In 2017, through a review with the University of Washington’s Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity and feedback sessions with IslandWood graduate students, it became clear that our communications were full of tokenism, saviorism, and we were perpetuating negative stereotypes. While our intentions may have been positive, the actual impact was not. We were causing harm to the very people we were seeking to serve. With this clarity, our communications team set out to change the course of our marketing, accurately representing, both in words and visuals, who our work seeks to serve, and why.
Our communications team works to respectfully, authentically, and transparently communicate about IslandWood’s work, our impact, and with each of the various groups that we serve. Some of the changes we’ve made since 2017 include:
We have been working hard over the past few years to build our capacity to create authentic communications about IslandWood’s work, our programs, and our need for fundraising that are founded in justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion principles.
We feel that our current work has come very far from our past mistakes of tokenizing, over-representing people of color, and perpetuating negative stereotypes and saviorism. That said, we realize that bias is real and often you can’t see what you can’t see.
It is one of our fiscal year 2023 goals to have an external audit of our communications done with a particular lens for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.
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