2025Q3 Reports: EquiCL

In the last year, EquiCL has had quite a lot of activities. EquiCL has conducted its first elections, electing Christine de Kock and Zeerak Talat as Secretary as president, respectively. They have also recruited affinity group co-officers, Fatma Elsafoury and Chi Kiu (Jackie) Lo, and technology officer, Chi Kiu (Jackie) Lo. We are still recruiting a publicity officer and an accounting officer. The current organising committee of EquiCL is thus:

- Zeerak Talat (President, 2025-2027) - Christine de Kock (Secretary, 2025-2027) - Fatma Elsafoury (Community Liaison, 2025-) - Chi Kiu (Jackie) Lo (Technology officer, 2025-)

The next elections are due to be held by the fall of 2026.

The team has actively been working on establishing formal and informal relationships with 12 affinity groups and diversity and 41 inclusion officers, with the goal to establish regular meetings between the different groups to coordinate around issues faced. So far, we have identified a large number of initiatives, and two workshops (Widening NLP and EthioNLP) have agreed to be EquiCL sponsored workshops. 8 inclusion and diversity officers agreed to be members of the initiative to support it. We have also launched our website (http://equicl.org) which also lists the directory.

Finally, we have conducted an introduction session to EquiCL during NAACL and will hold another one during ACL.

Over the next year, we intend to establish stronger ties with existing diversity initiatives (such as Queer in AI) and produce a report on a particular diversity issue to the ACL.