Taskforce.
• Build a culturally competent staff team that promotes The Carpentries’ mission, vision, and values. The Carpentries Core Team consistently participates in professional development to build cultural competence and cross-cultural communication skills to better support our global community.
• Develop The Carpentries Assessment Strategy. Thanks to the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (see grant announcement), we will have dedicated staff time to build our assessment strategy in 2023.

Going forward, the Strategic Plan will be our focus. On 22 April 2022, the EIA Roadmap will be deprecated, but will be kept for historical reasons.

Get Involved

Our core strategy for implementing equity, inclusion, and accessibility work involves listening. We want our community to follow the progress the organisation is making towards our strategic plan for 2020-2025 and share your thoughts. The strategic plan repository is updated on a quarterly basis and includes issues tracking each of the strategic plan deliverables. On 25 April we will release our Strategic Plan Year 2 in review. Look out for that blog post, and get in touch to share what you are excited about.

Lastly, now is a great time to teach a workshop and help us apply what we are learning to make our community more inclusive and accessible. Thank you so much for all you do.