We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jessica Bantom. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jessica below.

Jessica, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My business focuses on a combination of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) and interior design consulting. I get a lot of interesting looks when I share that. I began my professional career in marketing and I got into IT consulting as a technical writer and business analyst. At that point, while I was a few years out of undergrad, I felt compelled to follow my passion and go back to school for my design degree. I got my master’s in interior design and continued along my two unique career paths in parallel for several years. Eventually I transitioned from IT to management consulting and a few years I ago, I made a pivot into DEIB consulting, which made me look at the whole practice of design differently. I started wondering how there could be so little diversity in the design industry when designers design for everyone. I started questioning why we never learn to address identity and culture with customers in the design process. This examination of design led me to write my book, Design for Identity: How to Design Authentically for a Diverse World. I’m currently consulting independently in both DEIB and interior design, and I’m looking to evolve my business around a platform that teaches designers and design educators to intentionally incorporate identity into the design process. I see this as a major, long-standing gap in design education and the practice of design, despite the stance that most American institutions and organizations took in the summer of 2020 to combat social and racial injustice. I see merging DEIB and design as an opportunity to evolve the design industry, to demonstrate what the values of DEIB look like in action, and to equip businesses to connect in meaningful ways with a population whose demographics are shifting significantly.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was never one of those kids who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I’ve always been curious and I’ve explored several areas of interest throughout my education and my career. In my second year of college, I thought it was ridiculous that we were supposed to pick a major that would dictate our careers for the rest of our lives. I selected English because I had a great appreciation for the skill of writing. When I got into IT consulting, I sought the opportunity to transition into a business analyst role because I cared about the user’s experience of what we were developing. As a management consultant, I pursued change management as a specialty because I cared about the many impacts organizational transformations have on the existence of their workforce. I got into design thinking because the term human-centered design seemed redundant and I wanted to explore concepts that were strangely not addressed in the practice of designing interiors for humans. And that common thread of care for the good of people has carried over to my current work in DEIB and interior design consulting. My goal is to help aspiring allies take immediate action that creates meaningful outcomes for historically excluded people. I accomplish that through facilitated learning on various DEIB concepts and topics such as inclusive leadership as well as skills practice to normalize dialogue about identity, culture, and difference. In my talks about Design for Identity, I share critical habits for culturally competent designers and the Design for Identity BlueprintTM, which maps out what culturally competent dialogue sounds like in the execution of the design process. It makes me feel good when I see and hear my clients engage in conversations about identity that they wouldn’t have had prior to our engagement. I remind them that the goal is growth, not perfection. This is messy territory but if we all learn to explore it with curiosity, vulnerability, and a willingness to learn, we can make space for everyone to exist without fear, worry, or threat of living at full capacity. That’s when we can truly honor humanity and collaborate to make significant change across systems and society.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One lesson I had to unlearn was that you can’t always take the guidance of people you’ve looked up to. I am generally very self-assured and self-motivated but there have been a few people whose careers I’ve considered to be aspirational. They were individuals who traversed nontraditional paths like mine and/or established their own unique businesses. However, as I got into community with some of these people, I realized they didn’t necessarily appreciate sharing that space with others. In one particular instance, I shared the concept for my book with someone I respected and was met with harsh criticism that sounded more like it came out of feeling threatened than a place of transparency and correction. Now, I’m quick to acknowledge and receive wise counsel but this was NOT it. I learned in that moment that you can’t share big thoughts with just anybody. Some people are intimidated by a new approach they didn’t come up with, too afraid to think as big as you do, or too afraid to go after it. Either way, you have to practice discernment when it comes to sharing your dreams. They’re precious and the wrong people will try to rob you of them.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I got some of the best advice of my career from a mentor I met shortly after I transitioned into DEIB work. He encouraged me to establish a platform and use my voice so people could get a sense of who I was as a person, not just as another consultant. Showing up as your authentic self is important in any service industry but it’s especially critical in a field that’s as people-driven as DEIB. This is probably the most personal work any organization or individual can take on because it requires us to examine ourselves in order to better understand the world around us and what has informed our narratives about it. As a consultant, it requires building trust quickly and establishing a dynamic that allows for vulnerability and communicates understanding. I was able to show people my capacity to do just that – and to model the behaviors I was encouraging them to exercise – through my writing and social media. In addition to giving people a peek into who I am, it gave me the opportunity to explore my own thoughts and to get used to exploring things that were challenging for me, which increased my empathy for my clients’ experience. Overall, I think it has allowed me to connect quickly and genuinely with clients. And that’s something they tell me they appreciate about working with me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jessicabantom.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessicabantom/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicabantom
• Other: https://jessica-bantom.medium.com/