Health Equity Resource Library 
Equity and Inclusion Lens Handbook

City of Ottawa, City for All Women Initiative (CAWI)

The Equity and inclusion lens handbook will help you apply an equity lens to a wide range of public health activities.

The City of Ottawa and the City for All Women Initiative (CAWI) developed this guide to support Ottawa's work to embed equity into its programs and operations. The guide is divided into seven parts:

1. Terms to get started: Clarifies key concepts.
2. Consider your diversity: Guides the reader to reflect on their personal experiences of inclusion, exclusion, advantage, and disadvantage, and connects that reflection to the broader work of creating equity and inclusion for others.
3. Check assumptions: Provides a tool to help discussion participants inhabit the perspective of people who feel excluded from our work; helps reveal the impact of our assumptions on our programs and services.
4. Snapshots: Includes short paragraphs about people who are at risk for exclusion in our workplaces and communities based on their identities. This is a subsection of "check assumptions."
5. Ask about inclusion: Identifies three questions to ask in all of the work we do, in order to address equity and inclusion:
   1. Who is not included in the work you do?
   2. What could contribute to this exclusion?
   3. What can you do differently to ensure inclusion?
6. Be an ally—take action: Provides a list of characteristics of allies to those who risk exclusion.
7. Apply to your work: Includes specific reflection questions to help the reader consider equity and inclusion within 11 broad areas of organizational activities, including communications, engaging community and staff, gathering information/research, leading and supervising, monitoring and evaluation, planning, services, projects, and events, policy development, recruiting and hiring, strategic planning, training, and working with people. Each of these areas also includes a brief description of a promising practice.

When to use

The entire guide is a quick read and can be helpful for agencies looking for concrete steps to start working on equity and inclusion. You can also use the sections independently without going step-by-step through the guide.

Use the terms starting on page 10 to help staff understand basic equity and inclusion concepts.

Use the image on page 15 to show how the structures and systems in our work and services may contribute to inequities and exclusion.

Use the reflection questions and subsequent examples (pages 24- 45) to ensure equity and inclusion are included in the conversation where they might otherwise not be considered. ​

Find similar resources

• By practice: equip staff
• By type: assessment
• By goal: help staff understand equity