Preface: A Message from Anima Leadership

It is our pleasure to partner with Branksome Hall leadership in sharing a summary of key findings and recommendations from the original DEI audit report submitted to the school in the fall 2022.

With decades of experience in the field of DEI, our team at Anima Leadership believes that the Branksome Hall community should be proud to have concluded such an ambitious systems review of DEI at the school. To our knowledge, no school in the independent or public sector has undertaken such a thorough inquiry into its organization or community before. It is a sector-defining initiative, to say the least!

Our audit work addressed several segments of the climate at Branksome Hall:

• Student and Alum Experiences, comprised of three independent audits:

- Students’ experiences from Grades 7-12

- Students’ experiences from JK-Grade 6 completed by parents

- Alums’ experiences

• Employee Experiences

• As well as key organizational practices, an audit of Branksome Hall’s systems including human resources, admissions, and marketing and communications.

In alignment with the Anima approach, the DEI audit utilized a strengths-based framework. We named what Branksome Hall was already doing well in its DEI practices before identifying gaps and opportunities in policies and practices so the school could strategically target its efforts. The recommendations were generated from a combination of survey results, focus groups, interviews, observations and document review. We then compared the data against best practices research and used Anima’s DEI expertise as the filter to make meaning, synthesize and prioritize issues.

The final product was really 5-reports-in-1. Given the sheer volume of data, it was therefore necessary, from an accessibility and readability perspective, for Branksome Hall to create this summary and action plan—a valuable process, in and of itself, in gaining a deeper understanding of audit findings. This process was fully supported by the Anima team.

What is important to put into context is that audits are a relatively new phenomenon in the field of DEI, with most organizations never having conducted one. While there is limited directly comparable data from the independent school sector specifically, we do know that many of the issues identified are common to organizations across all sectors.

The audit findings were classified into several notable themes to help Branksome Hall leadership and the community understand the research results and determine how to prioritize as well as best address the key issues identified. Our team made a number of recommendations that have the potential to shape the school’s directions for many years to come.

It is important to understand that our recommendations are based on DEI best practices research and knowledge. These recommendations are not meant to be an action plan, but better understood as goals to achieve through the development of goal-specific processes in collaboration with key stakeholders across the community.

Our Anima team suggested the following broad-based implementation steps:

1. Communicate, process and prioritize recommendations, identifying key goals the school wants to achieve in what order and why.

2. Develop goal-specific action plans with metrics and timelines, determining what supports and resources are needed.

3. Seek input from Branksome stakeholders and update as part of the overall DEI process already underway.

4. Measure progress regularly to assess successes and challenges in implementing recommendations, and adjust accordingly.

Branksome Hall DEI Audit

Conducted by Anima Leadership

A COMPASSIONATE APPROACH TO RACIAL JUSTICE

We encouraged Branksome Hall to review the audit findings and prioritize recommendations with such a view, identifying short-term and longer-term issues and developing action plans accordingly. The leadership team has done so with this summary and action plan in various ways.

We look forward to meeting members of the community at our presentations this Spring, at which time we will join members of Branksome Hall leadership to go deeper into the data and address any questions you may have about the audit, findings and recommendations.

We at Anima Leadership wish the Branksome Hall leadership and community the greatest success as it continues its journey to make the school diverse, equitable and inclusive to all.

It has been a very rewarding experience working with you.

Sincerely,

21 MONTHS were spent working on the project

10 RESEARCHERS worked on the DEI audit team

16 FOCUS GROUPS were held with community members

196 Surveys Completed 73% Response Rate

GRADES

7 -

Shakil Choudhury Chief Visionary Officer and Project Lead Anima Leadership

623 Surveys Completed 83% Response Rate

EMPLOYEES 188 Surveys Completed 9% Response Rate

ALUMS