The month of March and International Women’s Day is dedicated to the glass-ceiling shattering suffragists, activists, visionaries, entrepreneurs and overall tribalizing women who fought for equality for their generation and future generations. We celebrate this month wholeheartedly as our founder’s work Ingrid Harb, started and continues to be empowering women globally.
Our celebration and work for women goes beyond the month of march, but being a nationally recognized celebration we make the space to honor and reflect on the reality women face today. Not only in America, but across the world.
There are many ways to celebrate this month, and here are some ideas for how to honor the progress the women’s rights movement has made and how to support the goals of the movement today. There are two ways to celebrate this month, as a company and as an individual. for this blog post, we are focusing only on how companies can celebrate, but make sure you check out next week’s post on how you as an individual can contribute to the movement.
Before we share some ideas, make sure you read our previous article on the history behind The History Behind Women’s History Month as well as the theme behind this year’s celebration. For us to comes to no surprise that this year’s theme is “Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope.” An opportunity to honor and celebrate the caregivers, mothers, front liners, and all women who have contributed to the healing of humanity and the planet.
How to Celebrate this month across your organization?
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1. Incorporate the theme into your branding and messaging:
As an organization, it’s important to have a plan on the branding, messaging and articles that showcase and reinforce a culture of inclusion and equity. This year we are working with two themes, “Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope” and for International women’s day it’s time to break the bias. Both themes have activities that your company can leverage. Using this opportunity to ask your employees to be a part of the campaign is a great way to showcase them and elevate their voices.
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2. Support Women’s Non-Profits and Women-led Small-Businesses: Making sure that your organization has women owned vendors as well as supports non-profits that either support the advancement of women, or are lead by women are crucial. If you work for an organization you know that many times bidding for a project as a small businesses is almost near impossible. It is your responsibility as a leader, to change policies and processes within your company to ensure that you are supporting the expansion of women owned businesses. We have seen it with mentors of ours that are executives in companies, and made the space in their busy schedule to learn about our work, services, not only give us advice but made sure that we were introduced to the right people within the organization to grow our work. This is true activism and ally-ship!
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3. Invest in training: this month is a great opportunity to invest in training for your organization, not only for the women within your organization but for everyone- however, making sure that the objective of the training is for the advancement of women. That could be to either understand the history of the movement, how to ally or sponsor women, skills for negotiation, advancement in your role, mental health etc. Before deciding what type of training your organization needs, run a survey or lead virtual meetings with employees to listen and understand what your organization really needs.
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4. Sponsor and promote your Women’s ERG: now this is important, most employee resource groups don’t have the funds to lead women’s history month. Depending on the size of the organization, it will depend if the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is leading this month or if the ERG is. Recently we have had both experiences with our clients on how they provide a budget to the ERG to lead this month across their organization, but often lack the resources to further integrate a marketing campaign outside of the organization, this affecting not only your image as a company but how people view you. Make sure that your ERG is fully supported, and they not only have the resources but support with vendors to bring these experiences to life within your organization. Note, that the leader of the ERG should be compensated for their work, otherwise make sure you have a DE&I team that leads this and involves the ERGs but only for their suggestions and not for their time.
Now there are many other ways of celebrating this month, these are just a few important things to know when planning Women’s History Month. Know that if you are looking for a speaker, we have some of the top speakers in the industry, head over to our website notainclusion.com and reach out to us with any questions!
Sincerely,
Ingrid Harb.