Stop Recruiting for Inclusion. Start Showing Up Locally.

We've spent years watching organizations pour money into DEI training, diverse hiring slates, and employee resource groups—and still wonder why their inclusion numbers barely budge. The uncomfortable truth: most of that effort is aimed inward, at fixing the culture inside the building. But inclusion practices that actually stick are the ones that reach outside the building, into the community. Our thesis is simple and debatable: if your inclusion strategy doesn't include structured, funded community engagement, you're not doing inclusion. You're doing HR.

Why the Internal Focus Fails

We hear the counter-argument all the time: "We need to get our own house in order first." It sounds responsible. It's also a stalling tactic. The Conference Board's 2024 survey of 1,345 U.S. workers found that four-fifths support their organization's DEI efforts, and two-thirds say they'd leave an employer that doesn't take DEI seriously. The appetite is there. So why do so many programs stall? Because they treat inclusion as a series of internal checkboxes—unconscious bias workshops, a diversity dashboard, a pride flag in June. Meanwhile, Harvard Business Review reported that U.S. businesses spend nearly $8 billion a year on diversity training that misses the mark because it neglects employees' fundamental need to feel included. That's not a training problem. That's a proximity problem. You can't feel included by a company that never leaves its campus.

Community Engagement Is the Missing Infrastructure

We define community engagement narrowly and practically: sustained partnerships with local disabled people's organizations, veteran groups, caregiver networks, and neighborhood associations that shape how you hire, design, and deliver. The evidence for this approach is stronger than most people realize. The Job Accommodation Network surveyed 1,425 U.S. employers and found that 61% of needed accommodations cost nothing, and when there was a one-time cost, the median was $300. That's less than a single day of a typical DEI consultant's fee. Yet more than half of those employers—56%—contacted JAN for guidance on retaining an existing employee, not recruiting a new one. That tells us the real inclusion work is retention, and retention is relational. It happens when a disabled employee knows their manager has actually met people from the local independent living center, not just watched a video about them.

The Strongest Counter-Argument—and Why It Still Fails

The best objection we've heard: community engagement is soft, unmeasurable, and distracts from pay equity and representation, which are the hard metrics that matter. Fair point. Pay gaps are real. In the UK, the full-time gender pay gap was 6.9% in April 2025, and the gap widens to 9.1% for full-time workers aged 40 to 49, according to the Office for National Statistics. But here's the thing: only 58% of organizations have conducted equal-pay audits, and just 53% have taken steps to close pay gaps, per The Conference Board. So the "hard metrics" crowd isn't exactly crushing it either. Community engagement doesn't replace pay audits—it creates the political will to do them. When you've built relationships with local advocacy groups, they show up at your annual meeting and ask about your pay gap. That's accountability you can't buy with a dashboard.

What Good Community Engagement Actually Looks Like

We're not talking about volunteer days or charity 5Ks. We mean structural partnerships. The Local Government Association in the UK points to effective practices: informal social interaction, transport support, cognitively accessible communication, and involving people with disabilities in decision-making. Notice none of those are one-off events. They're design principles. Here's a concrete example: a mid-sized employer we know wanted to improve disability hiring. Instead of another training, they partnered with a local disability sports group to co-design their recruitment materials—large print, plain language, and a clear statement that accommodations are available before the interview. They also funded transport stipends for candidates. That's community engagement. The WHO estimates that for every US$1 spent on disability-inclusive prevention and care for noncommunicable diseases, almost US$10 is returned. That's a 10:1 return. You don't get that from a lunch-and-learn.

Three Things We'd Stop Doing Today

We're not saying internal work is worthless. But we are saying it's overfunded relative to external work. Here's what we'd cut or redirect:

• Stop counting ERG membership as a community engagement metric. It's internal. It's necessary but not sufficient.
• Stop treating accommodations as a cost center. JAN's data shows most cost nothing, and 66% of employers rated them very or extremely effective at helping workers perform their jobs.
• Stop running DEI training without a community partner in the room. If your trainer has never worked with a local disability organization, they're guessing.

The counter-argument to this is that community partnerships take time and trust—both scarce. True. But so does rebuilding trust after a discrimination lawsuit. The EEOC filed 13 new systemic discrimination cases in FY2024, for a total of 45 systemic cases representing 22% of its litigation docket. That's a lot of litigation that could have been avoided with a relationship. We'd rather spend $300 on an accommodation and a few hours at a community meeting than $300,000 on lawyers.

What I'd Actually Do

If I ran an inclusion program tomorrow, I'd move 30% of my training budget into a community engagement fund. I'd hire a part-time community liaison—someone with deep local roots, not a DEI consultant—and give them a simple mandate: build relationships with five local organizations representing disabled people, veterans, caregivers, and neurodivergent adults. I'd require every hiring manager to attend at least one community event per quarter. And I'd measure success not by how many workshops we ran, but by how many accommodations we made and how many community partners would vouch for us. That's it. That's the whole strategy. It's not glamorous, but it's the only thing we've seen actually move the needle.

Sources

• The Conference Board (2024) - https://www.conference-board.org/publications/Beyond-Backlash-The-Continued-Benefits-of-Inclusion-at-Work
• Harvard Business Review (2019) - https://hbr.org/2019/12/the-value-of-belonging-at-work
• Job Accommodation Network (JAN) - https://askjan.org/topics/costs.cfm
• UK ONS Gender Pay Gap (2025) - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapintheuk/latest
• Local Government Association (UK) - https://www2.local.gov.uk/case-studies/expanding-opportunities-disabled-people-increase-physical-activity-through-inclusive
• World Health Organization (2023) - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health