First, HBS will hire its first Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer and support this professional with an appropriately resourced Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Office. The Chief DEI Officer and the DEI Office will primarily focus on transforming HBS internally. They will play a vital role in School-, program-, and unit-led efforts, spur new activities that leverage the School’s constituencies and resources, form strong relationships with Harvard University and with our Allston and Boston neighbors, and foster a shared vision of diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout our community. We will commence a global search for a Chief DEI Officer this fall.

The Chief DEI Officer will report to the highest levels of the School’s leadership and will partner with the faculty leader in the well-established role of Senior Associate Dean for Culture and Community. This leadership model, which pairs a senior staff member with a faculty member in a corresponding Senior Associate Dean role, has proven very effective at HBS. A key undertaking of the pair will be to work with experts in organization change processes and build on best practices and research to devise a process of culture change at HBS that supports our racial equity efforts. We expect that the change will require us to deepen the interpersonal skills of faculty, staff, and students—for instance around self-awareness, listening, inquiry, and perspective taking. (Examples of how these skills will be deployed appear in sections 3 and 5.)

Second, HBS will establish an Initiative focused on advancing racial equity. The new Initiative will serve as the center of gravity for research, course development, convening, and outreach related to race in business and the economy. The ultimate goal of the Initiative will be to enhance the research HBS undertakes, the ideas HBS generates, and the actions we inspire in the world outside of HBS. The Initiative will aim to amplify HBS’s expertise and impact in matters of race much as the Social Enterprise Initiative has transformed the School’s expertise and impact on organizations that drive social change or the HBS Global Initiative has extended the School’s global reach. It will build on the work on race and inequality already in process at HBS, including in other initiatives, as well as research in the rest of Harvard University. Importantly, the Initiative will also be a platform to learn from and build upon the deep expertise on race that exists in universities, businesses, and other institutions throughout the world. One of the Initiative’s critical aims is to make HBS a far more attractive destination for scholars who study race and business.

As an initial investment to support these new structures and their activities, HBS will commit $25 million of internal funding over the next decade and aim to raise additional resources from alumni donors.

The Chief DEI Officer/DEI Office and the new Initiative are cornerstones of our action plan. They will drive many of the actions described below and play a central role in bringing the individual actions together to form a coherent and compelling strategy. And they will be crucial in forming and supporting partnerships with outside organizations and experts—connections that will help HBS to overcome current racial knowledge gaps and networks that don’t reach the desired talent pools. Until the Chief DEI Officer and the Initiative are in place, a small group led by senior HBS leaders will serve in their stead so that progress is not delayed.