Academic Travel Abroad

2022 JEDI Annual Review

Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Action Plan

ATA’s  Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (JEDI) Action Plan consists of specific long-term goals to work towards transforming our workplace, programs, and industries to be more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive. 

Every employee contributes to this work, and at the end of every year we come together as an organization to evaluate our progress. Department leaders’ progress reports and goals for the future are evaluated anonymously by volunteers at every level of the organization before being published in preparation for the next year’s work. After two years of hard work, intensive review, and lessons learned, we expanded the scope of our work, originally called the Anti-Racist Action Plan.

The results of our Annual Review, both looking back at our progress in 2022 and planning for 2023, are summarized below.

What We Accomplished in 2022 

Actions to Transform our Workplace 

  • We evaluated and refocused our recruiting and hiring efforts, including an emphasis on diverse identities beyond racial identities. Each new position was advertised to a diverse community of applicants through new platforms, resulting in a larger and more diverse applicant pool.
  • We provided better employee support through an updated Staff Handbook, a revamped mentorship program, and an intentional incorporation of JEDI themes in new staff training.
  • We completed a compensation audit and made progress on updating staff salaries to be equitable across the organization and fair within our industries.
  • We formalized the structure of our JEDI work by creating a new part-time paid JEDI Coordinator position, hired from within our staff.  

Actions to Transform our Programs 

  • We began the work of assessing and updating our online presence for accessibility.  
  • We changed the way we talk about and represent our programs in our marketing materials, avoiding the use of “diversity” to mean non-white individuals or groups, and addressing intersectionality so that all of our travelers and students can feel represented in our materials.   
  • Our Programming team worked with its travel partners to include more voices, especially underrepresented perspectives in each host country, in the planning and implementation of our tours, and we pitched new tour ideas that focus on JEDI themes. 
  • CET Academic Programs, our study abroad division, continued its Curriculum Review project—a 3-year initiative in which CET reviews all syllabi and field-based/co-curricular components—with a view to identify and interrogate structures of difference, power, and equity. We also updated how we gather and analyze student demographic data to provide a statistical foundation for our work to increase enrollment of underrepresented groups, and we changed the titles and applications of our student scholarships to better reflect our goals of increasing study abroad access to underrepresented groups. 

Actions to Transform our Industries 

  • Across all of our departments, we audited many of our partners and vendors with an eye to our JEDI values. We asked them about their own JEDI efforts and either learned from them, encouraged them to do better, or found a different vendor.  
  • In the spring, we hosted a student through the DC Public Schools’ Practicum in Hospitality Services, including developing a curriculum and supporting them through this practicum experience. 
  • We continued our financial and in-kind support of the Fund for Education Abroad (FEA)—an organization focused on providing scholarships and ongoing support to students who are underrepresented among the U.S. study abroad population.  

Planning for 2023

Much of our work in 2022 helped us make progress on long-term goals which we will continue into 2023. Here are some initiatives and goals we will focus on this year:  

Actions to Transform our Workplace 

  • Increase and diversify our sponsored community service opportunities for employees.  
  • Use employee engagement surveys to solicit feedback from employees on their ideas and experiences at ATA. 
  • Continue to incorporate JEDI topics into staff training, with a particular emphasis on our staff based outside the US.  

Actions to Transform our Programs 

  • Continue our work to evaluate accessibility in the technology we use to market and implement our programs, and make those platforms more accessible as needed.  
  • Continue to seek out and highlight underrepresented voices on our tours and pre-tour reading lists, and pitch new tours which center BIPOC perspectives.
  • CET will highlight identity-related resources and JEDI-themed content in our student marketing, pre-departure resources, and advising materials. We will increase our efforts to partner with HBCUs, other minority-serving institutions, and multicultural centers at traditionally white institutions. We will also evaluate our admissions criteria and implement changes that will widen our applicant pool and remove enrollment barriers.  

Actions to Transform our Industries 

  • Create a system for assessing new vendors for JEDI compatibility, and continue to review current vendor relationships. 
  • Continue our financial and in-kind support of the Fund for Education Abroad (FEA). 
  • Continue to publicly share our JEDI Action Plan progress reports and JEDI-related topics in newsletters and on our websites.

In Summary 

Of 40 goals we identified for 2022, 8 were complete, 20 had significant progress (but still considered incomplete), 10 were still in the beginning stages, and 2 were incomplete. Many goals shifted and refocused over the course of the year as we continued to settle into the reality of our post-COVID world.  We are proud of the progress we’ve made, and of all that we’ve learned in the past year. We hope that this progress demonstrates a mindset shift, where each of us embed our values of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion into the core of what we do at ATA, instead of seeing JEDI work as a box to check once a year.   

35 goals have been identified for 2023, many of which are continuations of 2022 (and even some 2021) goals. This represents our commitment to the long-term nature of this work and the understanding that we’re running a marathon, not a sprint. We hope you’ll run with us into 2023.