Respectful and Inclusive Community

Building Inclusive Communities

The Community Tool Box is a free, online resource that was created to support those working to build healthier communities and achieve social change. This particular chapter  unpacks the concept of inclusive communities and the work that is required to create and preserve them. It can help you to better understand what inclusive communities are; why building inclusive communities is important; when it is most important to build inclusive communities; and how to go about creating them.

Tackling inequality: The need and opportunity for business action

This short report is a good introduction to inequality, and can help you to better understand the responsibility and opportunity that your business has to support positive change. Developed by the Business Commission to Tack Inequality, the report explains how inequality is an urgent systemic risk for business, highlights the case for business action, and presents a six-part agenda for action.

2021 CEO Blueprint For Racial Equity

This resource from PolicyLink provides a roadmap that can help companies understand and address the intended and unintended consequences of their products, policies, and practices on people of colour. The guide seeks to advance racial equity by providing key recommendations across three domains of corporate influence: within the company, within relevant communities, and at the societal level. It also includes profiles of companies whose work is advancing equity in these three spaces. This guide is a good starting point for leaders and agents of change who want to advance their business from simply "not racist" to deliberately and credibly "anti-racist."

Wheel of Privilege and Power

This visual tool by the Government of Canada can help individuals identify how power and privilege relate to their personal circumstance. It covers thirteen categories of social identity, including Citizenship, Wealth, Gender, and Language. Each category has at least three levels of privilege. This resource will be of particular value to those who want to understand how their intersecting social identities relate to systems of power and discrimination (particularly in the Global North), and to professionals working on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.

Inclusive Language Guide

This comprehensive guide from Oxfam can help you understand how to reframe your language to be more inclusive. It takes a critical look at language and how it can be used to empower new narratives and challenge problematic ideas. The guide explores a range of themes, including the power of language; feminist principles for language use; disability, physical, and mental health; gender justice, sexual diversity, and women’s rights; migrations; and race, power, and decolonisation. For each theme it provides examples of how you can put inclusive language into practice in writing and day-to-day conversation. This resource may be especially useful to communications specialists and HR teams that can use it to inform employee onboarding and training.

Human Rights Defenders and Shrinking Civic Space: A Guide for Financial Institutions

This guide from Shift can help you better understand how protecting civic rights and freedoms supports business sustainability. Based on insights from practitioners, it begins by explaining the role of civil society and human rights defenders and why they are important to conducting human rights due diligence. It also outlines how businesses can overcome key challenges related to engaging with civil society.

Although the guide is written for financial institutions, its insights are relevant to sustainability and community relations teams across sectors.

Women's Empowerment Principles

Established by the UN Global Compact and UN Women, The Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) serve as guidelines that will help your leaders, HR professionals, and change agents to promote gender equality and empowerment in the workplace. Adopting these principles involves six main stages: Consider, Sign, Activate, Engage, Sustain, and Report. Towards helping you understand and progress through these stages, the WEPs has created a comprehensive brochure that features tools, examples, insights, and other resources.

Linking Indigenous Communities with Regional Development in Canada

This study from the OECD can help you to better understand and support priority issues that maximise the potential of Indigenous economies in Canada. The report examines how public policy and public investments can be better leveraged to support Indigenous economic development, and focuses on four key areas of recommendations. These include improving the quality of data about Indigenous businesses and entrepreneurship and including these communities in the governance of said data; protecting and advancing land and water rights; enabling Indigenous entrepreneurship and community economic development; and improving governance and policies for place-based Indigenous economic development.

Although written with the public sector in mind, these recommendations highlight opportunities that sustainability, legal, community relations, and investment professionals can support to further the development and growth of Indigenous economies.