Piper Slowinski
Piper Slowinski is the Organizational Development Senior Manager at YW Boston. As a part of the InclusionBoston team, her work focuses on helping organizations succeed in their DEI change efforts.
Piper’s path to her current work started back when she was 10 years old and diagnosed with a form of childhood cancer. Her experience having a range of temporary disabilities growing up led Piper to work with the disability community as an advocate and ally. Most recently, they spent 11 years working with the nonprofit Partners for Youth with Disabilities (PYD) in a variety of roles.
During their time at PYD, Piper’s work focused on uplifting voices from the disabled community to build more accessible and inclusive organizations and communities. She developed an online learning platform and e-learning curriculum focused on accessibility and disability inclusion principles for professionals. They also helped create the Disability Mentoring Certification — a 16-week program through which organizations are trained on disability inclusion principles and guided through the process of applying them to their work and organization.
Piper has trained and consulted with hundreds of organizations both large and small —nonprofits, for-profits, arts organizations, summer camps, community centers, and more. This work showed her just how hard change management is and the many common pitfalls that can happen along the way in even the most enthusiastic organizations. Given the barriers people of marginalized identities face in workplaces and communities, it’s crucial that DEI efforts are set up for success and lead to lasting changes. As a late-blooming queer trans woman, Piper believes we owe it to ourselves and each other to ensure we are proactively and intentionally building spaces where everyone is empowered, supported, and treated with dignity and respect.
Piper has a B.A. from Gettysburg College in a self-created major focusing on child development and disability, and a Masters in Nonprofit Leadership from the Questrom School of Business at Boston University.
When she’s not at work, Piper enjoys hiking, swimming, gay romance novels, video games, and geeking out over all things sci-fi/fantasy. She is active in local community organizing efforts and has volunteered for her entire adult life as a camp counselor to youth with disabilities and serious illnesses.