“I was Doing EDI Before EDI was an Acronym”: EDI From Above and Below

As part of an international research project, my colleagues and I have been investigating how principles of equity, diversion, inclusion (EDI) and belonging are enacted in grassroots arts organizations, and what factors may be enabling or limiting. This commentary discusses findings from interviews that pertain specifically to necessary conditions for fostering true diversity, equity and inclusion, and attempts to offer recommendations in this fraught moment of growing EDI-disavowal. Resistance to EDI initiatives, and to the notion of recognizing one's privilege, is hardly new (Ahmed 2012). This paper falls in a conflicted space within this already conflictual moment, resting on the principle that diversity, equity and inclusion matter while acknowledging the gap between official EDI and the true lived experiences of those who seek to promote equity and inclusion on a regular basis. The interview findings serve to highlight this gap. In 2024, our team conducted semi-structured interviews with representatives from eleven arts and culture organizations in Canada, identifying individuals within those organizations who had developed or been involved with some type of EDI initiative within their organizations. We used purposeful sampling to identify relevant organizations, then employed a snowball sampling approach to help us expand our list of potential participants. Many of these organizations were small and relatively specialized, often focused on local initiatives or very specific aspects of arts and culture development. From the beginning, our research team hypothesized that EDI in grassroots organizations would not look like the EDI found in larger organizations, which has come to resemble a type of EDI industry: professionalized and structured, with its own jargon and labels. This is one of the tensions of conducting research on practices that genuinely promote diversity, inclusion and belonging, while understanding that EDI has come to be understood, at a mainstream level, in a very limited way (Cupples 2024; Nichols and McAuliffe 2025). This tension arose when, early in the research process, we revisited our initial consideration that we would be able to translate our learnings into recommendations for incorporating EDI in organizations, even to the point of creating a toolkit, and realized the challenges we would encounter, echoing the finding that “even well-meaning attempts to produce decolonizing toolkits can too easily reproduce the colonial logic of universality” (Shahjahan et al. 2022 in Cupples 2024, 3). Similarly, one consistent finding in our own research was that any conscious attempt to impose or systematize EDI may, paradoxically, hinder the development of real equity, aligning with previous research suggesting that “the bureaucratization of EDI work—or ‘doing diversity’—has the potential to reduce the problem of institutional injustice to a ‘matter of tick boxes and paper trails’ where the work is no longer about, and even conceals, ongoing struggles for social justice” (Ahmed & Swan 2006, 96, in Nichols and McAuliffe 2025, 7). Several of the organizations were organized in a way that evoked literature on alternative media: such organizations often work hard to be democratic, non-corporate, and non-hierarchical (see Atton 2015; Kozolanka et al. 2012), and vary from those that have a loose organizational hierarchy to ones that have minimal formal structures and almost no fixed roles, with truly collective decision-making. The strongly democratic, egalitarian values embodied by the latter model appeal to those who wish to pursue opportunities for real equity and inclusion, rather than a superficial approach imposed from above, but that model has its own challenges. Creative organizations that maintain a non-structured approach may remain small in scope, risking marginality and limiting their reach. Their existence may be defined partly in response to specific issues and may not be permanent. EDI did not come from … government or from mainstream institutions. It came from working people working on the ground, people who were engaged on the ground in various kinds of you know, in feminist organizations, I′ll tell you that. You know, in … feminist services, in racialized community agencies, you know. It came from those places, people who were working in alternative media. And anytime the work that we do enters the organizing frame of government, governmental institutions, or corporatize (sic) institution, it shifted, it shifts right the understanding, it shifts the foundation of what we are trying to do to fit its own: you know its own frame, right? It it (sic) absorbs it, and it reinterprets it. And what it became all about was recognition, representation … and so in in (sic) that way it lost whatever. It lost its … the actual embeddedness of what it was meant to do, and it became that which was performative. Here, as the interviewee notes, hegemony (Gramsci in Bates 1975) operates even under circumstances where good intentions may be involved. Corporate or governmental organizations take the language and wording of inclusion, and they systematize and institutionalize it. In so doing, they unintentionally remove the essence of true equity, though they may feel self-congratulatory about their efforts, having introduced what seems to them like a revolutionary attempt at inclusion. Such efforts may accidentally contribute to “diversity-as-deficit thinking” in which individuals become “tokenized for their identity, which results in the systemic reduction of their full dignity, worth, and skills to their 'diversity'” (Reed 2021, para. 5, italics in the original). This creates a paradoxical situation where, as Interviewee 9 said: “‘Diversity’ is a four-letter word as far as I'm concerned. ‘Inclusion’ has also kind of been co-opted in the same way as ‘diversity.’ It′s like, ‘Oh! We′ll include you! We′ll invite you! But you have to abide by our rules, and … there′s no actual sharing of power.’ And then, whoever is included, those few people are expected to somehow represent the entire spectrum of diversity beyond their own lived experiences and identities.” EDI becomes a limited way of naming principles that have existed for many years, but were not necessarily named, just felt, understood and valued. The interviews offer a sense of the individualized nature of the solutions that must be provided rather than an organizational, systems approach, as well a recognition of the labor involved. So much diversity work is, in fact, taxing, and this is articulated poignantly by Interviewee 5: “This study is extremely exhausting, it is tiring, it is hard on the spirit. It's hard on the brain. It makes it very difficult to relax at any point in a day like, because you′re constantly thinking about people you′ve left out, or people YOU have excluded. And I think we′ve recognized that we have to let go when it's time to let go.” The interviewee notes that genuine dedication to equity involves continual striving to ensure that everyone is represented and included in relevant initiatives, but at the same time, given the demanding nature of this work, one has to accept finally that it may not always be possible. A genuine attempt to do the best one can becomes more important than ticking boxes off a presumed checklist. Other interviewees speak to this notion, with participant Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui1 summarizing a common theme: “I was doing EDI before EDI was an acronym.” These interviews reflect considerable wisdom but also some inherent challenges: one cannot expand, systematize or operationalize principles that must be foundational to every organization. Interviewee 6 comments, “(Inclusion) is not a scary word, is not a dirty word, but it's also something that doesn′t have a formula. It is something that each space must create.” Is it possible, then, to avoid co-optation in the incorporation of EDI? At the moment, there is a kind of EDI industry, which charges considerable amounts for consulting services and has co-opted the language of EDI—this is a textbook example of how hegemony operates, appearing progressive on the surface, while diluting the notion of EDI. This creates discomfort for those who have always done this work and now find themselves having to write statements, tick boxes and meet quotas, some of which are being evaluated by supervisors with limited lived experience in this area. Even worse, some of these “equity-deserving” individuals are called upon to help meet the quotas in departments, on committees, or in public appearances, perpetuating an emotional tax (Travis and Thorpe-Moscon 2019). Naming can lead to ossification: promoting equity, diversity and inclusion may work best when it is not labeled specifically under this name or similar names (DEI, EDID, JEDI, etc.); Structures and hierarchies may inhibit real diversity and equity: grassroots arts organizations are thoughtful about building teams and (non)structures that resist hierarchies and notions of dominance, and Equity must be a built-in value: efforts to impose EDI as an institutional initiative are unlikely to succeed, as opposed to an organization that has equity and inclusion as founding, permeating values. What, then, is the answer for those who wish to share and implement practices that promote diversity without being extractive and exploitative, as so often tends to occur to innovators in the margins? The examples examined in our interviews demonstrate some guiding principles—resistance to strict hierarchies, commitment to diverse representation, dialog and openness to hearing other voices—but also the difficulty inherent in following these. It is also important to note that each organization has its own ethos and history, but organizations that succeeded in promoting real equity, diversity and inclusion were conscious of the dangers of hierarchy and did their best to reduce hierarchical structures and increase opportunities for everyone′s voices to be heard. Not surprisingly, those organizations had leadership that was as representative as possible of the communities they served, though they were also careful to point out that such diversity could not be assembled in a tokenistic way. Dialog and listening were also important, even though this meant it was not sometimes possible to arrive at quick or simple solutions. Even with these commonalities, each organization had its own personalized solutions which were true to its own vision and sense of integrity. Perhaps, then, organizations can simply use these principles and examples as a starting point for their own truly critical self-examination and interpretation or reinterpretation. Arguably, this study is pushing organizations, as it has pushed scholars in this field, to ask if the naming of EDI has caused more harm than benefit. This is an interrogation that organizations must engage in, but with sincerity, not with the intent of simply refuting principles of genuine diversity and inclusion, nor for the purpose of earning a badge of good citizenship. As our participants note, insincere efforts, or efforts led by those who are not steeped in efforts toward equity, harm progress. Speaking about the inherent tendencies of change that is imposed from above, as opposed to organic change that arises from below, Richard Falk describes globalization as follows: “Just as globalization-from-above tends towards homogeneity and unity, so globalization-from-below tends towards heterogeneity and diversity, even tension and contradiction. This contrast highlights the fundamental difference between top–down hierarchical politics and bottom-up participatory politics. It is not a zero-sum rivalry, but rather one in which the transnational democratic goals are designed to reconcile global market operations with the well-being of peoples and with the carrying capacity of the earth” (Falk 1997, 24) In a similar way, I think of successful EDI as EDI-from-below, rather than from above, but also see the potential for both forms to operate symbiotically. Formalized organizational EDI initiatives are here and at least offer us a pathway for discussion, debate and genuine changes. Through such initiatives, some non-grassroots organizations may have managed to promote more diversity in their hiring, raise awareness about unconscious bias, and open doors that had previously been locked to some employees. Thus, there is and has to be some possibility that EDI from above and EDI from below can come together in meaningful ways, but always without co-optation on the one side and with respect for the very real, longstanding and effective work that has been done on the other. Listening to one another, ruthless self-reflection, and the humility to acknowledge the significance of changes that are needed should be our starting points. I believe we have begun. And, even though institutions are at different stages in their change process, I am not afraid to hope. This commentary draws on interviews conducted by a research team, particularly Dr. Zeinab Farokhi and Evangeline Holtz-Schramek. The research project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The author declares no conflicts of interest.

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