Listening Within: ACM Employees and Leaders Articulate the Need for a More Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Organization

Events in 2020 created a moment of reckoning and a movement centered on and illuminating deeply ingrained patterns, processes, and prejudices of inequity and injustice faced by generations of Black Americans. Almost no institution was immune to probing questions concerning diversity, inclusion, and equity. Many professional membership organizations were also being asked to address the injustices manifested in their practices and traditions. Within ACM, however, the insider perspectives on this issue were not always clear. And so, from April until August 2021 I carried out research to determine whether ACM members, volunteers, staff and external experts believed that ACM should and could become a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable organization. This research is captured in a report entitled: All the Voices: Doing the Work to Improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion throughout ACM.