Office of Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Newsletter
Dear Colleagues,

We write to you on this historic day for LGBTQ+ Civil Rights as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act barring sex discrimination in the workplace protects LGBTQ+ employees from being fired. This news comes days after a rule removing nondiscrimination protections for Transgender patients in health care and health insurance was finalized. For us in Boston, thousands took to the streets this weekend to honor Black Transgender lives . Similar demonstrations occurred around the country with an estimated 15,000 people in Brooklyn . Demonstrations for racial justice continued across the country this weekend as well, particularly in Atlanta, over the death of Rayshard Brooks .

Our office uses LGBTQIA+ flags with Black and Brown stripes to highlight how racial justice and LGBTQIA+ justice are interconnected. Our Intersectional programming seeks to create spaces to learn more about these connections, embrace the discomfort and mistakes that come when engaging with race, racism, and oppression.  This is a challenge we’re all overcoming across the IHP together. Through the revised Power, Privilege, and Positionality curriculum, we’re developing a shared vocabulary around race, racism, and health inequities. We slowly introduced the brave spaces model which embraces making mistakes and learning from them as an integral part of the learning process.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve focused on racial (in)justice issues in our world at large and here at the IHP.  Students, alumni, administrators, staff, and faculty have increasingly reached out to us for support and guidance. What we thought would lead us to only incremental change opens the door for us to have the uncomfortable conversations that we were not yet ready to have. We are now talking about the racism that exists within our organization, how faculty, staff, and students of color, and more specifically, Black faculty, staff, and students experience racism. While we knew about the i nvisible labor faculty of color and students of color perform , the microaggresisons that faculty, staff, and students of color endure , the equity issues related to clinical placements, and curriculum that needs updates , among other issues . Not only are we discussing racism, but we are also having conversations about an anti-racist and anti-oppressive approach to resolving these issues. This opens the door to so many possibilities, including but not limited to re-examining recruitment and retention policies and practices as well as having an Institute-, school-, department-, and office-wide DEI strategic plans with actionable and measurable goals. 

Tonight, in partnership with the Alumni office we are meeting with alumni to better understand their experiences at the IHP so that we can support students while they are here as well as build relationships with our alumni. We welcome meeting with and supporting faculty, staff, students, and others (e.g., prospective students and clinical supervisors) so that can better support equity issues here at the IHP.

We hope you can join us for the remainder of our Pride programming this month and please note our call for PPP facilitators for the Fall so we can continue these conversations as a community. Please do not hesitate to contact us ktruong@mghihp.edu and kmartinez@mghihp.edu . 


Sincerely,
The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
LGBTQIA+ Best Healthcare Practices Series
This webinar series will be a mix of instruction and interactive activities to help health care practitioners create a more inclusive practice for LGBTQIA+ patients. To register for each module, please click on the title of the module and you'll be directed to a Zoom registration page.
The second module of this series will help participants think of actionable ways to make their everyday healthcare practice more inclusive for LGBTQIA+ patients and to practice communication skills. Topics will include the physical clinical environment, forms and documentation, pronouns and names, and inclusive language.
Would you like to learn more about Gender pronouns? How can you share your pronouns? How can you ask someone else about their pronouns? Learn all this and more at our Pronouns 101 workshop.
The third module in this series will have participants build on communication skills through case discussions.
Join us for this conference bringing together interprofessional public health and healthcare professionals to explore the policy landscape around LGBTQ+ youth and healthcare, services for gender diverse individuals, and ways to enhance your own skills in providing gender-affirming care. Hear from advocates and leaders from MGH Institute of Health Professions, MGH Transgender Health Program, Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ+ Youth, Fenway Institute, Boston GLASS, and more.
Dr. Howard Stevenson is the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education, Professor of Africana Studies, in the Human Development & Quantitative Methods Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Stevenson will facilitate a special processing space for Black IHP Faculty, Staff, and Students. He is a nationally sought expert on how racial stress and racial trauma can affect every stage of life. His work focuses on how educators, community leaders, and parents can emotionally resolve face-to-face racially stressful encounters that reflect racial profiling in public spaces, fuel social conflicts in neighborhoods, and undermine student emotional well-being and academic achievement in the classroom. Dr. Stevenson has served for 30 years as a clinical and consulting psychologist working in impoverished rural and urban neighborhoods across the country.
Anthony Abraham Jack , PhD, Harvard University, 2016, is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He holds the Shutzer Assistant Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students is his first book. It has won numerous awards and was recognized by NPR Books on their Best Books of 2019 list. His research documents the overlooked diversity among lower-income undergraduates: the Doubly Disadvantaged­—those who enter college from local, typically distressed public high schools—and Privileged Poor­—those who do so from boarding, day, and preparatory high schools.
Sean Saifa Wall is an Intersex activist, artist, and public health researcher based in Atlanta. As co-founder of the Intersex Justice Project (IJP), his work seeks the end of medically invasive and unnecessary surgeries in the United States that target intersex children and adolescents by empowering intersex people of color to advance that change.
"Talking Black In America" chronicles the incredible impact of African American English on American Language and culture. Filmed across the United States, this documentary is a revelation of language as legacy, identity, and triumph over adversity. Register to access the film for viewing prior to our discussion . This event is presented by: Students for Racial Justice in Healthcare, NSSLHA, Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, and the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Fall PPP is scheduled for Thursday, September 3, 2:00–3:30 p.m and we're in need of facilitators to help us lead conversations with incoming students. We initially began conversations in March in the PPP Planning Committee about having more explicit conversations about racism as well as moving the course to a virtual format given the pandemic. A proposed curriculum for PPP was approved in April as we simultaneously developed training materials, facilitated the training, recruited facilitators, populated the D2L site with course content, including coordinating with speakers on videos and editing. D2L went live on May 18 and we successfully completed our first virtual PPP on June,1st less than 3 months after the initial conversations. The Summer PPP event had 309 total people on D2L: 247 students and self-enrollees and 62 facilitators! We have more student impact data available but we wanted to share a bit about students have shared:

"Just a huge thanks to everyone who made this event possible. I did not know this was missing from my life but now that I have all of this information, I feel empowered to make a change."
 
"I really appreciate this course being a part of orientation! And, I hope we continue to receive an education based on the topic of racism. As long as racism is around, we should be educating ourselves on it, and educating our family and peers! Thank you for your time!"
 
"Overall, this workshop has reinforced my desire to continue to educate myself about issues of power and privilege and learn (and in some cases, unlearn) how to bring these skills into my personal development so I can become a better clinician."

We are currently recruiting for Fall PPP facilitators and we are able to pay students $100 for their time. We have also made revisions to our training curriculum and materials given participants feedback. To sign up to be a facilitator, please register.
Resource Sharing
Sharing your pronouns via Zoom is one way you can foster a Trans Inclusive virtual space. To learn how to configure your pronouns to appear and zoom and for more resources regarding pronouns, please visit the list of resources compiled by Berkeley Labs.

Diversity Dialogue Series
Our colleagues in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are leading several diversity dialogues this summer. Their first dialogue, "What leaders can do to address racism" 12:30pm-1:30pm is open to all Mass General Brigham employees. If you would like to attend, please email: diversityinclusion@partners.org
Advancing Care For a Diverse Society