City of Boston Celebrates 100 New Equity and Inclusion Ambassadors at 2025 E&I Academy Summit

BOSTON, MA – The City of Boston’s Equity and Inclusion (E&I) Cabinet proudly hosted the 2025 E&I Academy Summit, a full-day gathering at Rabb Hall in the Boston Public Library that brought together the newest E&I Academy cohorts, alumni, facilitators, and colleagues from across City departments.

This year’s Summit, themed “Sustaining Ourselves and Our Work,” centered on strengthening the skills, relationships, and collective care practices that empower Boston’s municipal workforce to serve residents more equitably. Through reflection, applied learning, and celebration, the Summit honored the commitment of the 100 City of Boston employees who completed the 2025 E&I Academy series and are now E&I Ambassadors. 

“This E&I Academy is building a City for Everyone by providing staff with the tools, history, and best practices to help us do better by our residents every single day,” said Chief Mariangely Solis Cervera, Chief of Equity and Inclusion. 

The Summit featured a dynamic program designed to support participants in grounding themselves, deepening their understanding of equity principles, and applying those tools in their daily work. The agenda included:

• Keynote Workshops: Sustaining Ourselves and Our Work, Part 1 and 2, led by Ky Kennedy (PleaseCallMeKy), Robbie Adams (Office of Language and Communications Access), and Flo Glynn (E&I Program Administrator), explored collective community care, neurodiversity, and the roles that public servants play in systems-level social change.

   

• Breakout Sessions: Participants engaged in immersive, skills-building sessions including Healing Liberation: Using the Power of Healing Circles for Grounding and Connection, Why Sleep Isn’t Enough: The 7 Types of Rest We All Need, and Just Sustainability: Climate and Our Communities.

   

• Interactive Activities: A warm-up cohort learning game, movement and reflection breaks, a community altar honoring cultural connection, and an optional lunchtime zine-making workshop encouraged community building throughout the day.

   

• Capstone Project Launch: Ambassadors received guidance on their upcoming Capstone Project—an opportunity to apply a key E&I tool or concept from the E&I Academy series or express their learning through art. They will present their projects during Impact Presentation Sessions in January 2026. 

“Every year, the E&I Academy brings together our City of Boston staff from across all our departments to foster trust and belonging across difference, to support cross-departmental collaboration, and to put equity and inclusion into practice in everything we do. I am honored to learn with our E&I Ambassadors every year to actively and even more impactfully create a City for Everyone,” shared Flo Glynn, E&I Program Administrator.

“When you are committing to being an E&I ambassador, this means that you are advancing social change in your own way, within your existing social change ecosystems,” said Ky Kennedy, E&I Academy Summit keynote speaker and Co-Founder of Autistics Unmasked. They continued, “ We are more effective and we sustain things better when we actually build into our connections and build into these specific roles that we can play.”

Launched as a pilot in 2023, the E&I Academy has continued to expand each year. With 100 participants completing the 2025 cohorts, the E&I Academy now includes a total of 217 E&I Ambassadors across the City’s workforce—employees who are committed to applying equitable practices, strengthening cross-departmental collaboration, and fostering belonging for Boston’s residents and colleagues. we are more effective and we sustain things better when we actually build into our connections and build into these specific roles that we can play. 

ABOUT THE E&I ACADEMY

The Equity and Inclusion Academy, part of the City of Boston's Equity and Inclusion Cabinet, is designed to equip City employees with the knowledge, skills, and strategies to foster an inclusive, equitable environment across all sectors of city government.

For more information, visit boston.gov/equity.

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