Where the door stays open

“It’s a challenging time, but we will get through it,’’ said Georgianna Melendez, codirector of the Commonwealth Compact, a statewide initiative to make businesses more welcoming to people of all backgrounds. (Globe publisher P. Steven Ainsley is a cofounder of the organization.) Layoffs in a down economy often take the greatest toll among the most recent hires, and for Massachusetts employers that want to build more diverse workforces to stay on track, Melendez said, they should “not let diversity happen to them, but embrace diversity and prepare for it, because it will happen.’’

Here are three Massachusetts employers striving for diversity despite cutbacks. They’ve helped the disadvantaged to climb the internal ladder, and when possible, sought employees from all segments of the community.

Lowell General Hospital: Lowell has long been home to vibrant immigrant communities, from the European laborers who worked in its textile mills more than a century ago to the Southeast Asians, Latinos, and Brazilians who have arrived in recent decades. Its diversity is reflected in the patients who come to Lowell General, said Amanda MacFadgen, manager of public relations, and the hospital wants its workforce to match.

“We look for as many ways as possible to get involved with and recruit from the community,’’ she said, which range from sponsor ship of cultural festivals to recruiting from immigrant populations.

In 2005, the hospital set a goal of increasing the number of employees from racial and ethnic minorities by 20 percent every year. With only 188 new hires so far, down from an average 300 in previous years, it may fall short this year. But aided by a state grant, Lowell General launched a program to help entry-level workers earn degrees and move up in the hospital hierarchy. Belen Tricoche, a 50-year-old utility aide in the hospital’s intensive care unit, is getting financial help and coaching to earn a nursing assistant certification.

“I always wanted to go back to school,’’ said Tricoche, who is from Puerto Rico and has worked at Lowell General for 20 years. “I always wanted to do something with patient care, to feel like I am helping somebody.’’

Employ + Ability: By accident more than design, Employ + Ability’s workforce is 35 percent nonwhite. That’s by virtue of the specific mission of the organization. The nonprofit maker of medical devices, based in Braintree, defines diversity as inclusive of people with a range of abilities, rather than a range of skin tones. People with physical and intellectual disabilities make up 65 percent of its employees. “We’re just naturally diverse because disabilities cross all racial barriers,’’ said Jim Kane, director of business development.

Every year, the employees of Employ + Ability, many of whom give up a dollar in disability benefits for each dollar they earn, make more than 10 million cold and hot packs for use in sports and in medicine. Eleven workers were laid off last year, but the company hopes to hire them back. To create the jobs, it started a new food packaging product line.

Managers said the revenue from their products, while substantial, is incidental to the company’s true goal: to help people with disabilities feel the sense of satisfaction that comes from working. “Their connection to the world of work is in many ways deeper and stronger than that of the average person,’’ said chief executive Mike Rodrigues.

Gilbane: In the past, when construction project managers from Gilbane sat down with the members of public school boards or town committees to talk about building projects, they noticed that the faces across the table often looked different from their own. “We recognized that our clients were diverse, but we weren’t diverse enough,’’ said Ryan Hutchins, district manager for the Massachusetts branch of the construction company, established more than a century ago in Rhode Island.

In 2004, Gilbane crafted a plan to make the company more representative of the communities it worked in: Half of its college and university hires each year would come from racial and ethnic minority groups. While the Massachusetts office has met the goal, managers say they still have a long way to go to increase the share of minorities in their ranks and in top management - an objective they say will be easier to achieve as more older employees retire in the next 10 to 20 years.

This year, the Boston office launched a program to give scholarships, help with SAT preparation and college applications, and to offer internships to two minority students from Madison Park High School in Roxbury Crossing. The students spent the summer working and learning project management at Gilbane. “The hope is to someday get them to come work for us,’’ said Hutchins.