Trainings

Expect an interactive, hands-on, and collaborative learning experience.

Willing Observers LLC offers virtual and in-person training to for-profit, non-profit, and academic organizations.

Trainings can be delivered in 60-minute, 90-min, or 2.5-hour 0r 4-hr sessions.

Contact us for additional information.

Implicit Bias & Structural Racism

  • We all have implicit or unconscious biases. They help us establish a sense of belonging and safety, but they can also exclude, isolate, and marginalize others. This training provides baseline tools for participants to better identify their own and others’ harmful biases, situate them within a greater social and cultural understanding of systemic inequality, and foster strategies for interrupting them.

    By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

    • Define unconscious bias and systemic racism, and how they mutually reinforce each other

    • Raise awareness of how our background and identity shape our biases

    • Define microinequities and microaggressions, and identify strategies to address them at work and the community to create inclusive cultures through Willing Observers' recommended "best practices."

    • Identify strategies to reduce common types of biases in organizations.

Language Inclusivity

  • This course provides tips and tools for recognizing and remaking everyday interactions with the goal of achieving greater inclusivity. The material is grounded in theories of linguistic anthropology that advance diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Each module focuses on a specific aspect of everyday language-use, through writing and interacting, that offer opportunities to create greater inclusivity.

    Through this training, participants will:

    • Raise their awareness of (and ability to critically assess) their own language practices.

    • Connect these language practices with the larger patterns as well as the structures of power and marginalization that they bring into being.

    • Receive the tools necessary to recognize and change these practices, while taking into account contextual variation.

Generational Differences

  • In this workshop, participants will learn the common explanations for generational differences and how to leverage this understanding for creating inclusive workplaces. We will situate differences across Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z in historic social norms and political and economic contexts. We will also explore the dangers of creating stereotypes along age and the complexities of intersectional identities when considering generations across other diversity dimensions including race, gender, class, and sexuality.

    Through this trining, particiants will be able to:

    • Examine the structural economic, political, and social reasons attributed to generational differences.

    • Understand how generational stereotypes harm attempts to create inclusive workplaces. Identify ways to encourage productive and inclusive intergenerational collaboration at work.

    • Design workplace practices, processes, and norms that are inclusive of various dimensions of diversity including age, race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Coaching and personalized learning plans are available for individuals.

DEI Metrics & Accountability

  • Every successful diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy has measurable goals and a means to track progress over time. Metrics allow organizations to develop a structured way to achieve organizational change over time, as well as identify the return of investment of specific efforts. In this training, participants will learn how to identify diversity, equity, and inclusion data, create and administer scientific surveys and interviews and observation protocol, collect, code, and analyze qualitative and quantitative data, as well as how to identify patterns and themes across multiple sources of data.

    Through this training, participants will:

    • Design measurable goals for a diversity strategy and specific diversity efforts Identify the various qualitative and quantitative options for collecting diversity data on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

    • Develop metrics to track DEI progress at participants’ specific organizations.

    • Understand and be able to address and eliminate research bias in metrics.

Identity & Allyship

  • This training introduces participants to the basics of allyship and articulates the importance of allyship within wider equity and justice initiatives, in organizations and in society. Providing a broad overview of allyship, here participants are introduced to key terms and concepts as well as to the business case for allyship. Given the multitude of ways in which potential marginalization persists, and the varied contexts in which exclusion can take place, everyone can practice allyship, and consider the role that improved allyship might play within organizations as well as in wider society.

    By the end of this training, participants will:

    • Understand allyship as a general practice while also being able to identify specific forms of allyship in the workplace.

    • Recognize personal and intersectional identities as part of allyship practice.

    • Identify opportunities for allyship at the levels of individual, interpersonal, and organizational policy and practice.

    • Critically assess allyship needs and goals within an organization and articulate a business case for allyship in order to foster more meaningful change.

Diversity Statements 101

  • Diversity statements are an important tool for assessing the potential of new faculty and executive leaders in creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive institution. This training teaches participants how to write and evaluate diversity statements. The 60-minute training offers information about how organizations can develop assessment processes for more impactful reviews of diversity statements. In the two-hour version of this session, the training provides hands-on activities to write a successful diversity statement.