As Juno’s founder, I’d like to share my vision for the future of Juno: we’re creating a modern university, an educational institution designed for the coming decades instead of the past 500 years. A place where what you learn is closely connected to a career you can be paid well for, and where graduate job outcomes are ambitious and tracked meticulously. A school that transparently shares that data so that you can calculate your return on investment - before you even apply. An institution that provides so much support to its students and alumni that they can’t help but want to be helpful to future cohorts, and to spread the word. A place where you can be yourself, and be welcomed. An inclusive institution that brings together students from diverse backgrounds, where equity is prioritized.
And for the most part, we’re well on our way to this. Sure, it’ll take time and hard work (as I tweeted about a couple weeks ago). But we have 42 incredible people (with more joining soon!) working hard on this vision every day.
However, there’s one area where I feel we haven’t made enough of an investment in the past, which we are looking to change in 2021 and beyond. It’s an area where we need to invest now, because starting later is actually too late, which is where Higher Ed finds itself today. And that’s our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy and practices at Juno.
You might be a bit surprised to hear that we feel we’ve missed the mark, because we pride ourselves on being an inclusive, welcoming place to learn - and we are quite proud. As I’ve written about before, diversity is at the core of who Juno is, and why we exist. There are lots of initiatives we’ve undertaken over the years to make Juno more inclusive and equitable, such as introducing Needs-Based Scholarships (which are re-launching soon with a broader mandate!) and Income Share Agreements, both serving the goal of removing financial barriers to equity-deserving groups. In 2013, when we originally leased our Toronto campus, we were adamant that the space we chose be barrier-free. When we learned about best practices for inclusive washrooms, we implemented them and took this one step further with a complete renovation in 2020 to make them both inclusive and accessible. We recently implemented closed captioning for all of our workshops and classes. We’ve had a Slackbot that discourages people from using the term “guys” for as long as I can remember, offering helpful alternatives like “friends” and “folks” anytime the term is used.
We’ve taken steps to strengthen EDI within the Juno workplace and in our team culture as well. Our team spans a number of different identities and backgrounds and as a result, we have different perspectives to bring to the table on almost any issue, problem or opportunity. These differing perspectives help us serve students and alumni better, and I truly believe that it is part of what makes Juno so special and unique. We also recognize that there is no way we could know everything - we constantly ask for and welcome ideas and feedback from our students on what we could do better. We’re thoughtful about the feedback that we receive, making plans to implement where we can, and quickly fixing mistakes when we make them, which we inevitably do some of the time.
Before I go on to share our plans around Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in 2021, I want to share an example of a recent screwup that could have been avoided and certainly will be in the future. For the past few years, a number of exercises in our web development courses used a Harry Potter API. In 2020, after J.K. Rowling made a series of transphobic tweets, a student shared feedback that we should remove Harry Potter references from the curriculum. The team agreed and added this to the list of program changes to be made along with an interim disclaimer expressing that Rowling’s beliefs don’t reflect those of Juno. We now recognize that we should have prioritized these changes and made them faster, across all courses where there was Harry Potter content; a disclaimer and promise to get to it was not enough.
This was made worse in late 2020. I wanted to do something nice for the team and decided to host a virtual murder mystery party. I hadn’t heard about the student feedback on the Harry Potter API, and, not thinking about the obvious connection to Rowling and her recent transphobic comments, I made the mistake of selecting a Harry Potter theme for the party. When a photo of the party was shared on Twitter, it made it seem like Juno did not care about the feedback we had previously received, and possibly that we didn’t care about our Trans students and alumni. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I apologize for the impact my decision had on our community. And, I appreciate the courage and honesty of our community members who called us out for our hurtful choices.
As you can see, we’ve gotten to the point where good intentions simply aren’t enough. If we want to build the institution that I imagine so clearly when I close my eyes, we have to start now with a much more deliberate strategy around Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. We will undoubtedly still make mistakes, but hopefully we’ll make fewer, and we’ll certainly work to fix them more quickly in the future.
That’s why we set out to find external expertise to bring our vision for a truly equitable, inclusive and diverse Juno College to life.
Our journey led us to Empowered EDI, a boutique consultancy specialized in EDI strategy and design. We chose to partner with them, not only because of their extensive experience with designing and implementing impactful EDI strategies around the world, but because of the range of voices they bring to the table. They themselves represent and have expertise in almost every single category of diversity representation, and as importantly, focus their work on hearing and centering the experiences and inputs of equity-deserving groups. In their work with us, they will be listening to and amplifying the voices of historically marginalized and underrepresented people - including those who are current students, alumni, former applicants, faculty and staff, and coupling those voices with the quantitative data that will give us a clear picture of where we are today and what we need to do to improve our programs, workplace and experience for all people.
Empowered has recognized from our get-to-know-you sessions that we have some big EDI goals for 2021: we want to increase attraction and enrollment of diverse students, we want to know what leads to experiences of inclusion and equity, and we want to pinpoint what can be improved across the organization and the student experience.
By working with Empowered, we’re going to have the opportunity to get clarity on a few important topics:
- How diverse our workplace, student and alumni population are today
- How inclusive and equitable current students and alumni perceive Juno to be
- The ‘moments of truth’ most important to experiences of inclusion and equity at Juno
- What’s getting in the way of EDI; the barriers to overcome and enablers to amplify
- Actions and strategies to overcome those barriers and achieve our vision
- How to measure and communicate the impact of our work
On the ‘measure and communicate’ side of things, we’ve set a goal to share our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion strategy publicly by the end of 2021. We hope to be able to share a lot more than that, including important learnings from our journey with Empowered throughout the year.
We are kicking off our project with Empowered next week. We’re starting with an Inclusion Mapping Experience, where about 15 people from the Juno team, including some Juno alumni, will be getting together to map the entire student journey. We’ll dive into ‘what is inclusion at Juno?’ and ‘What are our inclusion moments of truth?’
Next, the Empowered team will develop an EDI survey designed to tell us how diverse our students, alumni and team members are, as well as how inclusive and equitable we are across groups and moments of truth. Following the survey, the Empowered team will conduct a number of interviews with different groups and stakeholders at Juno, digging into the factors that influence underrepresented people to drop out of Juno’s pipeline or programs, or to not apply in the first place, and what can be done.
The survey results will be analyzed and then based on all available information, the Empowered team will generate insights on how diverse, equitable and inclusive Juno is as a workplace and as a learning institution. They’ll share what’s working well, what can be improved, and suggestions on what to prioritize. Finally, we’ll move into action planning. We’ll create plans for what we’ll do and when. We’ll determine roles, accountabilities and measurables. And we’ll figure out our approach for measurement and communication.
Everyone on Juno’s Leadership Team, and the company as a whole, is extremely bought in to the importance of this work. We’re excited to be working with the team at Empowered, and we’re also excited for a future where we have a full-time Juno team member who is focused on EDI; we hope that day isn’t too far off.
This is important work, and it can’t be delayed. We’ve already waited too long, but we are moving quickly to take meaningful action. We’re looking forward to updating you later this year with our learnings and sharing the progress we’ve made in ensuring Juno is an inclusive and welcoming space for everyone.