“Change is good—you go first.”
It’s a line that Dawnielle Tehama says is too often the prevailing sentiment regarding organizations catching up with shifts in public values. But when Tehama and 11 other NTA members assembled as the association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Group, they not only embraced change … they ran with it.
NTA launched its DEI Advisory Group in early 2021, pulling together a broad cross-section of the membership: representatives from tour companies, tour suppliers, and destinations who volunteered to serve. That included Tehama, executive director of the Willamette Valley (Oregon) Visitors Association.
“You have to be willing to do the work and have the hard conversations,” she says. “Those are two things I have never feared doing.”
The purpose of the group is to advise the association’s staff and leaders in three areas, says NTA President Catherine Prather. “The main goals are cultivating a culture of inclusion, expanding the diversity of the NTA membership, and providing opportunities for deeper learning about DEI so it can be integrated into the packaged travel landscape.”
In September 2021, the group recommended to the NTA Board of Directors that NTA sign on to the Travel Industry Association DEI Pledge, which has been championed by Travel Unity, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing diversity in the world of travel. Not only did the board agree to sign on, they further charged the DEI Advisory Group with using the guiding principles of the pledge to review NTA’s mission statement and operating principles—and, with DEI concepts in mind, to recommend updates.
Portia Conerly of Stay Arlington (Virginia) chaired the group in 2021 and 2022 and embraced the assignment. “Despite the daunting task of updating NTA’s decades-old mission statement and core values, our group worked together cohesively to produce an intentional, all-inclusive, and updated statement of NTA’s mission and core values.”
To help the DEI Advisory Group with the work, Prather enlisted the help of Roni Weiss, executive director of Travel Unity, who explained to the group the reason for—and the challenge of—updating the association’s operating principles.
“By having clarity on an organization’s mission and values, you can better make sure that everything you do links to that mission—and you’re better able to retain the members who align with that vision and find others who share that philosophy,” Weiss says. “One of the biggest issues with implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion is when people treat it in a vacuum. But by recommitting the association’s mission and resetting its values, NTA is able to make DEI part of the core fabric of the organization, not just an add-on that can disappear or never become fully part of operations.”
After receiving its marching orders from the NTA board, the DEI group initiated monthly meetings. They worked diligently to uphold the ideals and business focus of NTA while also honoring the task of reviewing NTA’s principles through a lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“When discussing the mission statement, the group felt it important to use words that literally signaled intent, such as ‘diverse,’ ‘welcoming,’ ‘all,’ ‘responsible,’ and ‘communities,’” Prather says. “They knew the association’s mission needed to reflect a holistic inclusion of the current members and those we hope to welcome, as well as the communities where our members are based or where our tour operators may take them. And they also included consideration for the impact on the planet.”
Once the group was satisfied with the revised mission statement, they tackled the core values. While they retained many of the original words, the group added definitions to show the new intent behind longstanding values, and they also placed them in priority order.
