One Woman’s Bold Journey Into The World of Diversity and Inclusion

In my world, invitations to connect on LinkedIn are a daily occurrence — Forex traders wanting me to invest; College students needing career advice; Startup business professionals wanting to partner — a seemingly endless stream of people reaching out. 

But when Di Ciruolo and I connected earlier this month, I got a totally different vibe. As the Head of Inclusion at Jambb, a NFT of Blockchain company that helps users make money by selling digital collectibles, fostering workplace diversity initiatives is her jam, no pun intended. 

Di Ciruolo, who also advises companies on best practices strategies for inclusion, is the author of Ally Up: The Definitive Guide To Building More Inclusive, Innovative and Productive Teams. 

Her Life

In our correspondence, Di offered a brief snapshot of her life journey and how it’s impacted her thinking over time about diversity and inclusion

“I was born in Salem, Massachusetts in the mid-80s. My parents were both 19 when my birth mother conceived me to “trap” my father into marrying her.  So even when they were together, it was combative. She dated his friend and fellow 80s musician just to torment my father, but it really upped the ante for her when he turned out to be a known child rapist.” 

She said that this led the Massachusetts Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) to get involved pretty quickly after she started arriving at school totally malnourished with lice and ringworm. 

“I was in foster care on and off when I was 3. My 2 younger brothers and I bounced around, often separated, going from bad homes to worse homes until finally some terrible stuff happened. They then put us in a “nice” permanent care home as an “mea culpa”. 

Unfortunately, that home was rife she says with every interpersonal form of domestic violence one could think of: 

‘Literally I thought: this is a nice house, this a “nice" family, these are “nice” schools. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone the truth.” 

Di said that when she was “aged out” of foster care, her foster mother proceeded to tell anyone who would listen how awful….

... “my beginnings truly were to anyone she was looking to impress. As a narcissist she told everyone that she had adopted me out of the kindness of her heart from literal poverty when in fact while in foster care, she WAS getting paid for my care and treated  me as a literal domestic servant she could hurt while telling me it was for “room and board”

Di, who is Hispanic says her foster mom held nothing back in terms of what she thought of “Machados”: 

“So here I am earning room and board, and outwardly she’s telling everyone how I’ve ascended to (white) Heaven.”

She laments that others she was around knew what was happening to her yet they turned a blind eye. 

“Years later, many of them came around to apologize after seeing who I am today, a respectful lady with a big platform.” 

Di ultimately aged out of foster care and became homeless with nothing to lean on:

 “My foster mom was the type of narcissist that actively fights you going to college, even on your own dime, because you’re to stupid and worthless. At best, she just hopes you can marry well.” 

Di’s life then took a pivotal turn: 

“I had a few friends who lived in Atlanta at the time when that city was really starting to come into its own. 

Like the stupid teenager I was, I took my laundry basket of worldly possessions and moved there.”

She says that once she was away from the constant, poisonous drip of poison of the American foster care system and her foster mother, things got better for her. 

“Atlanta is the type of place that adopts you, and gets into your blood. The people there are full of love and joy that seems to come from a struggle I was able to connect with.” 

She says that during the first two years she had no place to go when holidays came around. Fortunately, she says that she began to build a family there.

“I got better. I went to therapy. I put myself into college and lived my absolute best life. It felt like it was the first time I was in the driver's seat.” 

In college, Di says that she was drawn to anthropology, specifically gender, race, and class studies including African American studies. 

“I think the reason for that was I felt called to heal the systems that were harming us all. And I felt a curiosity about the people and the culture I had been embraced by. I even learned the “electric slide” line dance in someone’s front yard. Atlanta is in my blood.” 

Di graduated from college, after an extremely impressive showing academically, and in a student leadership capacity. Yet she couldn’t get hired.

“I had no network at all, no safety net, no anything: I had to always be working, which meant I couldn’t take unpaid internships that would lead to better jobs. The harder I fought, the more I realized that the goalpost was being pushed further and further away. Here I was one of the 3% of kids who “graduate” foster care and manage to graduate college and they weren’t looking to hire me. 

She attributes this to not having been a part of the selective recruiting pipeline of these companies, which included only the top schools where statistically few if any foster kids graduate from.

“I’m still mad about it”, she admits. 

Di persisted despite having a college degree that people often laughed at her about. Eventually she began working in people operations positions that allowed her to work her way up. 

