DEIB at a Cemetery: A Grassroots Guide in 5 Steps
Corinne Elicona | March 28, 2024
In early June of 2020, a few coworkers and I from Mount Auburn Cemetery (Cambridge, MA) sat around a picnic table, masked between bites of our lunch, and strategically sitting six feet apart thanks to the helpful masking tape guides. The mood was somber as the world seemed sick in more ways than one.
George Floyd had just been murdered when a police officer stood on his neck for nine minutes, and the country erupted into righteous unrest. Not to mention the fact that working at a cemetery, a few of us on staff had seen the devastation that COVID-19 had wrought on our community directly: family members unable to grieve graveside. Isolated dirges clad in full PPE at our crematory and many family members rushed into end-of-life decisions through small LED windows on Zoom.
Writing this in 2024, I find that my mind protects itself from these rushing images, unwilling to acknowledge just how traumatic of a time it really was. But at that moment in June around the picnic table, everything was urgent, dire, and present. We could no longer idly accept the slow-moving and slow-to-change status quo of our industry. We resolved to form a taskforce dedicated to addressing equity and inclusion issues at our workplace: a historic garden cemetery in the greater Boston community that has long held the reputation of catering to the elite, wealthy, and majority-white populations of New England—despite the progressive foundation of the cemetery which has always been non-denominational and racially integrated.
By 2021, enough groundwork had been completed to begin drafting an Action Plan for Mount Auburn. Our task force had conducted interviews and selected a third-party consultant to aid us in this DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging) realm that we were wading into as an organization.
As a cemetery, we faced unique challenges in this space that our consultant hadn’t encountered in their many years working for museums and other non-profits. For example, as a historic cemetery that hosts walking tours and that has a visitor center, what is our responsibility to the interpretation of legacy? Museums can contextualize their collections in a way that cemeteries cannot. Not to mention that the memorialization of individuals is a family endeavor and, in many circumstances, governed and protected by law.
The City of Richmond, Virginia, can decide democratically to take down the confederate monuments in the city squares, but Hollywood Cemetery in that same city can’t just decide to exhume the body of Confederate President Jefferson Davis because they no longer wish to be associated with that legacy. And even if they could, what would happen to the remains? Would they go to a different cemetery more willing to memorialize and uplift confederate legacies?
But just because there are no easy answers, doesn’t mean that cemeteries should shy away entirely from their social responsibilities, as we have a reputation for doing. Difficult conversations are our bread and butter, and the process of completing this action plan ran the gamut of the whole bakery. I hope, however, despite the difficulties and discomfort of this process, other cemeteries will follow in our path, initiating their own action plans and reckoning with their own community legacies.
The Process:
Step 1: Define Your Terms
Step 2: Assess the Current Culture
Step 3: Train Staff
Step 4: Craft and Articulate Your Vision
Step 5: Communicate and Distribute the Plan
Step 1: Define Your Terms
In discourse analysis there is a term, floating signifier, which can be many different types of things, but for this blog’s purpose, they are words that can have many different meanings to different people. We encounter floating signifiers often in political rhetoric: in the United States we constantly hear people referring to the concept of freedom as a baseline value—as if it were a term with a concrete definition. Freedom can be construed positively (e.g., in the sense that individuals have the freedom to pursue something), or it can be construed negatively (e.g., in that individuals have freedom from constraints). In these instances, freedom can mean many different, and sometimes contradictory, things.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) is an acronym full of floating signifiers. What does it look like to be diverse or inclusive? What does it mean to achieve equity or to feel belonging? It’s imperative that your organization clearly define these terms and what successful DEIB programming looks like. To give you some more specific details on this: our taskforce created an “action-item matrix” where specific tasks could be listed, assigned owners, and categorized based on which goal they fulfilled. For example, “research and create a public-use wheelchair maintenance plan” was a task we assigned to the Safety Committee, and it was categorized as working towards our goal to foster a sense of belonging for all visitors.
Step 2: Assess the Current Culture
To begin setting goals for our organization, it was important to first get to know our cemetery and its staff a little better. Clarifying where our current organizational culture was in relation to these goals helped us set clear expectations and benchmarks for the action-planning process. It also helped set the tone for our group: to know what was forefront in our colleagues’ minds and learn about their experiences with these issues in the past.
It is critical that this information-gathering process be conducted by a third party: those outside of the organization and without a vested interest in it. Otherwise, staff members may feel too intimidated to speak openly. In the case of Mount Auburn, our consultant anonymized and consolidated the information they gathered into a report for us that highlighted demographic information, key findings, and their overall assessment of our organization.
Step 3: Train Staff
After the cultural assessment was complete and the taskforce had a clear idea of where the gaps in our knowledge were, we committed to hosting a few training sessions on unconscious bias, the process by which the brain uses mental associations that are so well-established as to operate without awareness, intention, or even control. These sessions were mandatory for all staff and were held in both Spanish and English so that we could begin building a baseline of understanding among all staff. This baseline became a shared language as our staff began to express their thoughts and feelings, especially in the action-planning process.
Step 4: Craft and Articulate Your Vision
For our taskforce, crafting and articulating our vision was by far the most lengthy and intimidating part of the action-planning process. We spent months in meetings going over drafts and wordsmithing because everything felt so final and important. If there’s one thing that’s important to keep in mind during this stage, it is that you should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Remember that you are creating a living document that will evolve and change as your organization evolves and develops. If something that was created in the past no longer serves the DEIB interests of the organization in the future, then it can and should be amended.
The current iteration of our action plan begins with a vision statement that aims to encapsulate the scope of the entire document. We divide our taskforce into three priority areas that were identified during the cultural assessment. For us, these areas were identified as Inclusive Communication, Diversity, and Equitable Access to Mission. Each group is tasked with creating a goal statement for their priority area and identifying the key action steps the organization should take in service of those goals. For us, these action steps included exploring opportunities to diminish financial barriers to end-of-life services and engaging the historically underrepresented communities. Once these action steps were identified, the priority area groups began working with different departments to realize these ends.
After all the back-and-forth and the ever-changing iterations taking up space on your desktop are complete (final draft, actually final . . . seriously, FINAL this time), you have your action plan, and you can begin working on it.
Step 5: Communicate and Distribute the Plan
An action plan is of no use to the cemetery if nobody knows about it or feels any sort of ownership towards it. The focus on communicating the plan should first be internal: make sure the staff know and understand the plan’s vision, goals, promises, and commitments. I recommend involving staff and volunteers in creating specific tasks in service of your goals. At an ice cream social, we hosted for our staff in the spring, for example, we had volunteers participate in a dot survey to outline the tasks that we should prioritize. This catalyzed important staff dialogue with the taskforce and demonstrated the importance of their opinions.
Wrap-Up
I hope this brief blog acts as a roadmap for similar processes among those who have the drive and passion but lack the institutional guidance to get going. In democratizing this information, I look forward to seeing more cemeteries develop grass-roots action plans for their organizations to begin addressing DEIB issues that we encounter on a regular basis.
About the Author
Corinne Elicona is an independent scholar known for her expertise in death studies and end-of-life education. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a CANA Crematory Operations Certification. Her work has been featured in publications such as Nursing Clio, The Death Studies Podcast, and the Order of the Good Death. She is currently working as the Education & Digital Content Manager and DEIB Task Force lead at the historic Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is passionate about developing educational programs and fostering community connections.