Justice. Equity. Diversity. Inclusion.
Shifting the Rutland region’s cultural foundation towards a more equitable future
3 Pillars
Container for Connection & Belonging
Strengthening of Intersectional Progress
A Hub of Curated Public Resources
The JEDI Movement stands for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI). It is a collaboration, but we prefer the term MOVEMENT because it sounds way more fun and symbolizes forward momentum. We organize leaders in our communities who work to improve access, equity, diversity, and inclusion for structurally underserved populations and center their voices to direct our work to ensure all people have the opportunity to feel value and belonging. We curate trusted spaces for people to listen, learn, and engage together, and facilitate connections with businesses and organizations to help each other in this work. We gather quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate needs and successes. Through this work we identify, acknowledge, and dismantle the barriers that prevent true success in growing diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We work with a diversity of folks who are structurally underserved:
Black, indigenous, people of color
LGBTQ+
Women
People with disabilities
Youth and older adults
Body positive folks
Substance use disorder recovery
Abuse and trauma
Veterans
Immigrants and refugees
Restorative justice
Homeless prevention and recovery
Why we created this Movement:
Social Tinkering began shaping the idea for this project after our work on the All Are Welcome Here Visibility Initiative in 2021.
1. We have found there are a lot of people doing great work to increase JEDI in Rutland County, but there isn't a lot of coordination and communication between these people. We feel that increased communication will increase all our chances of achieving our goals, which often overlap. People are maxed out - we're here to help bridge their work.
2. There are a lot of great people wanting to learn more about this subject and integrate it into their business or organization - they want to help make things more equitable and inclusive - but they don't know where to start. We need to help each other learn in healthy ways - without shaming people for not knowing things and respecting each other and our different experiences.
3. If we are going to learn and grow and change how we do things in regards to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we need to listen to the people who have faced the most bias and discrimination. Those of us who are privileged to have not experienced deep biases, need to be aware of our impact on folks who are often marginalized. We need to do the work necessary to understand each other and make things better for all people. As we all try to figure out how to do better when we know better, we need to be mindful that we're not asking people with deeply lived experiences of bias and discrimination to guide us all without compensation and recognition of their incredible effort and emotional toll.
4. Lastly, the All Are Welcome Here visibility initiative isn't 100% true - there is still a lot of work to do here in Rutland County and beyond. We will do this work while increasing visibility through this campaign.
How it will work in a nutshell:
As of January 2022, we have partnered with the Rutland District of the Vermont Department of Health to begin our work in earnest.
The project's purpose is to center a group of Core Leaders - voices of folks who are structurally underserved in our communities. We will work with a variety of partners throughout Rutland County to build a library of experiences and data to base our work on.
1. Together with these Core Leaders, we will define a baseline for where Rutland County is currently at with justice, equity diversity and inclusion.
2. We will identify benchmarks for where we would like to be with JEDI in 5, 10, 20 years from now.
3. We will create short and long-term goals to reach those benchmarks.
4. We will define projects and/or programs that can help us reach our goals.
5. We will create a hub of online resources for learning that is tailored to our communities.
6. We will offer consulting, partner memberships, events, discussions, trainings, and workshops to help people learn, grow, and engage with each other. We will help businesses and organizations connect with trainers and consultants on all kinds of JEDI work.
Our vision is that this coordinated effort will help any individual, organization or business working on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies and training and general learning, to really build JEDI into their culture. Together, this will shift how we impact and interact with each other. The JEDI Movement will provide a kind of clearinghouse of information for the region for folks working on social justice issues to communicate and collaborate - to learn and grow and engage together for greater success.
The JEDI Movement is our solution to address problems of discrimination, bias, marginalization, and stigmas. We hope you will join us in this good work in any way you feel you are able to participate.
Our Current Mission:
To collectively shift the cultural foundation of our communities into a healthier state of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion to ensure that ALL people of Rutland County have the opportunity to feel valued and experience belonging.
***Interested in learning more?
Are you interested in having a conversation with us about how your organization or business could participate? Contact us at socialtinkeringvt@gmail.com to set up a conversation to connect and get creative.