Creating an inclusive community

Your community mission is the foundation of your community. This is where you express your communities' purpose, what you value and what you and your members stand for. Having a strong mission can help guide your members and shape the culture of your community.

When considering how your community supports diversity and inclusion, you can start by looking at how you express this in your mission and across your community. Think about the different places that you share your values and purpose — this could be your community description, community rules, in your on boarding materials and anywhere you speak to members.

A template for how you can express your mission could be:

'“[YOUR COMMUNITY NAME] is a community for [WHO ARE YOUR MEMBERS] that [WHAT YOU DO] and want to [YOUR VISION].”’

When describing who your members are or what your community does, you can add in relevant ways that you are supporting diverse voices. For example, “We are a community of people from around the world, from different backgrounds who love exploring the world and are providing a space for diverse voices to share their experiences and love of travel.” To learn more about how to craft a mission statement and build a strong culture, check out “Maintaining a strong community culture.”

Then, you can use this mission to guide how you speak to prospective and current members, always grounding your community in your mission, values and guiding principles. Remember, your community is made up of members. Ask them to contribute when defining your mission — you can survey members and ask them what you can change to improve their experience and sense of belonging.

To create a strong foundation for diversity and inclusion in your community, it is important for your team to represent your members and provide different perspectives.

Prioritizing diversity among your team is as simple as looking within your own community. A few ways you can start to do this are:

• Create a post in your community asking for volunteers to join your team.
• Ask your most active members to become a part of the team or to refer someone they know. You can find these top contributors using your Community Insights (check out our Tools section below for more on where to find them).
• Create a public post on your community’s Facebook Page and ask for volunteers to join your team.

Feel free to be explicit in your posting about wanting to create a diverse community and asking for help. Coming at this from a place of humility and openness, no matter what your community is, will help. Think of this as a collaborative effort with your members.

Remember, diversity can come through no matter what your community is about — even if it is a female-only community, hyper-local, or already a community where diverse identities come together, there are many ways that your members differ. Think about who your members are and the intersectionality they represent. Some examples are gender, sexual preference, ethnicity or socioeconomic status.

As you receive your inquiries, make sure to train your team on how to best represent your mission and lead by example. Remember the onus is not on them to teach other members of the community, but that they are seen as a valuable member in shaping your mission. For more information on how to train your team, check out this section on Building a Team.

You’ve also got many great tools to get your team together to brainstorm changes you may want to make to your mission and values. By creating a private community for your team, you can take advantage of Messenger chat and Rooms to get together and brainstorm, make decisions and share best practices for moderation.

Also consider starting a community chat to have a meaningful, deep-dive discussion in real-time with your group members. There's a channel/chat type to support any of your needs (social channel, broadcast channel or admin-only chat). These are casual spaces that help to foster connection and bring your group together through spontaneous interactions.

Visually representing your community is important to communicate your mission and who your members are. Showcasing diversity of members in your community’s cover photo, logo and across all of your communities’ imagery can help communicate who your community is.

Some ways you can do this are through:

• Illustrations
1. Illustrations are often the easiest way to represent your members and community’s diversity. Look inside your community to see if there are artists or if they have referrals or recommendations. You can also check out Canva or Adobe Stock for illustrations you can use in your designs.

• Photography
1. Photos can help to show real members of your community. You can ask members to submit photos of themselves and other members, or use images from events. Make sure to always get permission from everyone in the photo before you share it!
• Text and other graphics
1. There are many more ways to represent your community’s members visually. You can create maps to show where members are from, showcase imagery that is representative of their backgrounds or the languages they speak and more.

No matter how you decide to create inclusive imagery, you can make it a collaborative process. Ask your members and your team for input — make it fun! You can crowdsource ideas via a post or poll, call your members to submit their own designs, create a contest and have your members vote on their favorite imagery.

You can even rotate your community’s imagery every month and ask members to share important dates to celebrate, like Pride Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Black History Month, International Women’s Day, Indigenous Peoples Day — the list goes on! You and your community can use imagery to celebrate your members’ diversity and learn how they want to be represented.