About Celeritas
Despite many gains, the social, economic, educational, and environmental barriers and prejudices confronting Black, Latinx, and Native American people continue to challenge the academic attainment, career achievement, and socioeconomic equity for too many people of color.
The Celeritas Center for Intercultural Equity seeks to ameliorate these challenges through education, awareness, participatory action workshops, and special events.
Working in partnership with Black, Latinx, and Native American leaders and educators, America’s leading K-12 educational institutions, colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, associations, unions, foundations, and corporations, The Celeritas Center is driven to make our world not only more inclusive, but more equitable for underrepresented minorities, immigrants, women, and low-income first-generation students.
The Celeritas Center — Elevating opportunity. Advancing Access. Building equity.
Mission Statement
The mission of Celeritas Center for Intercultural Equity is to improve the progress of people of color in the U.S. through educational and career pathways as they strive to realize rewarding and fulfilling life and career outcomes.
The Knowledge Economy’s most essential supply chain for talent runs through primary, secondary, and higher education (including alternative certifications). Celeritas notes with deep concern that people of color frequently find this talent pipeline blocked or impaired due to the forces and effects of systemic racism.
Celeritas works with clients and partners to identify and eliminate these barriers in order to help ensure that all have the opportunity to move through this pipeline unimpeded and to succeed in their lives and careers based not on their racial or cultural identity but overwhelmingly on the application of their talents and the content of their character.
The Talent Pipeline Initiative
In our Knowledge Economy, there is no talent pathway more critical than that which flows from colleges and universities to employers.
However, despite the best efforts of countless scholars, activists, and professionals, systemic racism in the college to career talent pipeline—across a wide range of industries and professions—continues to hinder the individual and collective advancement of America’s Black, Latinx, and Native American students.
Given the ongoing demographic, social, and political challenges affecting American society, eliminating these impediments should be a strategic imperative for every educational institution and employer.
A Call to Action
To meet these challenges, The Talent Pipeline Initiative is engaging a select group of businesses, nonprofit organizations, and educational institutions truly committed to developing a talent-rich future—and positioned at the nexus between higher education and the managerial track of employment—to transform the talent pipeline for enduring equity, inclusion, and advancement.
Working in close collaboration, expert forum facilitators, esteemed faculty, CEOs, chief talent officers, and chief diversity officers of member employers will ultimately assemble with presidents, provosts, chief advancement, admissions/enrollment officers, and career services directors, deans, and the heads of school for member day and boarding schools, colleges and universities, several times per year in a private facilitated forum to:
- Identify impediments and strengthen pathways from secondary school and higher education to the managerial workforce by identifying and ameliorating barriers that impede the progress and ultimate economic outcomes of people of color
- Develop sustainable ways for member organizations to achieve greater equality of opportunity and equity for Black, Latinx, and other underrepresented minority students through active collaboration with peers, facilitators, leading researchers, scholars, and consultants
- Contribute comparative data insights, and analyses to speed the development of best practices for improved inclusion and equity
- Provide expert researchers with anonymized data assembled by the members over time to author and publish member-approved white papers to share actionable insights with universities, employers, and others
- Build enduring organizational cultures to equip black and latinX employees with the tools and support necessary to develop and thrive
- Assist employers in strengthening their talent pipelines’ effectiveness in an increasingly competitive marketplace
- Convene and maintain a trusted, confidential colloquium, within which members will agree upon specific performance targets—and hold one another accountable to achieve continuous improvement in the years ahead
‘Celeritas?’ What’s in a name? Chester M. Pierce, M.D., a towering figure, an inspiring intellect
“Walk with celerity,” Dr. Chester Middlebrook Pierce would admonish those who couldn’t keep up with the pace of his purposeful, brisk, gait.
Our work at the Celeritas Center for Intercultural Equity is, in part, inspired by the life story and work of pioneering Harvard psychiatrist Chester Middlebrook Pierce.
A trailblazer in every aspect of life, Dr. Pierce, graduated from Harvard College in 1948 and Harvard Medical School in 1952. During his 41 years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, Pierce was the first African-American appointed to a full professorship at Massachusetts General Hospital. Pierce also served on the faculties of Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard School of Public Health and spent 25 years as a psychiatrist with Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A consultant to institutions ranging from “Sesame Street” to NASA, Pierce coined the term “Microaggressions“ in 1970 as a description for the daily insults, slights, and other indignities visited upon African Americans by whites.
A prolific researcher and writer, Pierce also served as past-president of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the American Orthopsychiatric Association.