The APS Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Alliance

APS-IDEA (the Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Alliance of the American Physical Society) is an organizational change network (Singer et al. 2019) founded in 2019 with the mission to empower and support physics departments, laboratories, and other organizations to identify and enact strategies for improving equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). It will do so by establishing a community of transformation. With initial support from the APS Innovation Fund, this project currently engages 99 teams in physics organizations (US and some international physics departments, national or other large labs, and some physics research collaborations) totaling almost 1500 physicists and EDI advocates. The teams are grouped into twenty-one online learning communities each consisting of 4 to 5 teams having similar institutional context. These groups meet monthly with support from a facilitator to learn from and support each other in their goals of institutional transformation. The project has been developed by a Steering Committee of 11 people with input from an Advisory Board, facilitators, and team members.

APS-IDEA has a philosophy and project theory of change flowing from our vision and mission together with a set of four guiding principles:

• Practice shared leadership across differences in social power
• Center people whose identities are marginalized
• Utilize sensemaking to foster individual and organizational learning
• Implement research-based change-management methods from the social sciences

We are considering adding a fifth principle prioritizing building relationships before attempting to solve problems. In addition to these guiding principles, APS-IDEA's philosophy incorporates theories for achieving second-order organizational change (Kezar 2018) as well as elements of social movement organizations.

APS-IDEA has two main goals. The first is to foster empowered teams within physics organizations in the network. The second is to build a community of transformation (Kezar, Gehrke, and Bernstein-Sierra 2018) to address the deeply entrenched problems of inequity in the physical sciences.