Current IDEA Action Plan

The CGEn community (leadership and staff) has taken steps to situate Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) as a priority in both service provision and workplace environment. CGEn informs their IDEA practices, by drawing from their host institutions:

To supplement these practices, CGEn has committed to ongoing learning and in recent years, its leadership participated in IDEA training workshops with the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canadian Tri-Agency Funding Council (the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada), as well as the Canada Research Chairs Program.

As a commitment to IDEA, CGEn developed an IDEA Action Plan framework to create accountability for ongoing initiatives and efforts. Examples of these efforts include supporting practices that identify, address, and mitigate systemic biases and barriers, and also ensure fair and equitable recruitment processes that do not discriminate against individuals from the four designated employment equity groups (women, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and racialized people) or people from the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. CGEn also prioritizes initiatives to identify highly-skilled candidates who reflect the diversity of Canadian society.

Two main Action Plan objectives:

1) To actively and collaboratively promote IDEA:

  • Leadership for Equity – In addition to enriching both skill levels and diverse representation that aligns with CFI’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) definitions and policies, CGEn commits to supporting IDEA in the duties, responsibilities and oversight of all levels of its governance.

  • Diversity as Excellence – CGEn delivers IDEA training and adheres to IDEA best practices across partner institutions, in accordance with their IDEA (EDI) Action and Strategic Plans to support a welcoming and inclusive environment for CGEn’s diverse community.

  • Evidence-based Policy Development – CGEn’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee committed to recruiting an IDEA specialist staff member as part of the CGEn central team. CGEn’s IDEA Manager was hired in January 2023.

2) To develop and implement IDEA initiatives in CGEn-supported research:

  • CGEn will work closely with partners and collaborators to develop protocols for inclusive participation of research participants and advocates in disease studies, supported by its infrastructure.

  • CGEn will collaborate with community partners in the selection of species to sequence, and how these sets of data are shared and used.

  • CGEn supports a significant number of local and international projects, but a new focus will be to identify underrepresented areas of research not already studied.

  • CGEn continues to learn from partnering projects, such as the Silent Genomes initiative studying Indigenous populations, the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, the many paediatric populations we support, and the Canadian BioGenome Project.

IDEA in Operations

Research supported by CGEn spans a wide variety of disciplinary areas, extending far beyond the internal research focus of host institutions and locations. In terms of IDEA in the context of CGEn’s operations of the CFI-MSI facility, there is no hierarchy of local institutional users, public vs. private, those in certain disciplines, or those funded by specific agencies (e.g., funders of operations such as CFI, Genome Canada, or provincial governments).

CGEn uses project management best practices to ensure that the general “first come, first served” policy is upheld. To ensure equity in service provision, the queue is modifiable so that smaller projects can be completed without necessarily waiting for very large projects that are ahead in the queue.

IDEA Excellence is Embedded by:

  • ensuring equity in research opportunities (notably in connection with access);

  • creating equitable conditions for research community members with different backgrounds and needs;

  • fostering diversity of vision and critical thinking;

  • creating inclusive teams that promote and value the different voices and ideas of researchers, participant communities, knowledge users, and other research partners.

IDEA Excellence is Exemplified by:

  • responsibility for the observation of, and adherence to, IDEA objectives rests with the Chief Executive Officer;

  • CGEn recruits new staff following IDEA best practices, and develops IDEA training opportunities for staff;

  • providing internal staff/trainee education and covering the costs of some external opportunities.

Updated IDEA Strategic Action Plan

CGEn is developing an updated IDEA Strategic Action Plan that builds on existing IDEA structures and initiatives mentioned above. It is informed by the result of the IDEA survey and other recent learnings. This plan will act as a reference guide and tool to support intentional change in both the workplace and in genomics research, by centring intersectionality, anti-oppression, allyship, and accountability in our actions.

Coming Early 2024.

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