The cornerstone of CCIE’s efforts is its unique and innovative inclusiveness program.

Beyond Diversity: Inclusiveness in the Legal Workplace

Six-Step Inclusiveness Program

Beyond Diversity: Inclusiveness in the Legal Workplace is a six-step manual on how to create an inclusive workplace and gain practical skills that can be implemented within legal organizations. It was first published as a working draft at the 2008 Rocky Mountain Legal Diversity Summit.  It is now in its 3rd Edition and is available at www.legalinclusiveness.org. The manual was adapted pursuant to a license from The Denver Foundation’s Inclusiveness at Work: How to Build Inclusive Nonprofit Organizations Workbook.

Step One:  Laying the Internal Foundation 

Step Two:  Creating an External Support System

Step Three:  Integrating Inclusiveness within Your Organization

Step Four:  Integrating Inclusiveness into External Relationships & Communication

Step Five:  Implementation

Step Six:  Collective Effort & Success

Step One:  Laying the Internal Foundation
Engaging in an inclusiveness initiative will have a lasting impact on all aspects of an organization's work and will affect everyone in your organization.  Therefore, it is important take the time to lay the proper foundation for the initiative.  It requires highly strategic decisions in creating an inclusiveness committee, engaging leadership of the organization, cultivating white male allies, and designing strategies from the outset regarding how to combat apathy.  
 
Step Two:  Creating an External Support System
Succeeding in an inclusiveness initiative requires the development of an external support system, including creating an external advisory board, seeking assistance from consultants, and garnering support from organizations such as CCIE and specialty bar associations.  These external resources can help create an accountability mechanism and a sense of urgency for achieving stated goals. 
 
Step Three:  Integrating Inclusiveness within Your Organization
Integrating inclusiveness within your organization is only possible with a comprehensive understanding of what inclusiveness is and how it can work within your organization.  This step involves developing diversity dialogues, examining the organizational culture, gathering and analyzing information, making the case for inclusiveness, and developing strategies for identifying and eliminating structural and organizational barriers.

Step Four:  Integrating Inclusiveness into External Relationships & Communication
Creating an inclusive organization is not just an internal process.  Communicating about your inclusiveness initiative externally plays an important role in the overall inclusiveness initiative.  Do your communication and marketing plans, your website, your recruiting and hiring techniques align with your inclusiveness goals?

Step Five:  Implementation
An inclusiveness action plan takes all of the knowledge you've developed and provides goals to embed and infuse diversity and inclusiveness throughout the organization.  Measuring success in achieving those goals is also a critical element for a successful inclusiveness initiative.
 
Step Six:  Effort & Success: The Inclusiveness Network
Learning from others who are also engaged in inclusiveness initiatives is an important component for success.  CCIE developed the Inclusiveness Network - eleven legal organizations implementing the inclusiveness manual - in order to create a dialogue about successes and challenges throughout the process.  Joining with other organizations - even from different sectors - to learn from one another's experiences and to provide a support group - is a powerful way to shorten the learning curve and achieve greater success in a shorter time period. 

Inclusiveness Network

Eleven legal organizations – corporate law departments, government legal offices, and three law firms - are implementing the CCIE Inclusiveness Manual:

These organizations, referred to as the Inclusiveness Network, meet quarterly to share experiences and learn from one another. Dr. Arin Reeves, of the Athens Group in Chicago, is working with the pilot organizations in the Inclusiveness Network.  The work of the Inclusiveness Network has been incorporated in the third edition of CCIE's Inclusiveness Manual, which is available at www.legalinclusiveness.org.