Brett Boadway—Chief Operating Officer, IBAO
Looking across IBAO’s messaging of who we are, you’ll find long standing statements like “representing Ontario consumers”, “direct connection to Ontario consumers” and “uniquely positioned to represent the best interests of our customers”.
As an association, we represent brokers from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, whose clients form a plurality of Ontario citizens. It’s our responsibility to ensure we’re representing the broad, multiethnic, multicultural society that makes this province and country special.
And…
As a professional association, representing both our members and their clients’ interests, increasing our approach to equality, diversity and inclusion is a must. From our vantage point, ownership and leadership demographics across brokerages are not as diverse as the populations we serve. This could imply an equal opportunity issue. Volunteers, event attendees and brokers in a position of industry influence are relatively homogeneous. This could imply an inclusion issue.
IBAO is well positioned to uplift our collective workforce and communities through dialogue, education and engagement, to evolve our businesses and better serve a diverse marketplace.
There’s a lot to learn and a lot to share. IBAO is well positioned to uplift our collective workforce and communities through dialogue, education and engagement, to evolve our businesses and better serve a diverse marketplace.
Outside the internal strategies we’re putting in place and the community and corporate support we’re planning, we’re curating key resources for your businesses like policies and procedures, education and training, codes of conduct and best practices.
It’s our urgent imperative to be both deliberate and explicit in our EDI policies and resultant actions. The events of this year have brought increased attention to conversations that should have been addressed sooner—we’re inspired by brokerages who are leading the way, and we’re eager to help impact the broader channel any way we can.