This year, we’re celebrating our 55th birthday (!!), and we thought reaching such an important milestone was the perfect time to unveil a new look for the firm. We’ve also gone through several exciting changes over the past 18 months, and our new website gives us a better way to share those changes with you.
First, we’ve completely reorganized our team and welcomed several new faces so we can provide even more value to our clients and have the right people working on the right problems. It’s all part of our commitment to help organizations use the research we conduct to make sound, data-driven decisions to meet their inclusion objectives. Our new website gives us the opportunity to introduce our new firm organization and some of the new faces that give us so much confidence about our future.
Second, there have been substantial shifts in the judicial and political climate related to the inclusion work we do, leaving many organizations and the stakeholders they serve feeling nervous and unsettled, to say the least. We want to assure you that we’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time and have used the last 18 months to develop a path forward (as an example of what we mean, click here). Times of uncertainty can certainly be scary, but we want to help our clients use this time as an opportunity to honestly assess their inclusion programs and work with us to make them even stronger for the future, no matter what that future looks like. (In addition, we want to encourage our clients to stop paying attention to so-called “expert” predictions about the future. We have the opportunity to shape the future of the industry rather than sit by passively and accept what some industry pundits think it’s going to be and take their advice to essentially throw in the towel.)
Third, we have a lot of thoughts about the current state of community and business inclusion and want to create within the industry a culture of sharing ideas about how to help practitioners strengthen their inclusion efforts. We certainly don’t have to agree on everything, but we should have the courage to share ideas, respectfully disagree, and build better solutions. We’ve created a blog to do exactly that, and we wholeheartedly welcome the opportunity to share information and innovative ideas with government organizations, trade associations, decisionmakers, practitioners, researchers, or other stakeholders interested in helping us lead the way into the next phase of this work. You don’t have to just come to read our thoughts either. If you want to write a guest blog—regardless of whether we agree or disagree with you—reach out to us, and let’s figure it out!
Finally, we’d be remiss not to mention that two, beloved BBC owners—Kevin Williams and Iris McClish—retired at the end of 2024 to pursue their passions outside of community and business inclusion (although Kevin is still consulting with us when he can take a break from the outdoors). It’s impossible to overstate the impact both Kevin and Iris have had on the firm over the years. They’ll always be friends and they’ll always be part of our team, regardless of how annoying it is that they were able to retire in their 40s. (Iris would like us to note that, technically, she’s not quite 40.)
Please keep checking in here so we can share more of our thoughts with you and the exciting new directions our firm and our work is taking. We might have a new look and feel, but we have the same unwavering commitment to studying and helping create social and economic justice throughout the country in smart, meaningful ways. Thank you for your work with us over the years and into the future. Our success has been built on your trust in our work, and we’re going to continue working hard every day to make sure we honor that trust in the best way we know how—by providing the best research in the industry and helping our clients use that research to improve the communities that they serve.