Catalysts for Positive Change: The NASA SSERVI Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Focus Group

The NASA SSERVI Initiative has expressed a deep commitment to enabling positive change in equity, diversity, and inclusion, as detailed in the recent statement by SSERVI Director Greg Schmidt (found at https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/15083/). In response SSERVI has created the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Focus Group to provide a framework to support learning, sharing, support, and change.

The EDI Focus Group considers both large, national-scale and small local-scale issues in science and exploration of The Moon and asteroids that are related to equity, ethics, diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Examples of these issues include: diverse workforce development; equitable, beneficial, and just uses of space for all humankind, creating and maintaining a supportive professional culture, and inclusive representation of humans in science and exploration including race, disability, sexual orientation, gender, age, socio-economic status, and geographic distribution.

Participation in the group is open to all interested members (science, industry, government, university, non-profit, sociology, educators, science-communicators, etc.) of the broader lunar, asteroid, and human exploration communities. We are coordinating with similar groups and initiatives in our community (i.e. LEAG, LSIC, the EDI Working Group) to maximize our effectiveness and impact. Our overall goal is to identify and undertake specific actions to manifest immediate positive change within our local work environments and in space science and exploration as a whole. We will follow a model with five core activities, conducting them all in tandem as befits the needs of the various issues and challenges being addressed: Learn, Share, Support, Change, and Evaluate.

The group will meet every other week via Zoom, and will conduct interim business via email. To request to be added to the list, visit this link. This link, as well as the meeting Zoom link and EDI meeting calendar can be found on our focus group website.

Acknowledgements: Lead JA Grier is supported by NASA SSERVI TREX Grant (NNH16ZDA001N).