Public Media Diversity Leaders Initiative

Public media professionals across all disciplines and experience levels will benefit from participating in a PMDLI cohort. 

We encourage you to nominate others at your station and your colleagues throughout the system. When you nominate someone, we will reach out to them with more information to see if they’re interested in participating. Nominating others is free and can be done by filling out this brief form.  

Participants are selected from applicants across the country to reflect the public media ecosystem—region served, audience, station licensee type, affiliate organizations—as well as various diversity dimensions.  

Public media leaders across the country are grappling with the systems changes necessary to diversify workplaces, boards, content, and audience—changes that go to the heart of public media’s mission. Today’s heightened awareness of racial and other inequities in American institutions has magnified and accelerated organizational and stakeholder expectations that public media leaders establish diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as core values in their organizations and build them into their behaviors, systems, and culture. 

This transformative program has graduated more than 200 Diversity Fellows from over 100 radio and television stations, and 17 national organizations. With capacity for up to 70 additional participants each year, the program has become an important element of the professional development pathway that supports public media leadership in DEI work.  

Visit the PMDLI website for program curriculum, PMDLI graduate rosters, and more.

DEI work has become a polarizing topic and political target in some areas of the country. PMDLI will discuss how to do the work at the local level while equipping participants with tools to address perception, political, and legal challenges.  

Each cohort has access to the course on Public Media Learns. All alumni have access to an ongoing PMDLI space on Public Media Learns to continue the collaboration and discourse.  

The Riley Institute empowers emerging and established leaders—across sectors and throughout society—with the knowledge and tools to advance equity and drive social and economic progress in South Carolina and beyond. They work to strengthen public education; promote the power of diversity to help teams, organizations, and communities thrive; and elevate informed, evidence-based approaches to critical public issues. 

January 9, 2025

$2,000