Spotlight Series: How Dan Egol is Building a Community that Empowers Organizations with their DEI Initiatives
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Here at JTC, we frequently talk about small businesses doing inspiring work in building and growing DEI initiatives in organizations to ultimately increase diversity. For this month’s Spotlight, I am super excited to present to you Dan Egol, the Executive Director and Co-founder at IDEAS Generation.
Dan is a graduate of the Yale School of Management and comes with a wealth of knowledge and expertise in leading diversity and inclusion initiatives. With IDEAS Generation (IG) Dan is equipping leaders, communities, and society with the resources to bridge the divides of our time and advance social change through inclusion, diversity, equity, access, and social justice.
Team JTC: How was your company founded and how did you get started in DEI work and increasing diversity?
Dan: IDEAS Generation (IG) was co-founded by three former colleagues at Cook Ross, a DEI consulting firm in Silver Spring, Maryland. As Millennials in a space dominated by Boomers and Generation X’ers, co-founders Hannah Mack, Minjon Tholen, and I came together to form an organization that would connect, support, and elevate the next generation of practitioners and leaders in the sector. What began as a somewhat self-serving desire to connect with other emerging leaders in the DEI space soon gave way to the incorporation of a formal 501(c)3 nonprofit. Over the course of our collective 17 years at Cook Ross supporting dozens of organizations around the globe to advance DEI, there were a few gaps in the field that IG now addresses. First, practitioners and leaders in this sector are often isolated from one another and other potential change agents within their organizations, due to structural silos and the absence of any convening body at the field level. Secondly, many of the approaches employed by current practitioners simply do not resonate with the largest. Initiatives that focus only on one-off training, compliance, or locate this work solely under HR are both ineffective and uninspiring given the enormity of systemic issues our generations are inheriting. Third, there are few professional onramps for people who wish to have a career in IDEAS work, such as absent degree programs, apprenticeships, and structured mentorship opportunities. There are limited ways to land a job in the IDEAS space, except for a few certificate programs that we would argue are high cost and low value. Lastly, many organizations who wish to advance IDEAS in their organizations are priced out of support in the current market, whether that support is an internal hire or external consultants. Here at IG, we aim to bridge these gaps, empowering organizations to advance DEI.
Team JTC: Tell us a little bit about who you are and why you are in this work.
Dan: I was raised in a multicultural home with strong ties to both Cuba and Israel. As a result of having connections to multiple countries, languages, and ways of being in the world, I grew up passionate about social justice, community building, and global affairs. Though I did not have a language for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the time, my path towards this work began after I visited my Cuban family in Havana for the first time in 2004. Since this initial visit, changes in US family travel policy prevented me from accessing my family there for eight years. This foundational experience taught me that an inability to appreciate and navigate diversity and cultural differences with nuance and humility could divide communities. I wanted to contribute to fostering more progressive and enduring connections amongst and between different groups of people, so I went on to study political science and sociology at Middlebury College. While studying, I worked on campus at the college admissions office, the Americans with Disabilities Act Office, and a research center focused on the comparative study of race and ethnicity. These experiences, reinforced by internships at the Smithsonian American History Museum, the Washington Office on Latin America, and the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project, led me to Cook Ross where my formal profession in DEI or IDEAS (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access, Social Justice as we call it) began.
Team JTC: Whom are you serving through your work?
Dan: IDEAS Generation’s work has two main constituent groups. The first is individual Millennial and Gen-Z leaders who participate in several community and leadership development offerings, including a Slack channel with over 800 such leaders across the globe, and freely available healing circles – which use trauma-informed and somatic practices to support mental health and wellbeing of those in the field, and our half-year IDEAS Roundtable Program. The second constituent group consists of non-profits and social enterprises that are seeking comprehensive IDEAS-centered organizational transformation.
Team JTC: How are you increasing representation? How does your organization help companies increase diversity?
Dan: Representation, while important, is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of IDEAS work. Representation matters because the diversity of perspectives, identities, and experiences directly shape how decisions are made and the impact that they have. However, representation absent systems and cultures that are also inclusive, equitable, and accessible are necessary but insufficient to foster justice for all, which is our goal. We help our partners by examining what each facet of the IDEAS framework means for them in their work and community context. If companies see DEI or IDEAS efforts as solely connected to their team composition rather than as an ethos that extends to everything they do - from marketing, to finance, program/product development, governance, etc., then we are not positioning anyone to foster or sustain the changes we need. For example, fictional organization X may have a representatively diverse team at all levels of the company. But if organization X’s primary business is polluting the environment, our focus should not be on the composition of its leadership team but rather on the impact the substance of their work has on the planet. Or, in a less extreme example, the identities of a given team may be diverse in some way, but if meeting times or technology do not allow everyone to access critical decision-making spaces, the potential impact of that representation immediately dissipates. As such, IG employs intergenerational, inter-sectionally diverse project teams and uses the diversity of skill sets, worldviews, identities, and lived experience to holistically address the entirety of a client partner’s system in terms of inclusion, diversity, equity, access, and social justice.
Team JTC: What products/services are you selling to employers to help them do this work? How can people get in contact with you?
Dan: As a nonprofit, we offer some free programming and services, including access to our Slack Channel, Plenaries, Healing Circles, and Fireside Chats. These offerings are available to anyone free of charge, so long as they respect and uphold our community values. For individual leaders, we also offer our IDEAS Roundtables Program, which is a cohort-based learning experience for anyone seeking to advance IDEAS within their organization. The program is a combination of content delivery, community building, and facilitated conversations to workshop real-time IDEAS challenges that participants bring to the group. To date, over 100+ leaders have completed the program, which has a pay-as-you-can registration structure. We have partnered with 21 organizations across the United States, usually in six-month to two-year agreements. Partnerships entail a range of support and services, including organizational assessments, leadership coaching, developing and practicing skills everyone needs to advance and sustain this work. If you are interested to learn more about our programs and services, please reach send us an email at info@ideasgeneration.org.
