Bring as many perspectives as possible into decision making
Why it’s important to us
We’re making decisions that affect lots of people across our region. We believe that having a wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds at the table makes for better decisions.
We work to cultivate this variety in a lot of ways—recruiting and engaging people who have a wide range of background, skills and life experiences and continually building our understanding of the region in which we work so that we can keep adding to our knowledge and network.
How we’re doing
We are intentional about considering the skills, experiences and perspectives of the people who work at Bush or participate in decision-making so that we can understand how we are doing at outreach and recruitment.
For job openings on our staff, we share the opportunity with as many people as possible. We post the openings on a variety of websites and forums and invite anyone to share the opportunity with their own networks. We want a wide range of qualified applicants so that we can select individuals that will help us best serve a very diverse region.
When we look for board candidates, we cast a wide net and consider whether a candidate adds perspectives and needed expertise to our board. We also seek people who can bring a range of perspectives to our board based on their own education, professional and life experiences, including things like poverty, immigration, diversity of political thought or experience with a disability. Every five years we do a deep look at what perspectives are missing and create a plan to guide our board member cultivation efforts.
Across both board and staff, we have focused a lot on geographic diversity in recent years. We’ve added more board members from North Dakota and South Dakota and have created additional staff positions focused on North Dakota, South Dakota and Native nations in the region.
What’s next
We continually work to build the skills of curiosity and awareness through individual learning and development—at both the staff and board level—as well as organization-wide training and support.
We’ll also keep creating more ways to bring in more rural perspectives through the networks we have and the work we do. Similarly, we are pushing ourselves to bring in a broad range of political viewpoints more regularly. We are intentionally building skills on our staff to more effectively build understanding and connections across this region.