The Role of the Chapter Diversity Chair

The chapter Diversity Initiative (DI) Chair leads the chapter’s efforts to offer organized, engaging and welcoming events to encourage a safe, fun and inclusive atmosphere for learning about conservation, TU and angling. 

The Chair organizes a committee to recruit new members, engage them in TU’s mission, facilitate their retention, and promote them into leadership roles to reflect the whole community within the chapter geography. This individual actively develops or enhances events at the chapter level, initiates new programs to provide meaningful engagement opportunities, facilitates membership drives to increase membership, and facilitates communication with minority members in the chapter.

The Chair is encouraged to develop an annual plan for the chapter, along with an associated budget. In this annual planning effort, the DI Chair is supported by their council’s DI Committee, the TU National Leadership Council’s (NLC) Diversity and Inclusion Workgroup and Volunteer Operations staff.

The DI Chair position has wide-ranging responsibilities, requiring much more than simply being present at occasional board meetings and effectively leading a DI committee. He or she is an active conduit for communication to members and other stakeholders by giving proper notice of upcoming events and timely distribution of event materials to the chapter as well as the general public. Additionally, the Chair should provide advice and resources to the board on inclusion topics as well as advocating for diverse members and their perspectives. 

Key Responsibilities

The DI Chair must be a current Trout Unlimited member who will ensure that the following responsibilities are completed (personally or by way of delegation):

·        Create and maintain a current list of DI members and partners

·        Connect with current, lapsed and near expired minority members to introduce oneself and personally invite them to an upcoming event (chapter meeting, women’s specific event, Hispanic partner organization event, etc).  Chair may work in partnership with the membership committee. 

·        Connect with those who have attended an event or have become a new member.  This may consist of a quick email with upcoming events or news.  Ideally this happens on a regular basis (monthly).  Alerts can be set up to facilitate this effort.

·        Network with minority members, DI chapter chairs and council DI leaders

·        Recruit and support DI committee members to help facilitate chapter DI efforts

·        Participate in the monthly NLC’s Diversity and Inclusion Conference Call the third Thursday of every month at 8pm EST at 1.866.740.1260 and enter the code 2829092#.

·        Facilitate at least two DI events a year for the chapter

·        Attend council meetings and/or chapter board meetings to update others on DI efforts and learn more about other DI activities.  Discuss this expectation with your chapter board.

 ·        Retain records and keep the board abreast of upcoming events, budget status, donors, etc.  These documents may include:

·        May take a lead role in administration and updating of chapter social media, email and/or print newsletters and other communication vehicles.  These duties may also be assigned to another vetted committee member, chapter communications chair, chapter webmaster or other board position.