With support from a UW Medicine Well-Being Grant, we recently brought together nearly 30 people from around our department for a half-day retreat focused on EDI initiatives. With this Well-Being Grant, we hoped to create meaningful cross-departmental connections which we see as a critical component for achieving sustainable progress in our equity and inclusion work.

By bringing together members of various EDI Committees who don’t routinely work together, we were able to hear what each group is doing and learn about their individual successes and challenges. Many participants said the highlight of the retreat was hearing from each committee and thinking about new ideas to take back to their teams. In the second half of the retreat, we organized “fishbowl conversations” — a technique that enables a large group to contribute to a single conversation — which many participants enjoyed and appreciated. One participant said, “The fishbowl was a good way to learn about people’s perspectives on these important topics and also modeled how to have conversations around these issues.” Given the success of these conversations, we plan to use this model at more department events in the coming year.

The retreat brought together 11 faculty, 16 staff, and one resident from over a dozen different departmental units. In our post-event survey, 100% of the responses agreed or strongly agreed the retreat met the goal of learning about EDI efforts throughout the department, and the vast majority agreed that it met our goal of inspiring and rejuvenating each other and our EDI efforts.