Diversity Forums

Diversity Forums is a project of 20 Next Generation Leadership Fellows, in association with the Barat Education Foundation. We enhance the success of business, government and civic organizations by facilitating constructive dialogue that will help them tap the potential of our diverse society.

Diversity Forum panelists are accomplished leaders from varied professional and cultural backgrounds who model discussion on controversial social issues and challenge their audiences to broaden their thinking on divisive questions about race, class, gender, globalization, and opportunity in our society.

In 1997, the Rockefeller Foundation created Next Generation Leadership, a network of leaders from diverse communities and professional backgrounds from across the United States.

Over the next five years, the Foundation brought together 120 such leaders to discuss how to strengthen American democracy. Through domestic and international site visits, seminars and probing group discussions, fellowship participants reviewed some of the major social, economic, cultural and technological divisions in American society, and sought new and creative approaches to overcoming them.

A group of these leaders decided that candid and constructive discussion on these issues is an important first step in the search for solutions. Having been trained to facilitate conversations that generate charged or polarized reactions, we now seek to provide opportunities for our colleagues in companies, government agencies, civic and academic institutions to have such discussions and to include diverse perspectives in their approaches to bridging divisions in our society.

Barat Education Foundation, Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and the International Business Ethics Institute join to create Ethics Curriculum

One of the results of the Diversity Forums initiative is a newly formed partnership between the Barat Education Foundation, Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and the International Business Ethics Institute to develop and deliver to post-graduate adult students a curriculum on business ethics. The goal of this program is to expand the students’ understanding of the role of the corporation in today’s global society and prepare these future managers and business leaders on how to effectively anticipate and resolve the most prevalent and important ethics issues facing businesses and non-profit organizations.

The first course will be delivered by the faculties of IBEI and LFGSM this summer at the new campus of the Lake Forest
Graduate School of Management. Barat alumni who are interested in learning more about the LFGSM business programs and this course should contact Amy Gregozeski by e-mail here, or call 847-234-5005.

For additional information, please visit www.diversity-forums.org.