Business leaders from the Nashville area met Tuesday morning at Lipscomb for a discussion on workplace diversity in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The Lipscomb University Department of Communication and Journalism hosted the event in Ezell Center partnering with the Council on Workforce Innovation and National Organization for Workforce Diversity.
Guest speaker Anthony Carter, Chief Diversity Officer at Johnson & Johnson, shared his ideas about diversity over breakfast. Carter discussed his belief that corporations should concentrate more on social leadership and global well-being.
“Diversity is who we are,” Carter said. “And inclusion is how we work together. The beauty of that is how we pull all of that together to make sure that we are of best interest to our customers.”
Carter views diversity as a social justice imperative, and pointed to Martin Luther King Jr. as a hero worthy of emulation.
“His work,” Carter said about King Jr., “in fact his life, illustrates so accurately diversity and social justice. Think about it, Dr. King dismantled the barriers of segregation and transformed a nation.”
Breakfast attendees came from all over Nashville to learn how to better support diversity in their own businesses, corporations and organizations.
“Diversity really means everything, Lori Adukeh, executive director of 100 Black Men of Middle Tennessee said. “It gives people the opportunity to be different, and yet be the same, to collaborate, to be partners.”
Attendees also discussed the increased productivity diversity brings.
“Diversity, and workforce diversity specifically, really speaks to equality and opportunity,” said Jacky Akbari, director of employee services at the Nashville Career Advancement Center. “We’ve found that when there is a diverse workforce, it’s a productive, prosperous workforce.”
President Randy Lowry also attended the breakfast and spoke about the push and desire to bring more diversity to the Lipscomb campus.
“Our minority enrollment has gone from about 5 percent to about 18.3 percent,” Lowry said. “I think two years ago it was the highest minority enrollment of any college in the state of Tennessee except our historically black colleges. When almost 20 percent of your student body represents different cultures, different backgrounds, different ethnic traditions, that provides an opportunity for everybody to learn differently, and to leave this institution prepared to work in the world differently.”