History 21 The Podcast - 1.24 Levon Williams & Facing Change
Levon Williams, a Race, Equity & Inclusion Consultant with the American Association of Museums, discusses his work at ACHS and other midwest museums through the Facing Change grant. Levon reflects on how diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI) work can be messy, convoluted, and imperative for museums.
Hosts Rebecca Desens, ACHS Executive Director, Sara Given, ACHS Volunteer Coordinator and Erin McBrien, ACHS Archivist.
Levon Williams
Levon Williams
Graduate Fellow, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Indiana University O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs
(He/him/his)
Levon Williams is a Race Equity & Inclusion Consultant for Nonprofit Organizations. He is a Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Senior Fellow for the American Alliance of Museums’ Facing Change Initiative, working with museum boards to create inclusive board cultures. Prior to entering the DEAI consulting sphere, Levon worked in the Arts & Culture sphere in a curatorial capacity at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the National Museum of African American Music in Memphis and Nashville Tennessee respectively. Since 2016 he has worked directly with nonprofit organizations, arts & culture organizations, and institutions of higher education in their efforts to be more equitable and inclusive spaces. Levon holds master’s degrees in Nonprofit Management and Arts Administration from Indiana University.
A thank you to Levon from ACHS board members at the end of our official time together.
Three ACHS board members share what we have gained through our journey with Facing Change.
Anoka County Library Minute
Further Reading:
Books
Did That Just Happen?!: Beyond “Diversity” - Creating Sustainable and Inclusive Organizations by Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Lauren Wadsworth. This book is less a description of DEI than a guidebook or manual describing many real-life scenarios and how to address them. The most useful sections may be those that answer the questions, “How can I avoid diversity landmines at work?” and “What can I do when I’ve made a mistake?” It’s full of helpful do’s and don’ts.
How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive by Jennifer Brown was written for those leaders who not only want to learn about diversity and inclusion, but who want to do something about it. As a DEI consultant, she draws on years of experience and training to discuss how leaders and managers can approach inclusion in their own organization. She explains why it is important to address this issue, what the benefits are, and gives an outline for how to do the work. She uses a method which she calls the Inclusive Leader Continuum to guide leaders through the process. The four stages of the continuum are unaware, aware, active, and advocate. Using these four stages, she meets readers where they are at and helps them move forward through the process. This book would be a great read for those leaders who want to create a workplace where their employees and coworkers feel like they belong.
How to Work with and Lead People Not Like You: Practical Solutions for Today’s Diverse Workplace by Kelly McDonald. This is the book for people who want a quick overview of diversity, equity and inclusion issues in the workplace and straightforward action steps that managers and staff can take to produce positive changes. It covers complex topics like how to build connections between team members with different backgrounds and values, as well as how to build trust and productive working relationships on those teams in an easily accessible way.
The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias; How to Reframe Bias, Cultivate Connection, and Create High-Performing Teams by Pamela Fuller and Mark Murphy. The authors are advisors at FranklinCovey, the business and leadership consulting firm. This book provides an excellent explanation of the neuroscientific process of bias. It then applies that knowledge to the work environment in a way that the reader understands why the authors advise the management techniques that they do. This book is full of helpful worksheets and exercises for managers.
LinkedIn Learning, an online course provider, is a subscription database available free of charge to Anoka County Library cardholders. It provides hundreds of thousands of instructional videos covering the full spectrum of business, technology, and creative topics for the working world. There is a large selection of diversity and inclusion courses for various skill levels, among
them:
Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging by Pat Wadors covers the important step of creating a workplace where diverse employees feel that they belong. After hiring a diverse staff and including everyone in organizational activities, managers need to make employees feel that they are accepted for who they are as they work.
Inclusive Leadership by Shirley Davis is a course for managers and directors to develop the traits and competencies necessary to become inclusive leaders and describes the best practices that inclusive organizations employ.
Unconscious Bias by Stacey Gordon explores the relevance of the unconscious biases we all have to the business world and how those biases impede the formation of an inclusive work environment. She also outlines strategies to counteract their negative effects.