About the Chicagoland DEI Alliance

The Chicagoland Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI) Alliance is a practitioner-focused, non-partisan collaborative that views DEI and inclusive social change as a business and societal imperative. The DEI sector must work to align itself definitionally, strategically, and in its vision to be effective and engage the opportunities before us all toward an equal society. The DEI landscape is ever-changing and fractured, and the Alliance serves as a leveling and empowering space for people and ideas toward community engagement, innovative strategies, and educational advocacy.

The Chicagoland DEI Alliance is a collaborative launched in 2018 and, powered by Justice Informed, relaunched in 2025 with a new mission and vision that reflects the emergent and complex challenges that the ideas and strategies of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion face in the corporate and nonprofit sectors as well as the need for community and strategic support that professional DEI practitioners require amid unprecedented attacks and consistent confusion about how to ensure American workplaces and society attain inclusion and equality as a promise to workforces and communities.

Chicagoland DEI Alliance members believe in the power of DEI to positively transform workplaces and society. They come from different organizations, sectors, ideologies, and backgrounds, but through a diversity of ideas and methodologies, our roundtables, meetings and events bring the complexities of our work together to sharpen and find better solutions for our respective organizations, clients, and communities.

Mission

Our mission is to build a community for professional DEI practitioners. We do this through the work to ideate and thoughtfully consider best and next practices for DEI professionals and their organizations, and ensure the standards of our sector confer trust and understanding.

The Chicagoland DEI Alliance is a network and community where ideas and strategies for DEI meet the practitioners who are firm believers in the importance of true diversity, intersectional inclusion, and measurable equity, converging to share information.

At the Alliance, we consider ways to better understand the strategies and narratives that drive or hold back urgent DEI efforts within organizations, test assumptions and theories about the practices that the DEI community should advance together to leverage new opportunities or face entrenched challenges, and care for one another as we commit to the challenges of DEI work.

As an outcome, we work to advance clearer and more accurate definitions for DEI practices and theories advanced by practitioners and their respective organizations.

Goals:

Engagement: To cultivate and host a dynamic network of DEI practitioners (both in-house and external consultants) who bring their ideas, concerns, challenges, and opportunities to a community of peers for shared learning, support, and idea testing. The aim is to build trust and provide truly valuable information and tactics that address the real-world challenges practitioners face.
Innovation: To maintain a generative space for practitioner-derived ideas that challenge conventional norms for business and social growth. The desired outcome is the development of standardized best practices, effective strategies, test cases, and proof-of-concept opportunities for the DEI sector. These resources can then be utilized by professional practitioners and leveraged by organizations committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Advocacy and Education: To advocate for important issues facing DEI practitioners, elevate the successes and support the challenges of organizations embracing DEI, and serve as a unified local voice. This includes educating and engaging the Chicagoland community on the nature of DEI work, endorsing practitioner-backed practices, and presenting an aligned message when challenges or opportunities arise.

Vision

The Chicagoland Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Alliance envisions a DEI sector in which DEI practices and standards are primarily defined and informed by a community of professional DEI practitioners who advocate on behalf of the sector and are responsible for continually improving best practices while ensuring standards reflect the nuanced dynamics of organizations with respect to their sector, size, and growth stage.
We believe that individuals of all identities and ideologies can and must embrace the power and opportunities of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion toward a truly sustainable world, society, and economic marketplace without minimizing one another or the work itself. We believe in DEI strategies that boldly & accurately capture the opportunities DEI creates, while managing the typical growing pains, financial costs, shifts in business practices, historical nuances, fluctuations in market and public support, power dynamics, and psychosocial challenges of advancing DEI.

The Chicagoland DEI Alliance engages and is informed by a community of DEI practitioners who believe in leveraging the power of their professional roles, personal identities, life experiences, career and lived expertise, and networks to advance people-focused systems change in our society, operational change in our businesses, social change through our nonprofits, policy change through our government, and personal courage through our individual selves such that we can be of many identities and beliefs while aligned on our vision and goal for a future economy and society that delivers on the idea of equality through the practice of inclusion and the work of equity and justice.

Welcome to the Chicagoland DEI Alliance

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