Tori Bell is helping companies ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is not an afterthought.
Interest In DEI Work
The Agnes Scott College graduate’s interest in DEI work was sparked during her early career stages in investment banking in Atlanta, GA, at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. She served as an analyst and associate program manager between 2012 and 2015, managing the summer analyst program, her LinkedIn mentions.
She later joined Jopwell, a career platform for minority students and professionals. The platform had received backing from a number of investors, including Magic Johnson, who had participated in a $3.25 million seed round in 2016, according to Inc. magazine.
“What I saw during my time there was that you can hire diverse individuals into these major companies, but if they’re not prepared to support them it’s kind of like you’re yelling into a void,” Bell told AFROTECH™. “You’re not really doing much to move the needle, because you’re going to see turnover because the company is not prepared to support them in a holistic way.”
Facebook Inspires Launch Of Inclusion Unpacked
Bell then transitioned to New York for a role at Facebook, now called Meta, where she was hired as a university internship recruiter and moved up the ranks to manage internal culture and community. In 2018, she established an Employee Resource Group for Black women, inspired by an orientation class of over 200 people, where she noticed that very few looked like her.
“And so, yeah, I created the employee resource group,” she said. “And at the time, I thought, ‘OK, great. I’m creating this ERG as a way for Black women to connect at the company.’ It was both for us to connect but then also to share our collective experiences, good or bad. I’m sure you’ve seen the articles around big tech and how they have diversity issues with Black women being under-valued, underpaid. They have more HR violations than any other group within their organizations like that. That’s a problem within big tech, not just Facebook.”
As the group expanded to over 3,000 members around the world, it sparked Bell’s mission to guide other companies in developing diverse workplaces from day one. This led to the launch of Inclusion Unpacked in June 2022, supported by an investment from Columbia Business School, where she earned her MBA on a full scholarship.
She added, “Why don’t we capture companies early and help them embed diversity into the ethos of their companies, versus having all of these like reactive programmings and initiatives that seem to not move the needle. And so a few years into my role at Facebook, I created this idea for Inclusion Unpacked, which was to provide tangible diversity resources to startup founders to help them along their journey.”
How Inclusion Unpacked Is Moving The Needle
For founders and teams within large enterprise organizations seeking services, the first step is to fill out an onboarding quiz. Their results will help Inclusion Unpacked assess their DEI journey and share a subscription plan contingent upon company size and the level of support needed to meet expectations. After signing on, they will be able to connect to its network of diversity experts, who collectively have more than 200 years of experience in the DEI space, according to information shared with AFROTECH™.
“I would love every new company that’s emerging to be an Inclusion Unpacked member company, and bake diversity and inclusion into the ethos of their business early on, and get things right from the beginning,” she expressed. “As a Black woman that’s experienced a lot in the space I want other Black women that come up behind me, whether they choose to work in corporate spaces or they choose to entrepreneur, to be able to thrive, to be able to be in organizations that care about them and support them and have the right tools to do so… I’m just really passionate about corporations getting things right from the beginning and putting their money where their mouth is.”
