Making a Difference Beyond the GSB
One of the goals for the GSB is taking these efforts off-campus and into society. To that end, the school is providing free public resources, including The Anti-Racism and Allyship 7-Day Journey, a self-paced educational program to inform and guide those seeking to answer the call to action, and a publicly-available class titled Leadership for Society: Race & Power and companion podcast from Professor Brian Lowery.
Another way GSB is leveraging its influence is the GSB Impact Fund, managed by students learning about impact investing: intentional investing for social and environmental returns. This year the fund included a DEI criterion to its investment rubric and added a team focused on “justice,” where investments are directed explicitly to businesses that serve marginalized and disadvantaged communities.
“We understand that we have the resources, the brand, and the influence, and therefore the responsibility to also think about making a positive impact outside of the GSB,” says Hill.
Establishing and Maintaining Accountability
The GSB believes its community will hold it accountable and has established the DEI Council, made up of students, alumni, staff, and faculty, to follow through. The Council monitors progress towards the school’s goals, serves as a communication hub for ideas, and drives initiatives.
The school is also counting on the alumni teams and new student groups to drive accountability, including the GSB First Generation & Low-Income Club, the Native Business Student Association (NBSA), and the Doctoral Association of Black Business Students (DABBS).
Second-year students Isabel Andrade and Valeria Martinez are members of the Student Diversity Committee. Andrade characterizes the students’ role in GSB’s DEI effort by recalling a demonstration held in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Organized by a former member of the Diversity Committee, Dean Levin gave the event the green light amidst the pandemic quarantine, allowing the school to create a platform that met the required health and safety guidelines. “I think that moment really captured for me the sense of potential that I notice in the student body,” Andrade says. “As the demographics of who goes to business school changes, so will the demands that students make on the school.”
“There was so much energy around how do we, as a collective school community, push this energy forward, and how do we make an impact and drive change as business students?” adds Martinez. “There were so many students willing to step in and support and wanting to be educated about what this means for our country, and I felt so proud to be a part of the GSB community in that moment. And that energy has continued to this point.”
Another accountability measure for the school is transparent reporting and public data sharing. Stanford improved data collection and presentation on its Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning Environment (IDEAL) Dashboard, which includes over ten years of longitudinal data.
“A Movement of Movements”
Sarah Soule values this “distributed model” approach instead of centralizing DEI policy work to encourage the collective movement that the various departments, programs, and student and alumni groups have sparked. “What we’re really trying to do is start a movement and sustain a movement, and there’s no better way to sustain a movement than having wins and having people recognize that what they’re doing is actually making an impact. We need a movement of movements.”
“We are still on a learning journey; we are still figuring it out. What I think makes the GSB so special when it comes to this work is we have leadership that is totally committed to this,” adds Simone Hill.
What the 2020 DEI report reveals about Stanford GSB’s efforts is that this is a collaborative process, with students and alumni at the forefront of shaping the GSB’s policies, progress, and goals.
View the full report here.
