Angelina Brathwaite

In 2020, Angelina Brathwaite (she/her) saw the barrage of social media support from Brunel clients for equity and awareness initiatives such as Black Lives Matter, mental health awareness, and transgender safety and acceptance. It was during this time that Braithwaite, who now serves as Brunel’s director of strategic client engagement, life sciences, and regional diversity inclusion and belonging leader, was inspired to work with leadership to create a more structured approach to DE&I.

As a global company, Brunel faces a variety of DE&I challenges in its locations. As a result, there is no one-size-fits-all program for each of the organization’s regions. With Brathwaite at the helm, Brunel’s various locations came together to compare solutions and propel each other toward sound DE&I policies and procedures. Brathwaite herself has facilitated several diversity programs, providing insight and solutions across the organization.

Within the North American region, Brathwaite is dedicated to fostering an inclusive workforce and recognizes that diversity, equity and inclusion are crucial for creating a thriving work culture, business and community. To achieve her vision, she employs a variety of practices, including promoting diversity and equity, establishing strategic partnerships and encouraging innovation. She also helped implement unconscious bias training for Brunel’s global leadership team and an e-learning training module for all employees, and she helped establish diversity, inclusion and belonging councils in all regions which evaluate employee feedback to suggest improvements to leadership.

If employees don’t see themselves represented or included, they’ll leave. And then your organization isn’t really diverse at all.

She also encourages organizations to take a critical look at barriers to equitable employment practices such as job description language that creates exclusion, an application process that may create barriers based on accessibility needs, or a corporate culture that creates inherent exclusion. In order to ensure organizations have an effective DE&I program, Brathwaite suggests scrutinizing how and where they’re recruiting to ensure diverse communities and individuals are being reached.

However, hiring a diverse workforce is only a piece of the puzzle. It’s important to continually ensure diverse employees feel included and represented within the organization. Inclusion is a critical step to ensure retention because “if employees don’t see themselves represented or included, they’ll leave. And then your organization isn’t really diverse at all,” she says.