Deborah L Plummer

About Deborah L Plummer

Deborah L. Plummer, PhD is Founder/Executive Director of Getting to We, Inc, a non-profit dedicated to helping people understand their shared, core identity as humans and relate to each other without fear. Through her non-profit, she creates DEIB Edutainment™, competency-building learning experiences, and research-backed resources that create a better society for everyone.As a psychologist, university professor, author, and international leader in the field of diversity and inclusion, she brings her deeply humanist and Gestalt-trained skills to audiences and readers to examine themselves as social beings in relation to our programmed fear of “otherness.” Her work and writings introduce a relational model for managing differences that support the development of the competencies necessary to live authentically out of one’s core identity as a human being and master the challenges of diversity dynamics.Debbie has held past roles as Vice Chancellor/Chief Diversity Officer at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and Chief Diversity Officer, UMass Memorial Health Care System, Chief Diversity Officer at Cleveland Clinic, tenured Professor of Psychology at Cleveland State University where she was the founding director of the master’s degree program in diversity management at Cleveland State University, and began her career as a staff psychologist at Oberlin College, She was named by Becker’s Hospital Review as one of the Top 15 Chief Diversity Officers to Know and remains an adjunct professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. As principal consultant for D.L. Plummer & Associates (DLPA), she has supported over 100 organizations in the U.S, Canada, U.K, and India. Throughout her career, she has developed several widely-used assessment tools: Diversity Inclusion Belonging Survey (DIBS), Diversity Engagement Survey (DES), Racial Identity Status Self-Assessment (RISSA) and Antiracist Style Indicator (ASI). She has authored several books and numerous journal articles for the professional community. She currently writes for Age of Awareness and An Injustice! in Medium. Her first play, To My White Friends Who Know Me debuted at historic Karamu House and continues on tour.

Experience

1. Founder & Executive Director

   Getting To We, Inc

   Jun 2021 — Present · US

   Getting to We is a non-profit organization that uses the transformative nature of the arts to help people understand our shared, core identity as humans and relate to each other without fear. We create learning communities, research-backed resources, digital tools, visual media, DEIB edutainment, and competency-building learning experiences that create a better society for everyone. We believe that intentional multicultural, multiracial living provides us with the experiences necessary to turn us and them into we.

Education

• Kent State University

  Ph.D., Counseling Psychology

• Notre Dame College

  Bachelor's degree, English and Psychology