Self-Assessment Tool for Diversity, Inclusion, & Access 2019

What is the DEIA Self-Assessment Tool?

Over the course of two years, the Gap Year Association’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access (DEIA) Committee developed a comprehensive Self-Assessment Tool to encourage Gap Year Provider members of GYA to reflect and improve on their DEIA practices in seven key areas. Participating in the self-assessment will deepen Gap Year Providers’ already-existing commitment to leadership within and evolution of the Gap Year Movement through increasing DEIA practices. Read on to see what it’s all about.

How does it work?

The guided assessment provides members with conversation tools intended to encourage organization-wide reflection. As your team goes through the assessment, you will have room to comment on your current DEIA practices. At the end of the assessment, you will have space to strategize on future ways to improve them. As a way to encourage full reflection and self-honesty among provider organizations, the assessment is optionally anonymous, meaning you are not required to specify the name of your organization while reporting back to GYA. The goal is not to attain a perfect score. Instead the goal is to reflect and to keep improving. The seven categories are as follows, along with their importance.

Student Outreach, Recruitment, Marketing

This section guides reflection on outreach and to whom outreach is intended. It guides your organization to look your brochures, email and social media marketing, and websites to determine marketed barriers to accessibility and inclusion (e.g. Are scholarships as other solutions to access available and marketed?) If program marketing is inviting to people from diverse backgrounds, your program participation will diversify. Diverse and equitable participation in Gap Year programs fosters solidarity-building within the program’s group dynamics, aligning the program with solidarity-building goals in our host communities.

Staff Demographics, Organization Culture and Development

This second section of the self-assessment feeds into the first. If providers have diverse staffing and a culture of growth, including a plurality of perspectives, staff are more likely to market toward and recruit a diverse population of students into Gap Year programs. Society’s evolution begins with DEIA. Evolution of the Gap Year Movement also begins with DEIA.

Staff Training

Staff who are trained in group facilitation, including how to spot and mitigate such challenges as micro-aggressions, are more equipped to lead by example. They’ll show students by example how to be more humble, respectful, and inclusive toward all people, and how to embrace the ideas of people with varying perspectives both within their program group and within their host communities. Cultural competence for program leaders goes beyond competence in their host communities: it includes competency in engaging with people who experience the same home society in different ways.

Funding and Scholarships

There’s a myth going around that Gap Year programs are exclusive, expensive, and inaccessible. Offering funding and scholarships specifically to POC, LGBTQ students, and students of lower SES will increase their access to participate in Gap Year programs. This will decrease the pre-conceived notion that Gap Years are only for people who have privilege. This section of the DEIA Self-Assessment will help your organization continue conversations around privilege in the context of funding and scholarships. It will also guide your organization to reflect on how your team raises funds to support scholarships.

Program Curriculum

This section of the DEIA Self-Assessment Tool focuses on increasing awareness about conscious and unconscious bias within program curricula. This section also covers microaggressions training on a curricular level. Intentional and unintentional microaggressions during a program prevent inclusion for participants whom these target. Training staff and educating participants on microaggressions helps either to prevent them or to give students and leaders tools for how to respond to them when they arise. This section of the Self-Assessment also encourages providers to reflect on their programs’ accessibility related to academic course levels, language requirements, and beyond.

Student Support (Advising, Pre-Departure, Post-Program, Re-Entry)

This part of the assessment guides reflection on the ways in which your organization specifically trains staff to understand the viewpoints of students from systemically underrepresented groups. It will also ask your team to consider your network of alumni and staff assigned to student advisory roles, from pre-departure interactions to on-program counseling. How are providers already supporting their students? How can Gap Year Provider members of GYA continue to support students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and students from lower SES backgrounds?

Program Activities

The final section of the Self-Assessment Tool guides reflection on how your organization creates a group dynamic around cultural competency from the time of pre-departure orientation, throughout your programs, and through post-program activities. How are your staff facilitating inclusive group dynamics? This section also guides reflection on how your organization plans to accommodate homestay inclusion and access for LGBTQ+ students.

GYA’s intentions for this self-assessment

1. We hope that it serves as a catalyst for each GYA organization to assess and prioritize current efforts of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA). We expect the tool will help you identify where your organization can make strategic improvements in the near future.

2. GYA aims to collect the anonymous raw scores and do an initial review of the data to share annually. This will help to create a greater dialogue across organizations and allow us all to support each other in our DEIA initiatives.

Why should GYA Members participate?

Assessing your organization and strategizing for improvement in these areas of DEIA brings your organization into deeper internal alignment with key aspects of your philosophy and professional ethics for your programs. Participation in the Self-Assessment Tool strengthens the aspects of your organization that align with GYA.

Gap Year providers believe in the power of community engagement and the impact of encouraging students to leap out of their comfort zones into growth and transformation. This is the heart of the movement. Also at the heart of the Gap Year Movement is experiential education, which involves reflecting, learning, and planning. How are providers already doing that? How can each reflect and improve? Is deepening DEIA practices out of your comfort zone? That’s okay. Dive in!

GYA’s intention is not to call out organizations who might have a low score in a few sections, nor to hand out gold stars to providers with 5s across the board. GYA intends to help organizations reflect and strategize on DEIA practices. The Self-Assessment Tool serves as a starting point and conversation primer so that your organization can deepen its already-existing DEIA practices. This will bring your organization into deeper alignment with your own mission and with the collective mission of the Gap Year Movement as a whole.

Evolution of the Gap Year Movement begins with DEIA. So dive in with us!