Bakau Consulting: Equipping Workplaces for Their DEI Journey

Around the world and in our communities, countless people experience oppression every day. Championing diversity, equity, and inclusion to combat this starts with looking at the environments closest to us — the workplace being a key one. That’s why Bakau Consulting has made it its mission to educate businesses on how and what practices to implement so workplaces can be positive environments for everyone.

We spoke with Cicely Belle Blain (they/them), Founder & CEO of Bakau Consulting, about how this organization is not only championing DEI practices, but proving what is possible by achieving equity within their own workplace. 

Tell us about Bakau Consulting’s mission.

In 2018, I founded Bakau Consulting Inc., a full-service equity, inclusion, and anti-racism consulting company based in Canada, with a global, intersectional approach.

Since the beginning, our mission has been to help our clients make meaningful, long-lasting change within their organization. Our work is rooted in community, social justice, and a passion for equity, which translates into tireless advocacy for systemic change, and we work closely to develop and implement equity strategies that are instrumental, conductive, and sustainable. Bakau Consulting intentionally seeks to positively impact employees’ lives by paying living wages, providing health insurance and PTO, scheduling wellness check-ins, and encouraging work/life balance not only at our company but our clients’ as well.

In the last five years, Bakau Consulting has grown from a sole proprietorship to a team of 20 strategists, consultants, artists, researchers, storytellers, and educators with diverse lived experiences, skills, and expertise. The team and I have served thousands of clients worldwide, offering well-researched and historically-informed educational content.

What inspired you to start Bakau Consulting?

Bakau Consulting was founded on the stolen, unceded, and traditional lands and waters of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations in 2018. In addition to founding Bakau Consulting, I’m also the Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter Vancouver. At that time, Black Lives Matter was still considered a fringe movement, and there was little mainstream attention for anti-racism and social equity consulting. Starting Bakau Consulting was motivated by a passion to eradicate oppression from every workplace in Canada. As time went on, this passion has evolved in our mission to actualize sustainable, secure, healthy, joyful, and accessible workplaces.

At Bakau, we are driven by the essential care we have for our communities and each other. We intentionally gather as a team and envision alternative futures, and we trace roadmaps we believe will get us there, powered by the care, tools, and resources available for us at the organization. To co-imagine, co-create, and co-resist as a team isn’t easy, especially coming from such different cultures, ethnicities, and walks of life – it is exhausting, scary, and many consider it useless. Yet at Bakau, we manage to stay on track, motivated by communal radical hope.

What were some of the challenges you encountered?

As a small business, we constantly make difficult financial decisions. Leading with our values at heart centres us in our decision-making. We combine our knowledge, lived experiences, and values to help our clients transform their workplace, so it only makes sense for our own workplace to have the main focus be on the humanity of our employees.

We are proud to be a certified Living Wage Employer and offer thriving wages to our team. As a remote workplace, supporting the team’s well-being has been a challenge and a priority. We invest in not only providing a robust health benefits plan but encouraging our team to rest and not work overtime.

We offer a 4-day work week. For us, it’s about understanding that there is more to our humanity than working. Having a work-life balance is not just a buzzword to throw around for us, we stand for it and weave it into all of our business decision-making.

Focusing on people and not solely profit has created some cash flow issues, but we don’t take it as a failure as a business – quite the opposite. We lead with our values and recognize it’s people who make our company a good place to work, and this is what we are proud of the most.

What do you consider Bakau Consulting’s biggest success?

We are proud to be a pillar in the community of those striving for diversity, inclusion, and anti-oppression. This is something that we commit to actioning in our business and the businesses we work with. We believe that the work we do cannot be done at the expense of the mental and physical health of our staff. We prioritize their diverse needs by providing a 32-hour workweek, extended benefits, additional health and lifestyle spending accounts, five vacation weeks, multiple avenues for seeking accommodations, and ample personal leave days.

Under Bakau Consulting, I’ve created numerous workshops and strategies to educate clients on anti-oppressive values. My workshop “Unlearning Anti-Blackness,” was one of the first public educational programs in British Columbia to cover Black Canadian history in detail for adults, while also offering powerful educational tools and teachings. The workshop has also been adapted for K-7 students and presented in various schools across the province.

What makes Bakau Consulting unique?

The foundation of our business is diversity and inclusion, and we actively ensure anti-oppressive values are infused into our everyday practices to uphold our commitments. The consulting assistance that we offer is particularly difficult and taxing due to the intricate correlation between our lived experiences and the educational aspect of the services we provide. 

