Guide for Creating a Diverse and Inclusive Department

The Guide for Creating a Diverse and Inclusive Department offers ways you can increase the levels of diversity, inclusiveness, and equity in eight specific areas of your department or organization. The guide is meant to be a usable, practical tool that can start discussions in your department or organization. It is a document that you can sit down with and work through using the worksheets and checklists provided in the appendix.

Within each section, the guide provides a brief description of the topic area, a list of some of the expected benefits of making your department or organization more diverse or inclusive, “before” and “after” scenarios to help you understand those benefits more clearly, and implementation tips. The appendix contains a checklist for each section as well as some additional tools. The resources section suggests other materials you might find useful in creating or refining some of the documents or processes addressed in the guide.

This document was created by the National Volunteer Workforce Solutions FEMA SAFER grant and the Council for Future Volunteer Firefighters.

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Questions or Feedback about the Guide, Contact: Kaitlin Lutz at klutz@iafc.org.

Guide Resources

The resources in this section are examples meant to illustrate or support each topic area. The IAFC is not endorsing their use, nor is it liable for such use. Always check with your local counsel before adopting or customizing any of this information for your own department.

General

Vision, Mission, Values

Strategic Planning

Communication

Policies and Procedures

Valuing Each Other and Our Community

Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity

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