Announcements

The Diversity Committee would like to invite you to participate in a community conversation on employee resource/affinity groups, which are member or employee-led groups based around a shared identity or interest (such as sections within SAA). This event will take place on Thursday, 10 April at 2 PM Eastern on Zoom and is not limited to SAA members.

This conversation is being convened in an effort to ultimately fulfill 2022-2025 Strategic Plan goal 4.1.B: "Pilot and/or create guidance for creating affinity or employee resource groups that bring together archives workers that share cultural commonalities." Before creating such guidance, we would first like to hear from archivists who primarily have experience starting or leading such groups within the workplace, although within professional associations could also be applicable, and we welcome those who have thought about starting such a group.

The following questions will be used to guide this conversation:

1. Are there affinity groups at your institution? If not, is there a reason why?
2. What is their purpose or scope? What kind of things do they do or not do?
3. Where are they located organizationally? Does this unit provide administrative support?
4. Are they funded? Do they have a budget, get reimbursed, or something else?
5. Do they require an executive sponsor? Is there buy-in from organizational leadership?
6. Have there been any changes to affinity groups at your institution this year? 
7. Have you started or led an affinity group? What did you find successful or unsuccessful?
8. Are you thinking about starting or leading one? Is anything stopping you?
9. Why are you interested in supporting affinity groups? What do you find rewarding about them?
10. What guidance from SAA on affinity groups would you find helpful? Has leading an SAA affinity group been helpful at all?

Attendees are welcome to come prepared to address some of these. For example for me:

Duke Health Employee Experience has had affinity groups for five years or less while Duke University Human Resources began organizing ERGs last semester. Duke Health's Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) unit provides administrative support and a budget of $10k managed by each group's treasurer; inclusive leadership training is also offered within Duke Health. My group is an affinity group open to both health system and university faculty and staff and just launched in spring 2024 after the Chief Employee Experience Officer began pushing for a disability-related group to form. Each group is required to have at least one executive sponsor and write a charter, but every group is covered by the same by-laws. So far, the Chief Human Resources Officer has repeatedly expressed their continued support for all affinity group activities and our budgets have not changed, although I am concerned about the latter for next fiscal year as treasurer of my group.

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Zachary Tumlin
Project Archivist
Duke University
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Thank you to everyone who was able to attend this event in April, as well as my fellow subcommittee member Elizabeth Heu. We have now concluded our work and would like to share the following gathered online resources about creating and sustaining employee-led groups:

1. Verbate: The Ultimate Guide to a Successful ERG Program: How to Start, Grow & Scale Employee Resource Groups (+ building the business case for ERGs).
2. MIT: ERG Leadership Guide (2023).
3. Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion: ERG Toolkit for Creating and Sustaining Effective ERGs (2023).
4. Boston College Center for Work and Family Executive Briefing Series: ERGs: Leveraging Community to Enhance Inclusion and Belonging (2024).
5. Society for Human Resources Management: What the DEI Executive Order Means for Employee Resource Groups (2025) and How to Foster Employee Resource Groups That Align with Federal Law.

Although the above resources are not specific to libraries or archives, we did not believe that was necessary, nor did we want to create an original resource along those lines. ERGs began in the private sector/business world, and that remains the direction to look in when it comes to emerging, published guidance on these kinds of groups.