“Reimagine Tomorrow”
Depending on how closely you follow Disney news, you may have noticed the recent release of the Walt Disney Company’s “Reimagine Tomorrow”. Officially launched September 1st, 2021, this portal holds its own place in the Disney.com webspace, and is positioned as the company’s outward facing Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) gateway.
As someone who works in the DEI/Professional Development space as my “day job” (aka, Disney trip financing activity), I engage with this kind of stuff all the time, and I wanted to dig a little deeper to see what “Reimagine Tomorrow” was and what it meant for all of us Disney fans.
What is “Reimagine Tomorrow”?
As Disney describes it: “Reimagine Tomorrow is our way of amplifying underrepresented voices and untold stories as well as championing the importance of accurate representation in media and entertainment”. In other words, it is a digital destination where resources and highlights related to DEI can be shared and engaged. Leslie Gordan, Director of DEI Communications for the Walt Disney Company, calls Reimagine Tomorrow a “digital hub”, which seems a fairly accurate representation.
What exactly is a “digital hub”?
Reimagine Tomorrow acts like a catalogue of Disney DEI. Whether it is news, programs, initiatives, media or strategy, one can find numerous DEI topics discussed on the Reimagine Tomorrow website. Want to know more about Disney’s commitment to DEI? Want to find programs, shows or episodes that include representation from a traditionally underrepresented community? How about Disney’s strategic DEI goals? Yep. It is all there.
Want more details? Here’s how the site breaks down.
The main page for the site is a collection of tiles that acts as a highlight carousel. (No, not like the Carousel of Progress. Unfortunately, it is not that exciting. *wink*) In other words, each tile covers topics found in other areas of the site. From the “menu”, users can see that site content is broken down into three main categories: Vision, Voices & Action.
Vision includes Disney’s strategic goals (or what they call “Intentions”). It also refers to the reported DEI data points (gender and racial diversity) with regard to Disney platform content and its workforce.
Voices, as you might guess, is the part of the site that tells stories of what “reimagine tomorrow” means to executives, employees and fans. It also includes a spotlight on Young Creators and features remixes by diverse artists covering a popular Disney song.
Action is all that Disney is doing to achieve its strategic goals. This section highlights how the company matches its “beliefs with real-world action”, both internally and externally.
Copyright The Walt Disney Company
Even more details? Here you go!
The Vision section is informative. The overview of Disney’s Intentions alone gives the user some insight into what the company is looking to do in the coming years. These are high level DEI goals, broken down further into four themes: People, Content, Community & Culture.
The “People” goal is to “make progress” to ensure the workforce reflects their global customers. From a DEI standpoint, this is not a particularly impressive goal on its face, since the standard is only to make “progress”, which can be almost any forward movement. However, it does show that the organization has identified that representation is a key goal, which makes sense as a media company.
The “Content” goal is to establish inclusion standards and to ensure that by 2022, 50% of recurring characters across the organization’s scripted content will be from underrepresented backgrounds. According to data posted elsewhere in the Reimagine Tomorrow hub, scripted content currently sits in the mid-40% for both racial and gender diversity, so there is still a ways to go in a short amount of time.
The “Community” goal pledges to ensure 50% of all charitable giving is for programming/services focused on underrepresented communities. Unlike the “Content” goal, Disney does not share how far the organization is currently from the goal of 50%. As a result, it is hard to know how big a commitment this is, but measurable nonetheless. A second “Community” goal is to spend at least $1 billion with diverse suppliers by 2024. Again, sounds great, but no sense of what they have spent to date.
The “Culture” goal essentially commits to training and providing engagement opportunities internally for the purpose of diversifying the culture of the organization. This seems to include continuing to offer professional develop programs and employee resources.
In addition to the “Intensions” section, the Vision category also houses data related to diversity across its content and workforce. While this transparency is commendable, it should be noted that the data only includes racial and gender diversity, leaving out data related to LGBTQ+, Veterans and employees with disabilities. (While this is a clear omission, I can say that we see this across industries, as the later categories have not been consistently tracked through the years and, in many cases, are just now becoming part of what would be considered ‘DEI data’.) It also only shows data as of September 2020, so the user is seeing a snapshot without knowing the trends.
The Voices section is entertaining. Disney brands themselves as storytellers, so Voices presents different executives and employees talking about their experiences, backgrounds and what a “Reimagined Tomorrow” would look like to them. It also includes a section called “Recital of Remixes”, which showcases different remixes of known Disney songs, which currently are remixes of “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” from the Carousel of Progress. It also highlights a group of Young Creators by telling their stories.
The Action section is interesting. It gives an overview of many of the different programs supporting DEI that Disney takes part in or runs on their own. Yes, this can come off as a bit “showy”, but Disney’s work and participation in meaningful programming is impressive and shows Disney active in many different types of community engagement.
Copyright The Walt Disney Company
Search
At risk of over-covering this site, there is one more functionality of the Reimagine Tomorrow site that I found really interesting. By clicking “Search” at the top of almost any site page, a box drops down to allow you to search representation across the Reimagine Tomorrow digital hub. For instance, you could search for ways “Gender Diversity” was represented across Disney media. The search results bring back a list of television, film, documentary or news items that cover or highlight gender diversity. It is a great way to see what Disney, as a media company, is doing now with regard to representation.
Any magic in there?
What Disney is doing with Reimagine Tomorrow is not novel. It is no secret that most organizations have made an effort, especially in the last year or two, to make strategic DEI focused changes. However, most organizations just have a DEI page on their website, so Disney’s creation a dynamic digital space of DEI content for the world to see is a step above. It also appears that Reimagine Tomorrow is meant to change and update as DEI changes and updates, so we will have to see what else they do with it.
Let’s face it…performative DEI can feel soulless, but Disney is a media organization that speaks through performance. While having the “digital hub” that highlights all the things Disney does to improve DEI in the organization might seem disingenuous, it is hard to imagine how else a media titan would engage in these conversations.
What is magic here is that cast members and consumers alike can see that Disney has focused on DEI by looking at concrete examples of what they have done, where they sit with regard to some of their goals, and what they plan to do to make changes. Are any of the statements groundbreaking? Probably not. However, you are looking at an organization that is arguably already more diverse than most companies its size, and looking to do even better. While it is true that Reimagine Tomorrow is not much more than a well marketed statement piece, it is also a way for Disney to say very publicly that they are committed to doing more. Now, they just have to do it.
At the end of the day, if you are a kid dreaming about working in the tech, media or performance industry when you grow up, and an organization as large as Disney says you can do that “thing” regardless of your background, that is pretty cool. But if the organization then shows you people doing that “thing” that come from a similar background as you or that look like you, then that can change the world.
