How to Diversify Your Network

It took a man’s life and millions of people protesting in the streets amidst a global pandemic for me to realize (and then a lot of courage to accept) the fact that I am a silent participant in the centuries old problem of racism.

I have been networking for more than two decades. After more than 20 years meeting people you would think that my network would be diverse. You’d be wrong. Among the hundreds of people I knew, I could count the number of people of color in my network on one hand, One hand!

In episode 2, I talked about Analyzing your network, that analysis has not only taught me about the type of people in my network, but how homogenous my network really is!

We can't change what we refuse to see. So I refused to not see the lack of diversity anymore and decided to call one of the women I had in my network to ask her how I could network with the people who don’t look like me.

Enter Cleonie Mainvielle & Pearl Farquharson. Founder of D.I.C.E (Diversity and Inclusion for Community Empowerment) and founder of TOAST (To Obtain Anything Start Thinking) respectively. Two women who believe in the power of networking and are helping me understand the networking experiences of women of color, the power of affinity groups as well as how we can begin to diversity our networks and organizations.

As humans we gravitate towards things that are familiar to us, it's in our nature, we do it because we feel safe when things are known. This is part of the problem. We need to move out of our comfort zones in order to grow.

We need to treat Multi diversity networking the same way, as a place to grow and make the world a better place for everybody by focusing upon people’s personality, respecting their beliefs and life experiences instead of how they look.

You might assume if someone doesn’t look like you, that you might not have things to talk about because they have different life experiences and grew up differently than you. Let me tell you this! The biggest commonality we share is that we are all human beings for fucks sake. So talk about being a human being, learn that there is beauty in our differences if you take the time to learn about them.

Drinks for this week:

Jamaican Mule

1.5 oz Appleton’s Estate Rum

Juice of ½ lime

Ginger beer

Directions:

Fill highball glass with ice.

Add rum.

Squeeze lime wedge.

Fill glass with ginger beer.

Cleonie: White Russian (I can’t even)

Pearl: Sancerre