Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - Initiative

Through more than two decades of work, we at the Milken Institute know many factors can provide barriers to access healthcare, education and employment, and financial capital, but one of the most systemic is lack of representation from diverse communities at all levels of our society. When the gatekeepers don’t look like the person on the other side of the gate, that barrier is more likely to remain in place.

There have always been leaders and those in positions of power who have had an eye on diversity, but in 2020 – resulting from a pandemic that laid bare inequalities across all our systems – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) became a lens through which all of us at the Milken Institute are now looking. Why? Because it’s an extension of our values, it improves employee retention, diverse teams innovate faster, and it drives better business outcomes. 

As a non-partisan thinktank, we provide actionable insights to businesses, governments and private enterprise in part by publishing research that highlights solutions including:

• 14 Strategies for Partnering with Mission-Focused Banks

• Achieving Health Equity: A Multi-Stakeholder Action Plan to Address Diversity Across the Clinical Trials Enterprise and the Biomedical Research Ecosystem

• Better Brain Health through Equity: Addressing Health and Economic Disparities in Dementia for African Americans and Latinos

• An Inclusive Economic Development Roadmap for California's Inland Empire

We also walk the talk. 

At the Milken Institute, we are focused on DEI as a core component of both our talent development and the events we produce. Internally, we’re:

• Comparing our full-time staff diversity numbers against the U.S. Census numbers

• Measuring pay parity at each staff level

• Ensuring we interview a diverse candidate pool for every opening

• Sharing intern and full-time position requests with our academic partners 

• Establishing programs across the Institute to help promising leaders from around the world build their personal and professional development, and facilitate the growth of their peer support network

Our events are global in nature and thus require a variety of different metrics to ensure a robust DEI approach. These include:

• Comparing our speaker diversity against the U.S. Census numbers (U.S.-based events)

• Measuring C-Suite diversity against global C-Suite numbers

• Striving for all domestic and international panels to include at least one woman and one person of color

This is the foundation from which we continue to grow from. Building a more equitable society is, in fact, a whole of society effort and at the Milken Institute, we are committed to doing our part and to working with our partners to support theirs.

Contact Us

If you would like more information on the Milken Institute’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative, please contact Blair Smith at [email protected] or Brian Carandang at [email protected].