Finally, while doing staffing consulting jobs from home after having children, she says she realized that so many hiring managers were having repeated conversations with her over and over again as it related to DEI, a very uncharted field at the time. It was then when she realized that after years of feeling like she had nothing to uniquely offer the workplace, that her depth of knowledge pertaining to what she knew was vast. 

“That was a surprise, a game changer.”

The Book

In 2019, Di says she finally decided to write her book, “Ally Up" offering a baseline of accessible DEI knowledge for people to have before tackling these issues in the workplace: 

“I interviewed hundreds of people “on the ground” in highly paid fields like tech, STEM, academy, finance and others, at all levels, from all backgrounds (mostly BIPOC and or women+) and I kept hearing the same threads of wisdom over and over again as it related to DEI&B and leadership. The book I wrote was an attempt at providing knowledge that I felt people who called themselves allies (or advocates) needed to know.” 

She says the hypothesis of the book is simple: 

“If you are benefitting from systems of oppression and inequality then you are responsible for unmaking them. If you call yourself an ally (to anyone); these are your action items in the workplace.”

Asked about how 2020 with all of the racial justice protests impacted the narrative of this space, Di notes 

“I had been told by people trying to help me with this book that no one would read it and that I should think of it as a door opener. I didn’t write it that way, obviously, but I was led to believe it wasn’t that sexy of a topic. So, here I am writing my little book for a largely white audience on how to be allies and then 2020 happens with George Floyd and all.” 

She continues: 

“I created a social justice knowledge sharing group for allies, and I’m doing all this volunteering, and I’m giving free talks about allyship in social justice spaces and how we think about that in the middle of a pandemic. And I have two kids at home, one of whom needs virtual kindergarten support. So, do I have more to say? Yes. A lot more to say. I just didn’t have the heart for some of the places I was going to need to go as a result of what was happening around me. All of this to say that the book is shorter than I wanted but I’m still very proud of it.” 

Asked about what she’s personally discovering in her work amid all the chatter about diversity and inclusion, she had this to say: 

“I think a lot of people look around their companies and see they are largely white and think that the problem is largely tied to hiring. But in my view it’s usually not.  Rather it’s typically about leadership. We see a lot of bad faith actors when we think about DEI&B that don't exist for other spaces. You don’t hire a CFO and then work against them because you don’t want to do anything, or see changes made, or worry about pushback, or corporate buy-in. You hire an expert because you want them to be successful.” 

She notes that this is not always the case for DEI&B facilitators: 

“I often get pushback when I say that in tech, where I work. They say, ‘Well, Di, did you see Netflix’s diversity numbers?’ Yeah, not everyone is Netflix. In fact, only Netflix is Netflix. And they have their own battles to wage in terms of advancing the diversity narrative because no one is 100% there. Ultimately, though, all of this turns out great, because that means we can all work together without shame to solve what needs to be solved.

Added to this, Di believes we’re going to see a lot of conversations around how we "bring people back to work" and what that looks like for people. Not just the majority group, but all of us. 

“With the pandemic we lost a lot of ground in the workforce in terms of women and others fulfilling dual caretaker responsibility roles. So flexible (or even remote) returnships are going to need to come out in a big way.” 

Finally, she says she’d like to see better systems in place schools that support the reeducating of folks into tech jobs through actual tech job training. 

“ Right now there’s a gap between retraining courses or ‘bootcamp courses’ and the experience one needs to be in engineering and other tech fields. This is negatively impacting diversity. Not every company has a big enough team for a tech lead or other manager to teach someone totally new yet the workplace diversity movement can’t advance if we don’t make this  a point of emphasis. A lot of folks throw their hands up and say “BIPOC just aren’t getting degrees in computer science”. I’m like, okay, but we also know you don’t need a Computer Science degree to be an engineer.  So what’s the problem?

Ultimately, she says, talent recruitment and retention boils down to thinking about employees within the context of their actual lives and constructing policies around that. 

In conclusion, she had this to say about what she hopes readers will walk away with from reading her book: 

“My hope is that we can start learning about DEI&B in a real way that is accessible to people and gives them a place to start before rushing in without learning, empathy or planning. While this is an important conversation, it is important for allies in this space to have a baseline of information that is actionable. I hope this conversation inspires some of that work in its readers”.