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Smart communications strategies for organizations that love kids.
 

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

 

When Forthright was founded to work with organizations that love kids, we had the opportunity to build a company that reflects our values. We chose to build a firm that puts People First. That commitment extends past our own team and our clients, and out into the world and the communities we serve.

At Forthright, we are committed to using our privilege, our work and our platform to create a better world. We commit to maintaining an environment where all teammates, consultants, clients, partners and friends, regardless of gender identity, race, color, sexual orientation, language, national origin, religion, disability or age, know they are valued.

As communicators, we know that effective and meaningful outreach and advocacy begins by listening—and ensuring every impacted community member is included in this listening. That asking good questions, the right questions, and then truly listening gets you really, really far in creating lasting, equitable change that people can feel.
 

We ask:

How can I seek to understand your lived experiences? How has history shaped where we are today? How are people truly feeling? Why? What do they value? What is preventing them from taking action? Who is in this conversation, and equally important, who isn’t? Why aren’t they? What barriers must we remove to get them here?
 
There is so much left to learn for our team — for all of us — but we are committed to naming when something is wrong, seeking to understand our history as a foundation for smart communications, and doing the real necessary work to create meaningful change for kids, families and our communities.

We’re sharing just a couple of examples of how we’ve incorporated our commitment to diversity, equity, collaboration and inclusion into recent projects our teammates have worked on:

Forthright partnered with the National Head Start Association (NHSA) to create a communications toolkit, empowering advocates nationwide to successfully fight for increased Early Head Start funding. We infused community and family feedback into every step of the campaign. Teammates interviewed parents and families to build core messaging that reflected their lived experiences and needs, and helped to share their stories, in their own words.

We prioritized including families with diverse backgrounds and experiences, from partnering with Galena, a parent ambassador who is autistic, to DJ, a new parent who is adopting her four siblings. With the help of their invaluable partnership, we were able to create a coalition toolkit (which included research, framing, messaging, case studies, sample social media messages and more) that hundreds of partners can use in their advocacy.

As a result, policy makers are already paying attention, engaging in important conversations, posting about it on their own social media—and community members know they made it happen.

While leading a North Carolina state-wide government agency’s campaign to encourage families to wear face masks during the COVID-19 crisis, we worked closely with the department’s Historically Marginalized Populations Working Group to ensure the campaign resonated with communities being most impacted by the pandemic.

We started by meeting with the group to understand the values and barriers we should speak to and what resources would be the most impactful to community leaders. We then incorporated this feedback into our planning and review process.

Together, we created an inclusive, equitable, successful campaign through this team-based partnership model that empowered the voice of lived experiences and developed shared ownership of the final products.

When we approach a campaign, we make sure we're grounded in community-identified challenges and solutions. We strive to incorporate inclusive community feedback processes as well, from reviewing existing research to conducting interviews and gaining important perspectives from those most impacted by the issue. We see ourselves as partners in this work. We’ve included additional examples of our work in our case studies section.