Every year, I get to stand in front of a room full of Rhode Island’s business and nonprofit leaders and watch something quietly wonderful happen. People who might not otherwise cross paths sit down together, share what’s actually working inside their organizations, and leave with a little more insight than they walked in with.
Hosting the annual Providence Business News Diversity Equity and Inclusion Awards Program and Summit has been one of the honors of my career. It’s given me a front-row seat to how much heart Rhode Island’s business community puts into building workplaces where people can thrive.
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So, I want to share something with you, gently and honestly, because I think our community deserves that.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched the room get a little smaller. Not because the work matters less. If anything, it matters more than ever. However, the language we’ve used to talk about this work, diversity, equity, inclusion, has become tangled up in a much larger, much noisier national conversation. Terms that once brought people together to solve real problems have, for some, become loaded.
I’ve heard from enough leaders, quietly and off the record, that they’ve felt unsure of how to engage. Not because they don’t care. Because they weren’t sure where it was safe to stand.
I don’t think that uncertainty serves anyone, and I don’t think it serves Rhode Island.
Name change
This year, we’re renaming the summit. It will now be known as the Inclusive Workplace Summit.
We didn’t make this change to distance ourselves from the work, and we certainly didn’t do this because the mission has changed. We did because we want as many people as possible to feel they have a seat at this table, including the leaders and organizations who’ve felt hesitant to walk through the door in recent years. Inclusive is a word almost everyone can meet us at. It speaks to something universal: the simple, human experience of feeling like you belong. That’s always been what this day was really about.
If a name can lower the walls a little and bring more people back into the room and to common ground in the workplace, then changing it feels like exactly the right thing to do.
What stays the same
I want to be really clear: The substance of this summit isn’t going anywhere. We will still spend the day listening to leaders talk candidly about how they’re building stronger, more connected workplaces, what’s working, what’s hard, how Rhode Island fits into the national discussion and what they wish someone had told them sooner. Those conversations are the reason people keep coming back, and they’re the reason I keep saying yes to hosting this event year after year.
The awards ceremony remains just as meaningful, too. We’ll continue honoring the Rhode Island organizations and individuals who are doing this work with real care and real consistency, because that kind of quiet, sustained effort deserves to be celebrated, not overlooked.
An invitation, not a retreat
I think a lot about the word community, and how its strength has never come from everyone agreeing on the same language. It comes from people showing up for each other anyway. That’s what I hope this new name offers: an open hand instead of a closed door. A reason for a leader who’s been sitting on the sidelines, unsure if this conversation was for them, to come find out that it is.
This isn’t a step back from the work. It’s an effort to meet our community where it is right now, so that more of Rhode Island’s businesses can walk through the door together.
I hope to see you there, whichever door you come through.
Kevin Matta is a fulltime employee of the United Way of Rhode Island and serves as president of Diversity and Inclusion Professionals, a Rhode Island-based nonprofit. He is the host of the annual Inclusive Workplace Summit.
