Military Veterans Launch E-Learning Technology to Accelerate Diversity and Inclusion
Twelve veterans have come together to found a mobile app called “diversitypop” to address the issues of diversity and inclusion, racial equality and political uncertainty. The co-workers range from a Rhodes Scholar to West Point and Naval Academy graduates, according to a media release.
“When America’s service academy graduates were trained for diversity and inclusion in the 1980’s, they did so via immersive experiences and intense interactions with people not like themselves,” said Drew Bartkiewicz, one of the 12 co-founders of diversitypop, who developed product inspiration from his tenure at salesforce.com in the early 2000s. “They learned at a young age that ‘inclusion was an infusion,’ not only to the mind of the individual but to the effectiveness of the team itself. And now over thirty years later, we formed a company to deliver that learning experience and repeatable diversity training enabled with the scalability of technology.”
The new program is built for organizations in order to deliver diversity training to staff on the go, and incorporates repeatable digital experiences that mirror the inclusivity experience that the team of twelve experienced three decades ago.
“The diversitypop mobile app and underlying technology apply algorithms and personalization, leveraging information sciences, “clean” artificial intelligence, and cognitive learning methods that are increasingly the epicenter of modern learning. The diversitypop goal is to train the brain for diversity and inclusion without the friction and slowness of traditional methods,” as stated in the release.
The company will make the technology available to high schools at no cost. Businesses can do a trial run of the app free of charge for 30 days.
The app does not need personal identity information, as social media does, and works to develop and build on personal diversity and inclusion skills through:
Smart notifications on the new aspects of the diversity wheel, an academic area of study that has emerged as a discovery tool to see and live diversity more broadly
Personalized content about cultures, race, gender, disabilities, and a range of other topics
Interactive PopScores that gamify and offer tools to grow inclusion instincts
Administrative level to allow DEI leaders to customize diversitypop to their goals and measurements
Diversity Continual Learning
“To increase my knowledge and appreciation of people not like me, is to help me understand and appreciate what’s unique about me.
We should make that e-learning as accessible to as many minds as possible.”
– Roy E. Alston, PhD, co-founder
Check out this link: www.kmaland.com/tncms/asset/editorial/edddf6f0-2373-11eb-972f-0b5cd0551dce
“If we can use technology to watch what we eat, workout on smart biometric equipment, meditate, or hail a rideshare, then we can surely deploy software to grow our capacities to better understand and respect people different than ourselves,” said Nana Adae, a Navy veteran, co-founder and senior executive in financial services. “diversitypop is an intelligent and anonymous platform for any person in any organization to tap the diversity multiples in their midst.”
The 12 veterans come from a variety of backgrounds and include: Nana Adae, Albert Alba, Roy E. Alston PhD, Drew Bartkiewicz, Steven B. Choi, Everton Cranston, Col. Gregory D. Gadson, Adolphus Gwynn, Carlos Perez, Patrice Sutherland, John Tien and Jim Ziegler.