Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
“We are an elite force of trusted advisors improving lives, transforming businesses and bettering our community.”
At AMEND, we talk a lot about our community. Cincinnati is our home, and this community is an incredibly important part of our story. We want to be representative of our community, to be welcoming to our community, and to make an impact on our community. In the summer of 2020, we decided it was time to pull together all of these efforts with an increased focus and intentionality - and our Social Consciousness Committee was born!
Social Consciousness Committee
SCC is the largest committee at AMEND (if that tells you anything about how important it is to us). Our goal is to build a world-class inclusive organization here within our business - ambitious, right? Luckily, we have a team of incredibly thoughtful, caring, and compassionate individuals to get us there. The past few years have been full of reflection, educational opportunities, charitable partnerships, and a laser focus on diversification of our team, all to make us better and broaden our impact. We’ve seen a lot of incredible progress so far, but there is still so much more to come in the future. Our four subcommittee focus areas are detailed below - check them out if you’d like to learn more!
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Recruiting
Ensuring that people from all backgrounds have access to the opportunity to join the AMEND team.
The makeup of our team is not as diverse as it should be. That’s a fact, and one that we are working very hard to change! A big part of that effort is widening our recruiting net to find diverse talent and fresh perspectives to bring into our family. There are many ways this diversity is manifesting - through backgrounds, races, genders, veteran status, and many others. We are partnering with more universities and organizations than ever to make that happen, and we are always looking for more. Once we find those applicants, our recruiting team has built our interview process to ensure that everyone is set up on a level playing field with equitable opportunity to succeed and join our team. So while we are not as diverse as we should be - we are more diverse than we were two years ago, and we know that the same will be true two years from now. We’re excited that so many of our team members can be a part of that journey through involvement in our recruiting process.
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Culture & Inclusion
Ensuring we have a business that is ready to welcome the diverse talent that comes in.
Our family culture is everything to us at AMEND. As we grow and continually work toward becoming a more inclusive organization, we are being incredibly intentional about making sure we have a culture where everyone can feel welcome and at home. We’re constantly seeking out feedback on how we can be better, both for our new team members walking in the door for the first time and for team members who have been part of our family for years. Our culture is better than it has ever been, thanks to the input of everyone on our team, and we can confidently say that in the future it will just continue to improve as we reflect and bring in new perspectives.
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Internal Learning & Development
Establishing a space where we can have vulnerable conversations and continue to learn together.
We realize that we’re not perfect, and we don’t know everything. What we DO know is that we’re committed to continuing to learn, grow, and better ourselves - together. We’re constantly working to make sure AMEND is a home base where we can be vulnerable with each other and have the important conversations, learn from and lean on each other, and increase our awareness as a team. To date, we’ve held sessions on mental health, crucial conversations, allyship, and implicit bias reduction, with many more to come.
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External Partnerships
Continuing our impact in the community through partnering with organizations outside of day-to-day work.
Bettering our community has always been a core component of who we are as a team. We are incredibly intentional about seeking out partnerships that enable us to multiply our impact. We’ve come to see that sharing the talents and time of our team can be just as important (if not more so) than our 3x1 charity match in our effort to create systemic change in our city. Our team is energized by the opportunity to dig deeper than just the surface level and make a lasting impact on the Cincinnati community. Better together.
Our Partnerships
MadTree Ascending Women Series
We have some amazing female leaders at AMEND, and we take every chance we can get to learn from them! In 2022, we had the opportunity to do that on an even broader scale with women all around our community by sponsoring Madtree’s Ascending Women Series. Creating a space where we can hear the experiences and wisdom of some of the most inspiring women in Cincinnati? That’s good for everyone. We’re excited to be taking this partnership into 2023, so join us at the events - we promise you’ll love them.
Cincinnati Works
Cincinnati Works is an incredible non-profit leader here in Cincinnati, working toward eliminating poverty in our community. We are lucky to be able to strategically partner with them and support their mission through pro-bono consulting work, volunteer hours from our team, and connecting them with our network around Cincinnati. In our most recent consulting project with Cincinnati Works, we were able to automate their reporting process, decreasing data entry from their team and giving them access to real-time data on their initiatives. Our team members also volunteer with their Job Readiness program, getting to interact with and support their members directly. We’re looking forward to seeing how the partnership continues to evolve!
Big Brothers Big Sisters
If you know us, you know that we believe in harnessing the potential of young talent. So it has always felt natural for us to be involved with organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS), with their mission of defending the potential of youth and helping them reach that full potential. We have a long legacy of involvement with BBBS, including involvement on the Executive Board, Young Professionals Board, and leading as Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Our involvement has been organically driven by relationships on our team, with many of us being inspired to get involved by seeing others do so. We are proud to say that 6 people from our team are currently involved with the organization, 2 of whom serve on the board.
Groundwork
In some cases, our existing partnerships can lead us to new ones! We were introduced to Groundwork through our work with the awesome team at MadTree. Groundwork has some amazing programs for young adults that are focused around building job readiness and life skills. We love this partnership because we are able to give both our time and talent, through outdoor volunteering events with their programs as well as hosting skill-building workshops on topics such as Financial Literacy.
