Inclusion to Innovation Summit focuses on reconciliation, resiliency

The fourth annual Inclusion to Innovation Summit will be a little different this year, thanks to COVID-19, but organizers say the summit is more important than ever. 

“We feel like this year, more than ever – when we’re facing COVID, we’re facing this national unrest – we think about how we leverage the work in an organization. It’s even more important to give folks who are responsible for leading these efforts a space where they can come together and just talk about the work,” said Willette Burnham-Williams, Ph.D., MUSC chief equity officer, who is chairing the summit planning committee along with Anton Gunn, chief diversity officer for MUSC Charleston and executive director of community health innovation.

 

The summit provides a space for people leading or allied with diversity efforts in their workplaces to come together and discuss their shared goals and challenges. Burnham-Williams said such meetings are great places for enthusiastic and energetic conversations because the participants don’t have to start from the beginning and explain the “why” of their work – why having a doctor or teacher of the same race can mean better outcomes, why it's important to ensure minorities are included in clinical trials or why Blacks may be mistrustful of the medical establishment. 

The theme of this year’s completely virtual event is “Reconciliation, Resiliency and the Path Forward.” It will feature three keynote speakers and five breakout workshops, including a morning keynote address by the Rev. Nontombi Naomi Tutu, associate rector at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, California. She is the daughter of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his work against apartheid in South Africa.

Tutu said she will speak to the group about the strength of diversity and inclusion.

“The main message is that our strength, our future, our hope lies in being able to be as inclusive as possible at all layers of society,” she said. “Inclusion and diversity is a way that allows us not simply to survive but to thrive as a community, whether the community we’re talking about is a university, a city, the whole country or the whole world, it is clear that diversity is a source of life.”

“Are we going to accept that we cannot truly move forward until we are reconciled with our history, or are we going to keep on trying to vilify those who say we cannot heal unless we face the truth?”

Rev. Nontombi Naomi Tutu

Particularly this year, the U.S. seems to be at a crossroads. 

“We are in a place where there is a choice of paths. There is a choice to really come to grips with the history of the United States, the history of the dispossession of the indigenous people of this country, the history of slavery, the history of Jim Crow, the ways in which the 13th Amendment set the line for the cradle to the prison pipeline that we see. That is a choice we can make. And yes, this country can also make the choice to ignore all that history,” she said.

“Are we going to accept that we cannot truly move forward until we are reconciled with our history, or are we going to keep on trying to vilify those who say we cannot heal unless we face the truth?” she added.

Burnham-Williams said she is sometimes taken aback by people who don’t want to acknowledge history, whether at the national level or here in Charleston. She said it’s important to own our nation’s history without wallowing in it.

“Focus on a future that lets you be something very different from the nation, the state and the community that we were,” she said.

As MUSC continues its journey of inclusivity, Burnham-Williams explained that the journey means allowing for “what you don’t know that you don’t know.” That could mean understanding policies or procedures that unintentionally have a negative effect on minorities or realizing that all humans carry a certain amount of bias.

Burnham-Williams said organizers are always happy if the summit finds a national audience, but the target audience is right here.

“Our primary audience has always been the MUSC family. While we want this to work for strategists, we want this to really, really resonate within the MUSC community,” she said. To that end, there is a discount for MUSC employees, and MUSC students can attend for free. And a benefit of this year’s summit being forced into a virtual format is that the sessions will be available online for attendees for one year after the event.

Burnham-Williams said she’s hopeful the virtual format will allow more people to attend.