fbpx Action Plan: Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism | Harvard Kennedy School

Our work targets five action areas

By focusing on our culture and training, community building, teaching, research, and outreach, HKS is making strategic and fundamental changes to support diversity, equity, and anti-racism. Below are some of the actions that we as a community—faculty, staff, students and alumni—have already taken and are continuing to take.

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Culture and Training

HKS is creating a more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist culture by strategically creating new offices, roles and programs and by providing new training and resources for faculty, staff, and students. 

  • Creating the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (ODIB), led by a new associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging  
  • Hiring diversity, inclusion, and belonging associates—paid research positions for students to help HKS implement inclusive and anti-racist strategies 
  • Creating the Culture Ambassadors Network, in which staff volunteers help to foster a culture where all employees feel they belong by facilitating learning and communication within work teams about diversity, equity, and anti-racism  (the network won a Harvard CLIF award to expand its work to share resources throughout the University)
  • Convening the HKS Diversity Committee of staff, student, and faculty members  
  • Curating an HKS library collection of resources on diversity, equity, and anti-racism as well as an exhibition that portrays explorations on race and belonging at HKS
  • Recognizing and celebrating heritage and history months  
  • Producing a monthly ODIB newsletter for the HKS community  
  • Supporting enforcement and providing  new resources on Title IX  and sexual harassment, including bystander training
  • New anti-harassment and anti-hazing guidelines and related resources 
  • Running orientation sessions for new students focused on understanding anti-racism and allyship  
  • Creating HKS Anti-Racism Fundamentals, an online learning experience open to all members of our community to learn about anti-racism and how to take actions to create a more inclusive HKS 
  • Improving accessibility, including opening an additional lactation room and a designated space for religious observance, meditation practice, and reflection  
Building Community

HKS is revamping the ways it recruits and supports faculty, staff, and students to build and sustain a more diverse and equitable community.

  • Instituting new faculty recruitment processes, including more cluster hiring, to broaden candidate pools  
  • Appointing roughly 10 faculty members between 2018 and 2021 whose work includes a focus on race and policy 
  • Adopting an updated staff recruitment approach that emphasizes a broader and more inclusive hiring process in order to build a more diverse candidate pool 
  • Developing new student recruitment processes including:  
    • Partnering with student groups on targeted outreach to potential applicants  
    • Refining the application review process, including requiring implicit bias training for readers
    • Revising our financial aid awarding process to give more weight to applicants’ level of need
  • Increasing the use of unrestricted HKS funds for scholarship resources for students working for African American and Latino communities  
  • Supporting student affinity groups focused on perspectives of underrepresented groups 
  • Publishing and sharing an annual HKS demographic report to make diversity data available  
  • Nurturing a vibrant and diverse international student community
Teaching

HKS is adding new courses and teaching materials and striving to make the classroom experience more inclusive and equitable. 

Research

HKS’s faculty and fellows are conducting research to aid policymakers and public leaders in effectively addressing issues of diversity, equity, and anti-racism. 

  

Outreach

HKS is addressing diversity, equity, and anti-racism by convening events, inviting guest speakers with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives, and sharing insights with a wide global audience. 

To support HKS’s work in these action areas, we have gathered resources and data.
Resources and Data

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