Everyone has a story to tell, and associations can take advantage of their vast resource of member stories to prompt important conversations, particularly about diversity and inclusion.

That's what the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) is aiming to do with its new Creating Inclusive Communities Project, which showcases HR professionals' stories and celebrates their diverse perspectives. It consists of personal stories, told through videos and portraits, along with "conversation starters" and other facilitator resources on several topics.

The message is that the community is richer when people listen to each other's stories. Some of the pieces in the collection focus more on people's experiences than their demographics. For example:

• A man shares his experience raising kids in a small, rural community and teaching them to accept people who are different from them.
• A woman in a leadership role talks about the microaggressions—brief slights or insults—that she has felt at work.
• A man who grew up in poverty talks about what it was like to be the first in his family to go to college.

Other topics include immigrant employees, race and ethnicity, LGBT issues, and challenges deaf people face.

CUPA-HR sees the project as a way to celebrate the diversity of HR professionals in higher education, to initiate conversations about D+I, and to provoke action to create more inclusive communities. The goal: to improve institutions' cultural understanding and competence.

It works because it focuses on the human element. "People do not want to hear statistics," says Andy Brantley, CUPA-HR's president and CEO. "It's through stories that we connect."

The project uses videos and portraits "as a resource for creating dialogue and understanding," says Candace Baer, vice president for human resources at the Rhode Island School of Design and a CUPA-HR board member. "It allows people to understand each other."

The school had used images in a similar initiative and saw an impact on its campus. CUPA-HR worked with the same photographer, Adam Mastoon, to develop its project.

"I do think art transforms," Baer says. The project "uses the power of images to bring about people's voices."

Diversity and inclusion are "core to who we are as an association and as HR professionals," Brantley says. "It's not acceptable for us to view diversity and inclusion as someone else's job." He added that many HR professionals have made a commitment to D+I but may not be sure where to start. Because translating talk into action can be difficult, CUPA-HR hopes this project can help the process along.

"One of the traps that employers get into is that [D+I] becomes a numbers game, as opposed to creating an inclusive culture," Brantley says. It's important to take the time to celebrate unique perspectives, because diversity makes us better together, he added.

CUPA-HR members are sharing these stories with their campus colleagues. But the project's utility is not limited to higher education or HR. The stories themselves, as well as the conversation starters for each topic, are not specific to HR or college campuses, so they could be used more broadly. The video and portrait on microaggressions, for example, could be used "to have that conversation in another setting," says Leah Burns, chief development officer at CUPA-HR. The project's approach "can help associations envision what diversity and inclusion can be."

"To learn and grow as professionals, to be relevant in 2016 and beyond, diversity and inclusion has to be a core element that drives the work of every association," Brantley says.