Designing Resilient Communities for Change: Successes, Challenges, and Practical Ways Forward

Duration: 1 hr 5 mins
Publication Date: May 2025

About the session

Affinity groups are effective in creating workplace cultures that foster belonging, strengthen allyship, and develop emerging leaders. Organizations can offer structural support for these communities and gain these benefits. In the face of US legal and political challenges to DEIA initiatives, how can individuals and organizations create or maintain resilient communities?

Our panel, from a range of organizations, will discuss their experience and examples of leading community groups to take active roles in advocacy, advance organizational goals, and develop career opportunities, and ways to define and track metrics for success.

Using scenario modeling, the audience and panel will consider how affinity groups and communities within organizations can mitigate risks, provide support, advance organizational goals, such as increasing employee satisfaction and retention, or creating accessible and inclusive products.

Collection

Annual Meeting (2025)

Speakers

Senior Product Manager, Content Accessibility, Elsevier, B.V.

Simon Holt is Senior Product Manager for Content Accessibility at Elsevier, where he leads work making books, journals, video and audio accessible to people with disabilities. As a sight impaired person himself, accessibility is important to him personally as well as professionally. He has worked in scholarly publishing for over 15 years, working with authors and editors, and is involved in several industry initiatives including serving as a Director for the Society of Scholarly Publishing, a member of an Advisory Board for the Royal National Institute for Blind People and as a Trustee for the sight-loss charity MyVision Oxfordshire. He lives in Oxford, UK.
Manager, Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Springer Nature

Camille Lemieux leads data projects as a Manager of Global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) at Springer Nature. Leveraging her specializations in program evaluation and data-driven decision-making, she helps teams track progress on their DEI goals. In this role, she also leads the company's annual DEI employee survey, which helps senior leaders use feedback from thousands of employees to cultivate a more inclusive and equitable workplace culture. She holds a master's degree in learning sciences from the University of Iowa.
Editorial Director and Publisher, American Chemical Society

Dr. Paul-André Genest is an Editorial Director and Publisher at the American Chemical Society where he is responsible for the management and development of roughly half of the ACS journal portfolio and Global Editorial Strategy team. He also acts as the Chair of the ACS Pride Affinity Group. Since 2016, he is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University where he co-teaches a yearly course on scholarly communication (BIOS 292: Preparation and Practice: Scientific Communication and Media). Previously, he worked as a Publisher and Senior Editor at Wiley and as an Associate Publisher and Scientific Editor at Elsevier. Dr. Genest has a BSc (Biology) degree and a MSc (Microbiology-Immunology) degree from the Université Laval in Québec City, Canada, and a PhD (Molecular Parasitology) from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He held two postdoc research positions at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands before transitioning to the scholarly publishing industry.
Director of Scholarly Communication & Open Publishing, Indiana University Libraries

Karen Stoll Farrell is Director of Scholarly Communication and Open Publishing at Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington, where they were previously the Librarian for South and Southeast Asian Studies. They hold an MA in South Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, an MLIS from Wayne State University, and a BA in Anthropology from Kalamazoo College. Currently, their research is focused on feminist management practices and on disability equity, including equity in scholarly communications and for neurodiverse librarians, specifically. They are active in work incorporating equitable values into open access practices. Their most recent publication, coauthored with nicholae cline, is “Envisioning Leadership: Principles of Feminist Management in Practice” a chapter in Critical Library Leadership (2024).
Consultant, Stone Strategic Marketing Services

Anne Stone is a marketing and strategy consultant to publishers, professional associations, and businesses focused on the intersection of organizational strategy and implementation. She is an active volunteer on SSP committees and the Workplace Equity survey, sponsored by C4DISC. You will find her most of the time in Central Massachusetts, walking her Airedale on the weekends.