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Categories Blog Diversity Equity Inclusion
Recent Posts How Great Leaders Approach Diversity The Hidden Story Behind Your Organization’s DEI Data Book Review: The Disordered Cosmos Discovering Diversity Success: 10 Questions to Ask Yourself DEI is Personal: My Story of Family, Kenya, and a Career
DEI is Personal: My Story of Family, Kenya, and a Career Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
By Anne Loehr, Executive Vice President
Diversity has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. We just never called it diversity when I was growing up. But it was there all along. It started with being the youngest of eight children; five brothers and two sisters, all of whom are very different. Add in their friends and you get the picture: a bustling, dynamic house with a never-ending, revolving door of high school and college students. As the youngest, I spent a lot of time observing the differences and similarities of my siblings and their friends, trying to understand what made each person tick. My early memories start with having Rotary Youth Exchange students in our house, which is when where an American high school student lives in another country for a year, while a student from that country lives in an American home for the same year. Over the years, we had students from Sweden, Belgium, Japan, Bolivia and other countries living with us, each bringing new perspectives on culture, language, food and traditions to my world. I hung out with a fairly international crowd in college with friends from Argentina, Mexico, France and Kenya. After falling in love with my Kenyan friend, we got married in an international wedding with his family coming from India, Canada and Kenya to help celebrate. I didn’t think much of it at the time; however, someone recently said to me, “You married a Kenyan two decades ago?! That just wasn’t done back then.” Well, we did it. And we also moved to Kenya to live and work. It was only supposed to be for two years; we stayed for 12 years instead. My grandmother referred to Africa as the dark continent; that should’ve warned me of what was to come. I hadn’t seen real racism growing up, but I saw it firsthand in Kenya. I witnessed how people of different skin colors treated each other on a daily basis. I noticed how people expected