This innovation, this resilience, this creativity was only possible because we relied on each other’s experiences and ideas to inform our own. By synthesizing the best of what we all came up with individually and shared, we were able to create better solutions to better our lives. This is the essence of what inclusion brings – by being generous with each other, and leveraging our diverse talents and understandings of the world we were able to find effective ways to get through, and sometimes even thrive, during this incredibly difficult time.
2021 won’t see sudden improvements. A new COVID-19 strain still threatens, we’re still a long way from solving the problems that Black Lives Matter has been protesting, and the effects of Brexit are still to fully play out. Even now, we’re thinking about the massive disparities in how the US Capitol building was guarded for Black protestors against racism versus how it was guarded last night against a mob of Trump supporters trying to violently overthrow an election. There’s still a lot to process about last night’s events, and even more to do to ensure mobs like those aren’t encouraged further.
But, if we are to thrive in 2021, we need to build on the collective generosity and inclusion that was a promising impact from 2020. If we can do that, 2021 may bring us into a much more inclusive world.
