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NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA)
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About the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for DEIA
The Fiscal Years 2023–2027 NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) (the Plan) articulates NIH’s commitment to embracing, strengthening, and integrating DEIA across all NIH activities to achieve the agency’s mission. It represents one facet of NIH’s stewardship of federal dollars and contributes to maintaining transparency and accountability to its community.
As NIH works to turn discovery into health, the agency recognizes that principles of DEIA are intrinsic to the achievement of better health for all. This Plan prioritizes NIH’s role as a people-centered organization by uplifting its community and articulating NIH’s vision for enhancing DEIA in its operations, workforce, and research. The Plan demonstrates NIH’s commitment to integrating the principles of DEIA into all of its processes, policies, and programs. It also includes approaches to advance DEIA within NIH and the broader biomedical and behavioral research enterprise, including within its workforce and through the research it supports.
NIH created a two-page overview that summarizes the content of the Plan.
NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for DEIA Framework
The Framework of the Fiscal Years 2023–2027 NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for DEIA is harmonized to the Framework of the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2021–2025, with NIH’s DEIA priorities organized around accomplishments, needs, opportunities, and challenges in three key areas or Objectives—Operations, Workforce, and Research—and their underlying subobjectives. For each subobjective, goals are identified, along with strategies to achieve these goals. To illustrate the types of activities that may drive progress toward each goal, a sampling of new and ongoing activities is included under many of the strategies. This is not a comprehensive list of all the activities currently underway at NIH; it is anticipated that implementation of the Plan will build on those ongoing activities and introduce many new approaches toward achieving the objectives, goals, and strategies outlined in this Plan over the next 5 years. There are also three Crosscutting Themes—promoting transparency, communication, and engagement; fostering sustainable change; and harnessing data—which are common approaches across all objectives of the Plan that are integral to realizing NIH’s vision.
Strategic Planning Process
The Plan was developed by a working group with members from every NIH Institute and Center and many Offices within the Office of the Director to represent the range of NIH’s activities and research portfolio. Comprised of more than 100 people, the working group was co-chaired by NIH’s Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity; the Director of the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; and the Director of the Office of Human Resources. It was coordinated by the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives. Internal and external feedback on the proposed framework for the Plan was gathered through a Request for Information and webinar. Additionally, an inventory of more than 1,700 NIH DEIA activities was developed, a sampling of which are included as illustrative examples throughout the Plan.
In October 2021, NIH began developing the Plan to cover fiscal years 2023-2027. The process was designed to be transparent, grounded in DEIA, focused on science and good stewardship of research, guided by evidence, and informed by NIH’s many community members.
The strategic planning process entailed five phases: (1) pre-planning; (2) developing the Plan framework; (3) gathering input from internal and external community members; (4) refining the framework, selecting content, and drafting text; and (5) finalizing and publishing the Plan. The following are key activities undertaken during these five phases.
This page last reviewed on March 20, 2023