The Advisory Council of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communications Management has taken its first concrete steps toward building a practical, collaborative framework for Diversity, Equality and Inclusion ((DEI) implementation across different jurisdictions, cultures and legal environments, with a clear commitment to keeping it alive through feedback rather than letting it gather dust in a drawer.

Jennifer Muir, Founder of She Advocates Australia and moderator of the Global Alliance webinar Master Class on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Implementation, revealed the council’s early priorities in her closing remarks at the session.

She disclosed that the council’s first action has been to take stock of what already exists globally.

“We’ve got a lot of organisations around the world that already have things on paper around DEI, so a lot of tools, rules and resources that already exist that are free,” she said, adding that the council is working to evaluate these and bring them together in one accessible place.

“What we want to see is if we can put together a clearinghouse for people to tap into, with evidence-based, evaluated resources and tools,” she said.

Reaching out to all Global Alliance members is the council’s immediate first priority, Muir said, after which the focus will shift to identifying programmes that can align with the framework and help kick-start policy and programme development within different jurisdictions.

She acknowledged that this is not a one-size-fits-all undertaking, noting that different countries bring different norms, cultural barriers and legal frameworks to the table. “It needs to be considered in different jurisdictions given norms and cultural barriers and all the things they need to consider,” she said.

On the question of how the framework should actually be built and applied, Muir echoed a point that had been raised powerfully by Dr Nia Sarinastiti of Indonesia earlier in the session.

“One of the points that Nia made in a couple of different ways is that in order to do this properly, you need to do it in a collaborative way with the people that it is going to support,”

Muir said. “You really need to go on a journey of engagement and collaboration. That goes into the data as well. So when you are actually trying to build the framework, you need to know what the baseline is.”

She warned against the most common failure mode in DEI policy work, the moment when good intentions become buried documents.

“There is nothing worse than issues getting written up as policies and going in a drawer and never being referred to again,” she said. Her prescription was clear: leadership engagement must come first and it must come from the top.

“Before you even begin an engagement programme, your leadership team needs to actually have to solve this from the top,” she said.

She described this leadership commitment as the single most important factor separating programmes that work from those that do not.

“Where I have seen the best programmes working is when it is tied to KPIs and tied to a whole lot of other things that the management team cannot unravel. That is where I have seen them working and being spread through an organisation, breathed through it rather than just being an extra page at the end of the colleague policy framework,” she said.

Muir also spoke about how the framework itself was developed, describing a process built on rigorous global consultation rather than top-down prescription.

“We developed it through significant consultation across the world with the profession, and we tested it so that it reflects different regions, cultural barriers and the legal frameworks that are in place,” she said.

Crucially, she was clear that this is not a document the council intends to finalise and forget. “As a framework it will not be a set and forget. As we get feedback from people who pick it up and use it, we will tweak it where it needs to be tweaked,” she said, adding that the council also plans to develop instructions and guidelines to accompany the framework so that organisations which have found it challenging to apply can navigate it more easily.

For Muir, the overarching message from the entire master class was one of patient, collaborative, context-sensitive progress. The framework the Global Alliance Advisory Council is building is not designed to impose a single global standard but to give communications professionals everywhere a living, practical tool that can flex to the realities of their own communities, organisations and legal environments, while keeping the core commitment to justice, equity and genuine inclusion at its centre.