2 May 2025
In February, the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) hosted a Rapid Response Day addressing the current political situation around DEI. Dozens of community members came together to share knowledge, identify priorities, and begin work on needed resources. One of those resources was a document providing guidance for professional membership communities (like C4DISC’s own member communities) who want to continue to advance DEI work in a hostile environment. That resource is now available!
Guidance for Professional Membership Communities
This document was inspired by the Toolkits for Equity, but it is a much less polished resource. It was crowdsourced during the Rapid Response Day and over the following two weeks, and has not undergone rigorous editorial or peer review. Due to the urgency of the issue and the rapidly changing environment, we felt it was more important to release the guidance quickly. That said, we are leaving it in a Google Doc for ease of updating, and we want to hear from you if you notice any errors or problems with the document. Please email c4disc@gmail.com with feedback.
We hope this guidance is useful to C4DISC members and to other professional membership communities. Academic institutions, corporations, and many nonprofits are facing constraints on their ability to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Professional membership communities – with their democratic governance structures and distributed member bases – have an opportunity to pick up the baton and keep this work moving. We hope that this document will inspire those communities to do so and provide some useful guidance on how.