Promising Practices from Duluth

December 2024 | Nondiscrimination and Equal Opportunity in Practice

The Challenge: Help improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Background: The Duluth Workforce Development Board worked with local employers in 2019 to increase diversity and inclusion through a series of workshops and webinars with four different areas of focus: recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and retention.

Strategy: The following year, the Board convened a workshop with 150 employers to facilitate joint learning. This event included large group training and small group sessions where employers shared their own best practices around the four focus areas listed above. The lessons learned from this workshop became the basis for their action guide.

Outcome: The Duluth Workforce Development Board created the Diversity & Inclusion: Employer Action Guide, with leadership from the Board’s Equity Committee. The action guide offers concrete steps employers can take to improve diversity and inclusion in recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and retention. Business Services teams within any AJC will find this tool valuable. Staff can share this action guide and its best practices with local employers to assist in improving diversity and inclusion in these four focus areas.

Since the launch of the action guide, the Board continues to learn and collect equity actions employers take through their Employer Champions Initiative to support diversity and inclusion efforts related to hiring and training employees. The Employer Champions Initiative sessions allow employers to dig deeper into diversity and inclusion strategies in a peer learning network. These sessions primarily benefit Human Resources staff, hiring managers, supervisors, and other business and organization leaders.

Overarching strategies from Duluth:

Business Services Teams within the AJC can share best practices, like the ones found in the action guide, with employers to improve diversity and inclusion in the local community.
The practical and concrete tips listed in the action guide can serve to improve diversity and inclusion within the AJC in terms of customer service, marketing, service delivery, intake, and more.
A peer-learning network, such as the Employer Champions Initiative, is an effective way to continuously evaluate and improve diversity and inclusion efforts.

For more promising practices like these, visit the Promising Practices in Achieving Nondiscrimination and Equal Opportunity: A Section 188 Disability Reference Guide (2024).