We, like you, have been heartbroken by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbury, and the countless other innocent Black lives that have been taken away or held back from their full potential through centuries of oppression. We fully and unequivocally support the Black Lives Matter movement, and will do everything we can to ensure the massive outpouring of support will lead to meaningful, lasting change. Like many other organisations, we’re making donations, using our platform to share resources, evaluating our policies and hiring practices, and taking the time to learn right now.
We recognise, though, that nothing we do as a business in a short period of time will overcome the centuries of injustice that have led to this moment. We recognize that meaningful change will require long-term commitment, and we’re writing this to make that long-term commitment as a business. This is Chapter 1, and we commit to updating you here quarterly on what we’re doing to ensure we’re making meaningful progress towards creating a more diverse, equitable and inclusive business that better reflects and supports our communities.
As cheesy as it sounds, it’s true – we started Who Gives A Crap to make the world a better place. It’s our mission to address some major injustices we see in the world. While we’ve donated millions of dollars to fund sanitation projects and alleviate poverty around the globe, we haven’t been active enough in fighting the centuries of injustice in our own backyards. Who Gives A Crap is a small but incredible group of people spread out across 4 continents. Each of our home countries has their own challenges, and we’re committed to helping find solutions in each of our communities.
Over the years, we’ve worked to foster diversity in our global team, including at the Leadership Team level. Even still, out of the 5 people on our Executive team (our most senior leadership level), only one is non-white and only one is female. We’ve never taken an internal diversity survey, but we’d guess that none of our employees would identify as Black or indigenous. This is unacceptable.
Our team is not as diverse and inclusive as it should be. We need to be doing more, and it won’t happen by itself.
How we got here
We’ve been reflecting a lot on how we got to this point, and I think the biggest learning we’ve had comes from ‘How to Be an Antiracist,’ by Ibram X. Kendi (which we highly recommend!). At the heart of the book is a very simple, but incredibly profound concept – there is no such thing as “non-racist.” Because the status quo always perpetuates racial inequity, we must actively work to create equity. Otherwise, we’re inherently perpetuating, and contributing to racism.
At Who Gives A Crap, we’ve implemented policies and practices to ensure the candidates who make it into our system are treated equally, and that we’re not actively applying bias in our recruiting process. These policies have kept us from slipping backwards, but they haven’t helped us move forwards, either. We haven’t worked proactively enough to create racial equity in our team, which, by Kendi’s definition, means these policies have been racist in nature, despite their good intentions.
What we’re doing about it
As we said in the beginning, we’re taking short-term actions to support the urgency of this movement, while also committing to larger, longer-term change internally at Who Gives A Crap. Here’s a synopsis of what we’re doing in the short-term:
We’ve donated $10,000 USD to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to provide legal support for the protesters and the people leading this movement.
We’ve donated $5,000 USD to the Greening Youth Foundation to connect under-represented youth to the outdoors and careers in conservation, ultimately working towards climate justice.
We’ve donated $5,000 USD to Inneract Project to empower the next generation of Black and Brown Designers.
We’re using our social media and our blog to continue the conversation about racial equity, and share resources our team have found helpful
We’ll be featuring guest bloggers to continue the conversation over the next several months, using our platform to amplify their voices.
We’ve created a forum internally for our team to share their learnings, questions and feedback.
We’ve committed to sharing quarterly updates here on our blog, to ensure we’re making meaningful change quickly, but that the change lasts and continues to grow over time.
For the longer-term, we’ve been interviewing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consultants, and hope to kick off our work with them within the next few weeks. We’re looking for a partner who can help us identify the biases built into our systems and processes, have the challenging (but necessary!) conversations about what we need to do differently, and rethink how we make Who Gives A Crap a leading example of how strong a diverse team can be. We’ll be redesigning our recruiting, onboarding, learning and development approaches, launching new Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies, and we’ll begin to measure our progress towards making our teams more inclusive. We believe in measuring what matters. And this matters.
We’re only in Chapter 1, so this is just the beginning of our journey. Our team, now more than ever, has shown their passion for using our business to model the kind of change we want to see. Together, we’re confident in our ability to make meaningful progress, and we’ll keep you updated every step of the way.