Canadian Equality Consulting
Championing DEI Initiatives

Canadian Equality Consulting is a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consulting firm that helps businesses build an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive and feel like they are valued and belong. The company meets clients where they are on their DEI journey and supports them to embed DEI into the foundation of their business. This helps in transforming workplace culture and sustaining DEI in the long run.

In an interview with Manage HR, Marcie Hawranik, founder and president and Anisha Philips, lead strategist and trainer, Canadian Equality Consulting, share insights into the company’s mission and vision and its approach.

Creating a Broader Societal Impact

We work with businesses across every industry and customize our approach to meet diverse client requirements. But we never believe in measuring our success solely by the impact we make on every client’s project; our goal is to make a broader societal impact through our work as well.

Canadian Equality Consulting also focuses on advocacy and government relations. We have advocated for and promoted the national childcare strategy in Canada, we offer free public monthly webinars, and regularly offer different e-course campaigns to fundraise for organizations (they recently offered an e-course on Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation for September 30th; and one on Gender and Sexual Diversity for Pride season; both of which fundraised for national non-profits).

Our goal is to help companies catalyze positive and transformative work by sharing, prioritizing, promoting, and investing in DEI. Workplaces are increasingly embracing diversity, and focusing on equity and inclusion produces many opportunities for employees and employers.

We practice what we preach. Our internal culture celebrates DEI by providing everyone with equal opportunities and a variety of benefits.

Challenges Existing in the Market

The murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the Black Lives Matter movement was felt across Canada. Organizations started to prioritize DEI initiatives. Many of them perceived DEI as a checkbox exercise instead of a continuous journey. Also, there is a consistent lack of resources dedicated to DEI, resulting in DEI internal champions burning out. Businesses did not know where to start and how to drive and sustain those initiatives toward success.

Exceptional Services and Solutions

Our services are unique, and training (both online and offline) is customized, which helps companies see themselves in our offerings. We perform comprehensive DEI assessments including evidence-based qualitative and quantitative surveys, consultations, policy reviews, industry scans, and benchmarking against maturity models. We design and conduct interviews and focus group sessions to capture the specific needs of employees and communities and centre their lived experiences in the work.

Our team also offers in-depth courses and training programs with sustainability models and include pre/post surveys to measure and provide clients with a report on the impact and effectiveness of the training. The training programs focus on some crucial topics, such as inclusive leadership; inclusive language, marketing and communications; power and privilege; bias and bias awareness; advanced DEI fundamentals; Gender Based Analysis Plus; allyship, and organizational transformation.

We believe in maintaining long-term relationships with clients to help them scale their DEI initiatives and support them throughout their DEI journey beyond our initial work together.

We also offer subscription-based membership streams that allow clients to choose the right package according to their needs. This is for the people who are responsible for championing DEI initiatives within an organization. They have access to an entire dashboard, tools, and policy templates to become successful, as well as a supportive community of DEI practitioners and mentoring. We also have an equitable and inclusive leadership certification program in place to help clients spearhead DEI in their organizations.

Intriguing Instances of Client Success

We engaged with one client from a federal government department to conduct a Gender-Based Analysis Plus (GBA+) assessment when Covid first hit. The goal was to look at the impact that the working from home shift made. We uncovered that people were experiencing domestic violence in their homes; struggling due to the right office setup at home, often exacerbated by disabilities; and facing mental health challenges. Leaders also lacked the proper knowledge to rightly communicate and engage their team members during this challenging transition.

We helped the organization create new policies regarding equitable home office stipends, with specific aspects for people with disabilities. People with disabilities were given the opportunity to ask for additional support while maintaining their confidentiality and anonymity. The revised policies also included more flexibility to accommodate changing needs during the rapidly changing transition. We provided leadership coaching to make leaders more empathetic and engaged. After this, we did another assessment to discover the challenges associated with returning work and helped the client solve them. We coached management and handed over a resolution toolkit while protecting staff confidentiality.

Competitive Features

One of the critical factors that differentiate us from others is our team. We have a team from different backgrounds. Every team member specializes in different areas of DEI, including disability and accessibility, anti-racism, Indigenous truth and reconciliation, and sexual diversity. This diverse knowledge enables us to address all client needs.

We don’t specialize in one particular industry and have a wealth of experience working with government at all levels, private sector companies, universities across the world, and non-profits. This provides us with a unique creative lens to DEI work where we can create and test innovative tools and approaches to work in a variety of industries.

We also do not believe in any ‘off-the-shelf’ approaches. To be successful in integrating DEI into an organization, it requires customization to be effective.