Leadership & Social Justice

Social Justice, Diversity and Equity 

The heath of a population is dependent upon the access to opportunity, healthcare, education and housing. The Alchemist Agency supports individuals, organizations and communities ad they enact social justice principles in their life and work. Consulting packages include a combination of assessment, training, coaching, policy development, program development, and process facilitation. 

The work of ending racism, gender-based discrimination, and fighting for the rights of oppressed people requires a deep commitment to also ensuring that the oppressive structures don’t also impact the internal functioning of organizations and communities. Social Justice Consulting can help strengthen the outcomes of your work, and address tensions and struggles that exist within organizations and communities.

Upskilling, Reskilling and Social Justice

You’ve made commitments, your company has goals. You can’t keep them or reach them without upskilling.

Most business leaders recognize the necessity of addressing the skills shortage to meet business objectives. Perhaps you are pursuing major transformations: acquiring and divesting lines of business, seeking new sales channels or deepening digitization and automation. 

There are clear and proven links between skills at all levels and productivity. Growth accounting disaggregates economic growth into improvements in technology, skills and other variables.Your company's transformation plan must envelope systems that allow employees to feel supported, valued and put in a position to succeed.

Whether The Alchemist Agency partners with your company through a job rotation or enrichment and redesign, establishing a peer coaching, or other collaborative strategy; we will evaluate specific data, including the skills most necessary in your company's core functions. With a well-informed strategy and a better understanding of the target skill sets, the necessary training assets can be developed or acquired to bring virtual, cross-functional teams, or project-based work in step with the rise of soft skills that only humans can develop — the capabilities that will continue to provide irreplaceable value to organizations.

A key difference among today’s large-scale skill shift and those in the past—including the transformative transition from agriculture to manufacturing—is the urgency for workers who exhibit these capabilities.

Reskilling at scale is a concern and priority for 80 percent of C-suite executives worldwide, according to a McKinsey survey. Reskilling significant portions of the workforce within the next 5-10 years will be required—tens of millions of mid-career, middle-age workers, particularly in advanced economies—with the development of soft skills a key element.

Learning and skills contribute to economic growth both directly, by improving the skills base available to employers, and indirectly, by underpinning the five foundations of productivity identified by the government: ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment, and places. This is the case for all levels of learning from basic skills to degree level – research clearly shows earnings, employment and productivity gains for each level of learning.

Skills also contribute to social justice, helping to improve social mobility (the extent to which an individual’s life chances do or do not depend on their family background) and reduce inequality (the gap between rich and poor). Again, this is the case at all levels of learning. Gaining basic skills helps people access opportunities, and widening access to higher education also opens up new career opportunities.

The nation's prosperity depends on the skills and ingenuity of its people. There need not be a trade-off between economic efficiency and social justice – the two can go hand in hand at all levels of learning and skills.

The case for a higher ambition is clear and unambiguous.