Carson Group Launches Free Online Diversity Course for Advisors

Carson Group’s latest diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiative is a free online course launched last week and promoted on Twitter that was designed for advisors throughout the industry.

Standout features of the new course, called “Missed Opportunity: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Financial Services Industry,” include videos with Sonya Dreizler and other diversity experts, as well as a downloadable DEI toolbox providing such tools as a checklist and templates for important DEI policies that organizations should have in place, according to Sarah Cain, vice president of coaching and consulting at Carson Group.

“We started working on this last summer,” when there was “a lot of social unrest due to social injustice,” at the same time the pandemic was happening, she told ThinkAdvisor in a phone interview.

“What we saw initially was all these companies — in all industries, not just ours — who came out making statements, saying things on social media, sending emails and then that quickly faded and kind of fell into the background,” she recalled. “I saw that in our industry as well and it really bothered me because we have a huge opportunity to make this a better industry for everyone.”

So she started thinking about “what do we do really well at Carson,” and it is that “we make things actionable for financial advisors,” she noted. “I thought we had an opportunity to help advisors who know we have a problem in the industry, want to do something about it but they’re not exactly sure what they can do.”

Therefore, the company developed the new online course that provides “great information, actionable steps, checklists, templates and scripts so that advisors and other professionals in our industry can make meaningful progress in the diversity and inclusion space,” she explained.

The course was made available to everyone in the industry for “free — no strings attached,” she noted.