Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator and consultant with more than 25 years of experience in the field of diversity, equity and inclusion. He has trained senior leaders across sectors and developed measurement tools for organizations, helping improve their diversity outcomes. Internationally, Shakil has designed and led peace-building projects for communities in conflict, specifically in Europe and South America. He lives in Toronto and is currently experiencing his most challenging and rewarding management experience: his two toddlers teaching him about fatherhood.
About the book, Deep Diversity:
“Deep Diversity is intimately tied to my personal and professional story. It’s a culmination of 25 years of teaching and learning from thousands of people across 4 continents, one emotional burnout in my early 30s and a childhood in small town Canada pretending I was white. In trying to reconcile my place in the world—who I was personally and what I did professionally—led me to explore and integrate a variety of perspectives into my work including psychology, neuroscience, bias research, social justice as well as mindfulness meditation.
My ultimate goal in writing this book is to help average people regardless of identity, have a conversation about racism and discrimination—something that’s tough, almost taboo, to talk about openly—and bring hope to a topic that can feel so ultimately despairing. Using a compassionate but challenging approach, this book helps identify the racial blindspots we all possess and offers practical solutions about how to break the ‘prejudice habits’ we’ve learned in order to tackle systemic discrimination.
The book also includes stories of my own “inclusion errors”, such as underestimating the abilities of a person in a wheelchair or discounting someone because of their “foreign sounding name.” And successes such as supporting a group of diverse young leaders in Europe to emotionally process the terrorist attack on the London Underground as the tragedy unfolded in 2005.”
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