Increasing our diversity is not only the right thing to do, it is how we complete our mission.
Monday, September 5, 2022
<aside> ✍🏽 Hello! This is my revision of the beautifully written “Who is Spark” article written by Beez along with co-writers Pavan, Akash, and Steve. This semester, I am leading our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee to ensure the follow through of the goals we have set to diversify our membership. When revisiting this article, the question I kept asking was “why?——why does this article matter?” We wrote and tirelessly revised this blog post not just to be transparent about our faults and convince you to join our organization to fulfill our mission. It was written to communicate the work we are doing to make space within the Spark family for you, for more diverse perspectives.
How Spark defines:
Lastly, before we dive into “Who is Spark,” here are some important thoughts from Beez that I would like to mention:
Entrepreneurship culture and resources at USC are enjoyed primarily by white, male-identifying, and privileged students.
While certain individuals in Spark have put serious effort into diversifying our membership, we, as an organization, regret that we have not committed to this goal until two years ago. Still, those individuals were right to lead us in that direction. We hadn't identified the homogeneity and inaccessibility in entrepreneurship at USC as an area of impact for us – despite our complicity in both problems.
Our DEI committee recognizes that we have a lot of work to do as an organization and, as I mentioned earlier, we are committed to creating change.
Keep reading to learn more!
*Rakesh Kochhar, “Income Inequality in the U.S. Is Rising Most Rapidly Among Asians,” Pew Research Center. July 12, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/07/12/income-inequality-in-the-u-s-is-rising-most-rapidly-among-asians/. (accessed Jan 22, 2022).
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This is our most recent picture of some of our board members from Spring 2022; this reflects our current level of diversity pretty accurately.
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As we've discussed in our last two posts, Spark is identified and driven by its mission. You can also think of Spark as a group of people who share a culture and values. While we have a lot in common, our different backgrounds and problem-solving styles sharpen us.
Spark's members come from all sorts of intellectual and disciplinary backgrounds – even though we're an "entrepreneurship organization," a lot of our members' definitions of entrepreneurship don't only include founding a startup or building a product. To our members, entrepreneurship is designing clothes, making music, directing music videos, solving climate change, journalism, practicing medicine, writing graphic novels, and publishing research. This inclusive definition of entrepreneurship shapes the way we work toward our mission.
Ironically though, Spark is still not that inclusive or diverse in other ways. Becoming a diverse and equitable organization is essential to our ability to fulfill our mission of “fostering entrepreneurial thought and action across communities of all backgrounds at USC.” As our membership expands to represent an expansive variety of backgrounds and experiences, we can empathize with more of the people we aim to serve at and around USC.
Three semesters ago, we began reaching out to leaders of other organizations on campus and met with Kristina Williams, critical race educator and founder of Unpacking, the leading online resource for antiracism education.
This past semester, Spark incorporated DEI through our DEI committee that worked to provide equal access to the organization by ensuring that our membership is diverse and representative, our culture is inclusive, and our initiatives reflect our mission. Below, we have outlined how we’ve approached our goals in the past along with our current plans for accomplishing them:
We are committed to recruitment practices that reflect the values of DEI. We aspire to reflect the communities we work with at every level of our organization and will identify, attract, and retain diverse, qualified team members.