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Elena Thurston Elena Thurston

(PART TWO) Employee Resource Groups: A Safe Space for LGBTQ+ People In The Workplace

ERGs are useful for ensuring employees within an organization feel acceptance, camaraderie, and fairness in the workplace.  But, for LGBTQ+ persons, many are seeking more than a sense of belonging—they are seeking a sense of safety.  ERGs are often those safe spaces that make it possible for employees to feel like they can be their authentic selves at work. Joining an organization’s ERG specifically for the LGBTQ+ community & its allies, helps employees to feel safe, to feel seen, and to feel heard.

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Elena Thurston Elena Thurston

What Is Inclusive Leadership?

Is it just buzzwords? Does it impact the way you communicate with your team? Can it help you find solutions among the many challenges of being a leader?

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Elena Thurston Elena Thurston

COS Tragedy Creates Need to Connect with Your Employees

This means that many members of the primary workforce in the US are parents of LGBTQ+ youth. And they are struggling right now. Being a parent is hard enough given the increase in school shootings and other violent acts that target our young people. Add a child whose marginalization is compounded, and you have a whole other set of problems. Parents of LGBTQ+ youth struggle to walk the line of encouraging their children to be true to themselves, while also being safe in a homophobic and transphobic society that is getting increasingly more violent against them.


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Elena Thurston Elena Thurston

How can you measure your allyship?

As a corporate diversity and inclusion consultant, clients often ask me, “How do we measure our allyship? How can we know where we need to grow?” It feels like a grey area, too nuanced to be measured objectively, right? But at the same time, most of us want to ensure we're hitting our allyship potential. We want to be a person who is actively part of the solution and acting as the change we want to see in the world.

For my clients who'd like to understand their baseline knowledge of allyship, I created

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