Mixing It Up

The first meeting of Bridges, an interfaith employee-resource group at financial regulatory company FINRA, didn’t go quite as planned. The new network had hoped to kick off with a panel discussion at the organization’s Rockville, Maryland, campus, featuring two company execs discussing religious diversity and inclusion. Then, a pandemic hit.

Instead, they convened virtually for a keynote about courage by nationally recognized faith diversity speaker Sue Warnke, senior director of engineering content at Salesforce. The meeting might not have been face to face, as the inaugural management committee had hoped, but it offered “solace and a safe space for staff to connect, and created a mechanism to provide support during a difficult time,” says Denise Fields, FINRA’s associate director of inclusion and workforce compliance.

Bridges welcomes employees of all religious backgrounds—FINRA purposefully decided against launching separate faith affinity spaces “because we felt as though we would be opening