Category: Executive Director ISDI

Here, ISDI announces the launch of its 2026 NW Diversity Learning Series, beginning with a March 11 workshop titled “Navigating Conflicting Mindsets: Engaging Skillfully in Dialogue Across Divides,” which focuses on fostering inclusion, safety, belonging, and healthy workplace relationships amid uncertainty and differing viewpoints. The interactive session, led by dialogue and conflict resolution expert Dr. David Campt, will guide participants in building constructive dialogue skills, emphasizing connection before persuasion, exploring the values and experiences behind disagreements, recognizing trade-offs in deeply held beliefs, and using personal storytelling to transform confrontational exchanges into reflective conversations. The workshop invites attendees to co-create a meaningful dialogue space and offers multiple registration options, including sponsor, subscriber, and single-session access, with sliding scale pricing and accessibility accommodations available upon request.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams reflects on how ISDI met the intensifying DEI pushback of 2025 not by retreating, but by strengthening the skills, community, and infrastructure needed to sustain inclusion work under pressure. Drawing on ISDI’s 2025 outcomes, 27 years of the Northwest Diversity Learning Series, 10 years as ISDI, and broad engagement across workshops, special events, and practitioner development, he describes how ISDI used the Aspen Institute’s Better Arguments framework to build practical capacity for navigating conflict with rigor, context, and relationship-centered leadership.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams, Executive Director for the ISDI, reflects on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ahead of MLK Day on January 19, 2026, and connects King’s call for courageous, collective struggle to ISDI’s decade of work advancing equity, dignity, and belonging. He highlights ISDI’s long-standing Northwest Diversity Learning Series as a space where leaders confront hard truths, build practical skills, and sustain the uncomfortable but necessary work of naming inequity and turning values into action.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams steps into his new role as Executive Director of the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion (ISDI) and names what he’s hearing, loudly and consistently, from the people doing DEI and belonging work right now: they’re committed, they’re still showing up, and they are exhausted. Drawing from an ISDI survey shaping the 2026 Northwest Diversity Learning Series (and a scan of practitioner discussion spaces), he surfaces a clear set of needs: real encouragement (not platitudes), calm and current legal guidance, evidence-based practices that actually work, sustainable ways to do the work without sacrificing health, and strategies people can act on immediately.