As DEI goes hush-hush under Trump, an exclusive Martha’s Vineyard summit follows suit

The posh and picturesque island of Martha’s Vineyard boasts hotels that easily run more than $1,000 a night, six-figure cars, and mansions enjoyed by celebrities like the Obamas, Spike Lee, and Larry David. The summertime playground for the elite also happens to host a little-known summit that may be harder to get an invite to than a pretty, pretty, pretty good party.

The Martha’s Vineyard Summit celebrated its fifth year with 240 attendees during the first week in August on a 50-acre estate in Edgartown, MA. Despite having rebranded last year from the Chief Diversity Officer Summit, it still welcomed diversity leaders from across the country.

As DEI has gone incognito in the wake of the anti-DEI movement and the Trump administration’s seemingly endless efforts to control corporate America, the Martha’s Vineyard Summit has followed suit. The off-the-record event is now branded as a summit for “global thought leaders.” But its DEI roots still permeated throughout the agenda as its founder, Dani Monroe, builds a vision for the future.

“Our audience is broadening. So we’re getting COOs and CEOs, and we’ve always had CHROs [and] lawyers,” Monroe told HR Brew in an exclusive interview at the summit.

Monroe, who began her career under the late civil rights leader Price Cobbs, and has practiced DEI-adjacent work for more than 40 years, grew concerned about the DEI movement in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

“When that language started to evolve, it turned me off,” she said, claiming that the focus on white privilege was problematic. “You’re not going to engage anybody by calling them a white supremacist. If your work is to engage people and bring them along, then the language has to be something that they can connect to.”

So, in 2022 after decades of working on projects for household names like Pfizer, Cisco, and the Central Intelligence Agency, Monroe developed the summit to help leaders build diversity programs.

“The summit exists because I asked myself, ‘what if we brought a group of chief diversity officers to the vineyard?’” She thought maybe 10 people would attend, but more than 100 people joined her. “What makes the Vineyard incredible is it’s been a thought leadership place of some of the best minds in the world for decades.”

Though the event name has gone through what appears to be a diversity-hushing makeover, this year’s speakers included Stephanie Creary, a management professor and faculty director of the Relationships Across Differences roundtable at the Wharton School; Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place to Work; Kenji Yoshino, director at the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU School of Law; and George-Axelle Broussillon-Matschinga, VP of diversity and inclusion at Sephora.

Monroe said the event featured “tenets of it [DEI], but it’s not the comprehensive intent of it,” noting that the summit welcomed a physician who works in trauma-informed systems because leadership often involves secondhand trauma.

However, don’t expect Monroe to lean into the social justice approach to DEI, which she believes wasn’t about organizational change. “When you’re doing true diversity, equity, and inclusion, you are talking about ‘how do you transform a system? How do you optimize the performance of that organization?’’

Still, the summit itself proved that even storied diversity and inclusion practitioners have room for improvement. The upscale estate, for example, is accessible to the influential, across the pond from the Obamas, allowing Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett to stop by on the summit’s first day. However, it wasn’t developed with disability inclusion in mind, and did not have wheelchair accessible bathrooms, closed captions for hearing impaired guests, or an option to request accommodations during the sign up. “I gave all that stuff to my staff and said, ‘We’ve got to fix this for next year and figure out how we make it more accessible to people,’” she told HR Brew.

Monroe believes the summit should evolve with Corporate America, but other than the name change, it’s unclear how. She is focused on the future as the summit continues past its fifth anniversary. “The work for us is to really begin to hone the leadership skills of any senior executive, not just people in here,” she said. She hopes that leaders can walk away with a fuller view of all employees as human beings, and not “paint people in the boxes”—a holistic approach which is ultimately good for business. One recent report indicated that companies have not been financially harmed by continuing diversity work, while some employers that backed away faced harsh criticism from consumers.

“If the generational knowledge is going to be exchanged, it’s like ensuring they’re getting that information…you’ve got to begin to think about this one in terms of all people, because at its core, this is spirit work.”