The USA-NPN has successfully engaged a wide range of resource management, education and academic audiences over the first ten years of our development. In recent years, however, we have realized that unless we work actively to represent and include all demographic groups in the United States, we will continue to deliver benefits primarily to audiences that are more white, more educated and more wealthy than the US as a whole. We have made a formal commitment to diversity, inclusiveness, and equity in our actions, partnership development, as well as on our team. As a staff, we identified core values of inclusion, dedication, and innovation. Further, we explicitly incorporated these commitments throughout our goals in an update to our 5-year Strategic Plan.
Results/Conclusions
Our primary emphasis with this new commitment internally is to focus on staff growth and development, assess organizational practices, including office and hiring norms. Externally we are building relationships, meeting new audiences in their spaces, and attending meetings to listen and learn. We are also collaborating with like-minded organizations to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the fields in which we operate, including citizen science, ecology, and natural resources. We have been working for several years to learn how to work appropriately with indigenous communities, including hewing to a framework respect, relationship, reciprocity and data sovereignty. At this meeting, and in other fora we hope to support indigenous voices in sharing powerful approaches understanding phenology and adapting to climate change. We have found that the simple question “Who Benefits?” can be transformative. We know we have a long way to go, and hope to undertake this journey collaboratively with the ecological community.