by Cecil Scheib

This blog post is 2 of a 3-part series on the Office of Sustainability’s efforts to be proactively anti-racist, combat white supremacy culture,¹ and embed anti-racist actions into our work. The blog series is intended to document and provide transparency about the work we are doing internally and externally and to share our process, begun in 2018 and accelerated in 2020, that is far from complete.

Part 1 of this series addresses myths related to anti-racism and sustainability, and how action for justice is an essential part of the work for anyone who cares about the environment. Given this imperative, the NYU Office of Sustainability has been working to improve its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts for several years. Over the past year, we have been inspired by national events to do even more, including developing an internal plan for anti-racist communications and activities.²

In 2018, we reexamined our hiring practices, focusing first on where we advertise open positions. The easiest way to increase the changes of diverse hires is to ensure a diverse applicant pool, and that includes reaching people through many different channels. For entry level positions, reaching out to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) can be helpful. For mid-career opportunities, many professional areas have group identity-based societies (for instance, American Association of Blacks in Energy and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers), often with job boards.³

We also found it helpful to carefully consider our criteria for evaluating applicants. After being in a field for many years, there is a set of conscious or unconscious assumptions built up about what characteristics a successful candidate will have, be that past education or work experience, or their personal or group identity or interests. Starting with a clean sheet of paper and determining what things a person in the position will truly need to succeed, distinguishing them from things that arise out of convenience or habit, opens up the field to candidates who have the basic skills and competencies to succeed, without being screened out by unexamined expectation. Once key skills and competencies are determined, an assessment matrix that allows the interviewer to evaluate and focus on those specific items aids in reducing unconscious biases. It is also important to reconsider whether interview questions are designed to allow the candidate to tell their story about how they can succeed in the position, or simply to confirm which candidates check the boxes (in terms of work experience or personal/group identifiers) that were already expected for the position? Techniques like these can help obviate the so-called “pipeline” problem (when a homogenous candidate and hiree pool is justified by purported “lack of qualified candidates”), especially since that may just be a myth anyway.⁴ And as an office that has continually involved students deeply in our work, we also have extended these efforts to hiring of student employees.

Since 2019, over half of the management-level employees on our team have completed the Office of Global Inclusion’s Global Inclusive Leadership and Management Institute training. The program examines the role inclusive leadership plays in achieving inclusion, diversity, belonging, and equity within the work environment. It stands along many other NYU resources to encourage inclusion in the working place, including Zone training, Human Resources, and school-level policies and guidelines.

In our engagement efforts and events, we try to incorporate anti-racism, anti-white supremacy culture, and environmental justice principles into existing and new offerings. This includes our own Green Zone training and events for Earth Month. It also influences which student groups we invite to our student engagement and sustainability roundtable each semester; we have begun taking a broader look at what constitutes “sustainability” in this context in order to be more inclusive in our invites. It has begun to play a role in Green Grants, where we’ve recently funded a project aimed at bringing an environmental and climate justice curriculum to NYC high school students, and an interactive hub with environmental education resources for Spanish-speaking and/or Latinx communities. We are working to offer stipends to NYU students doing summer internships in sustainability or environmental justice, which tends to further diversity by assisting those without the economic means to take unpaid internships in their desired career area. And we have held events directly focused on this topic, including an environmental justice career panel.

We are developing a set of communications goals that include anti-racist tactics and resources, including guidance on using inclusive language and specific questions to ask when creating communications materials to avoid reinforcing generalizations or stereotypes along white supremacy culture lines. We also incorporated goals around strengthening the connection between racial and environmental justice in our communications plan.

Finally among our internal efforts, we have developed mechanisms within our office to ensure progress and accountability, and to help us continue to expand this list of activities. This includes an internal process to ensure appropriate accountability and transparency for planned anti-racist actions, to review any new internal policies to prevent new racist policies from being instituted, and to add anti-racist and white supremacy culture material to our “team contract” – an internal document, developed collaboratively by all team members and updated annually at our team development day, that describes our intent in working and engaging with each other.

These activities were developed through inclusive and open discussions among the team to the greatest extent possible. And if you’d like to do something similar, feel free to reach out to us for more information at sustainability@nyu.edu. In the spirit of transparency, and perhaps helping others further, you can learn more about how we initiated and continue on our ongoing journey in Part 3!

<sup>1. There is a range of opinions over whether to capitalize “white” in this type of discussion. While it is not the preferred style of
many, failing to do so may center “whiteness” as the default. In these blogs, we have chosen to write in a style that generally avoids use of the term, except in quotes from other papers, where we have retained the original capitalization or lack thereof, and in phrases like “anti-white supremacy culture” or “combat white supremacy culture”, where the intention seems clear.
2. While BIPOC are largely centered in this blog, our anti-racism and anti-white-supremacy-culture efforts are meant to be intersectional, and we strive to have our anti-racist work address the full spectrum of inequality and injustice in the sustainability field. That includes #stopasianhate and much more.
3. These are just some examples to help explain the general point. There are a lot of resources for diverse and inclusive hiring practices, written by people with many more qualifications than us, and that’s who you should be listening to about it!
4. Asare, J. G., “Five Reasons Why The Pipeline Problem Is Just A Myth”, Forbes, December 18, 2018.</sup>