PLMA's Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

PLMA is committed to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community amongst its load management practitioners and the communities they serve. We celebrate our differences and promise to foster an environment of equity and mutual respect for all members.

PLMA's DEI Charter:
PLMA seeks to ensure its actions and content reflect our values through both internal and external opportunities. We seek to represent the diversity of the community we serve and foster a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture for members, leadership, and the energy industry. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion should exist across the breadth (functions) and depth (hierarchy) of PLMA. The group will work to integrate best practices for DEI into policies, activities, and content, and will serve as an advisory body to PLMA. In addition, the group will provide research, recommendations, event support, and policy guidance to leadership and membership when appropriate.

One of the group’s main tasks is to encourage, facilitate and support Affinity Groups. In addition to encouraging content at PLMA conferences and presenting DR Dialogue DEI success stories/education, the group will curate and recommend podcasts, short videos and other educational material, such as searching out and sharing best practices from other organizations to become an example to the energy industry.

Participants in the initiative will collaborate to increase DEI knowledge, and increase DEI visibility and awareness. They will help develop recommendations for training, policies, and practices that foster a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture for the member practitioners we serve. Members will help regularly review our tools, policies, and practices to pro-actively make recommendations for changes that implement nondiscrimination toward all prospective, current, and future members. Where possible, this group will also seek to enable Justice related aspects of DEI.

DEI In Action at PLMA:
Projects/Programs. We will proactively and intentionally seek out demonstration and pilot projects/programs that showcase how to improve DEI within load management and how load management can provide practical benefits to traditionally underserved communities.

Policies. When contemplating, crafting and updating PLMA policies, we will seek solutions that create more equitable outcomes and do not increase burdens on traditionally underrepresented members of our community.

Leadership. We will proactively recruit and develop volunteers, board, executive committee, and officers who bring more diverse backgrounds and firsthand experience with diversity, equity, and inclusion to our team. We aim to have a team and a board that is reflective of the diverse community serve by programs our members offer.

Events. We will strive to give visibility and “airtime” to speakers whose voices are not traditionally heard, and who are more reflective of traditionally underrepresented members of our community. We will strive to have events that are accessible and comfortable for all of our attendees. 

Process. We encourage all individuals to participate in various levels of decision-making and to hold us accountable for meeting these goals and ambitions. We will use this document to shape our strategic plan and our organizational development in the coming years.