The nature of our work demands adequate care of our already diverse team. As a Black, queer-owned company, many folks from equity-seeking backgrounds find their professional home at Bakau, so we invest considerable time and resources into the ongoing safety and enrichment of our team. In response to team feedback, we increased mental health-related benefits, as well as introduced additional health and lifestyle spending account funds to deliver sustainable and consistent resources to support the safety, emotional health, and mental well-being of each team member.

How do you feel Bakau Consulting makes the world better?

As an organization and individuals, we understand that we will not end oppression within the workplace, especially not worldwide. We try to stay focused on the people around us, the lands we operate on, and the communities we belong to. At Bakau, we strive for our clients to implement as many large- and small-scale practices to make workplaces equitable and more enjoyable for everybody involved in and, therefore, outside the workplace. For us, this means a robust compensation package is a foundational element: pay equity, living wages, extended benefits, paid sick leave, as well as ample vacation and personal days – all are important for people to feel valued for the work they do.

Each person has a unique experience, so we work collaboratively to create accommodations for self-identified needs, and we encourage our clients to do so as well. We celebrate different religious and spiritual holidays, so we provide religious and cultural accommodations and hybrid work options that are important for fostering belonging at our workplace. In this sense, we are encouraged to take holidays and schedule days off around religious, spiritual, or cultural holidays and celebrations. Some of the holidays Bakau recognizes with paid time off include Yom Kippur, National Indigenous Peoples Day, Eid al-Fitr, among others. Employees are encouraged to take this time to observe the date as they see fit. With all of these initiatives in place, people’s lives are more enjoyable and, therefore, make the world a better place. 

How would the world be better off if it were more diverse, equitable, and inclusive?

A world that prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion would be one where all people are able to thrive, be authentic, and experience safety. Currently, many people are experiencing oppression and discrimination on a daily basis on all different scales, from personal to systemic.

A world without diversity, equity, and inclusivity is a world ravaged by violent systems of oppression. We don’t want to just survive, we want to thrive. What does an imagined future look like when we have the space to breathe and hold radical hope at our centre? We want a world where we have the space to dream, a space where the most silenced voices can be heard.

Tell us about Bakau Consulting’s goals.

Bakau’s mission is to assist companies, organizations, institutions, and collectives to identify integral areas of growth, both in the short and long term. From there, we work closely to develop and implement equity strategies that are instrumental, conductive, and sustainable.

All too often, there is an overemphasis on creating diversity and not enough on sustaining diversity. It creates a revolving door effect, and people of marginalized identities can be left in a worse place than where they started when the promotion of diversity and inclusion is mishandled.

Our goal is for organizations to commit to ongoing education, unlearning biases, and equity-informed policy updates. We want to promote psychological safety, boundary-setting, and opportunities for mentorship and growth to help mitigate tokenization and create an environment where people can truly thrive.

Are there any upcoming initiatives or projects you’d like to share?

Our new facilitation program!

Facilitation is a coveted skill that brings transformative structure to the workplace and beyond. Over the years, people would often ask us if we lead Train the Trainer workshops to teach others how to facilitate their own sessions. Our facilitation skills stem from lived experience, ample time, ongoing education, and navigating discomfort.

Our Facilitation Certificate Program (FCP) is a three-month guided, content-rich program. This online program teaches essential skills and strategies for powerful, inclusive facilitation. The FCP begins by strengthening fundamentals of anti-oppression, equity, inclusion, and intersectionality. It then evolves to skills-based training, including active listening and inclusive communication, cultivating safer spaces, activating meaningful dialogue, developing workshops and agendas, and navigating group dynamics and conflict resolution. 

What do you most want people to know about Bakau Consulting?

We’d like folks to know that any organization, regardless of whether it is for-profit or not and regardless of industry or field, as long as we’re operating under capitalism, needs to stay vigilant of becoming complicit in the dehumanization of workers and labourers.

How can people help or contribute to Bakau Consulting’s mission?

Indigenous sovereignty, Black liberation, and anti-oppression are the driving forces behind our work. Any person that is committed to these values is already in community with us, seeking collective liberation.

We advise everybody, but especially people in leadership positions, to persistently honour and uplift the Indigenous communities and host nations of the lands that they’re on and to seek decolonial education (individually and as a team). We encourage everyone to pay reparations as it is feasible and to support small local businesses whenever they have the chance. 

We want to motivate people to do research on their favourite brands, businesses, and service providers — find out what they stand for and make sure their values are aligned with yours. The more intentional we are with our social, creative, and economic capital, the better we can serve our mission, which isn’t just Bakau’s, it belongs to all of us.

This story was featured in the Make The World Better Magazine: