Before I reflect on our DEI Committee’s progress from the last quarter, know that our hearts go out to Jacob Blake, his family, and to all of the Black and Brown lives that have been lost and murdered by police. EverTrue stands in solidarity with all of those who are suffering in the face of relentless and systemic racism in America.
And as such, it has taken me a while to compose my Q2 reflections for EverTrue’s DEI Committee. So much has happened in our country in these last four months that it is often difficult to find words, let alone the “right” ones. It sometimes feels like our DEI Committee isn’t making enough progress, isn’t accomplishing enough, especially in the grand scheme of things… but we are committed and showing up.
If you’re new here, check out my reflections from Q1. If you’re ready to continue on this journey with us, read below for what we’ve been up to.
- We’ve continued to host regular weekly meetings. We now record these meetings and take minutes so that committee members who can’t make it can still catch up and be up to date with next steps.
- We’ve seen the formation of a #true-ally Slack channel. It is a safe, brave space in which EverCrew members can share resources, talk about current events and simply be there for one another.
- We’ve become more intentional in our hiring. Since we do not have a formal HR department, this means that in the past when it came to hiring we often leaned on our individual (and often homogenous) networks. However, we are now looking beyond our LinkedIn connections, working hard to ensure our job descriptions are equitable, attending virtual job fairs, doing cold outreach, and being extremely thoughtful in how we approach the interview process.
- We’ve partnered with Hack Diversity and are bringing on an intern this fall to join our engineering team. She will be putting her front-end and design skills to use!
- We’ve helped our Executive Leadership team decide to partner with the Ron Brown Scholarship Program. We look forward to providing more of an update in the coming months.
- We hosted a virtual coffee hour on Juneteenth which gave folks the opportunity to come learn about the significance of the day and talk about it in a safe space.
- We publicly celebrated Pride Month by updating our logo everywhere it was visible, including right in the platform for our thousands of users. Internally, we shared a weekly series called “Featured Figure Friday” in Slack where we highlighted the history and legacy of individuals from the Black LGBTQ+ community.
- We’ve updated our career pages to better reflect who we are and what we believe in this remote-world.
And finally, we put our pen to paper (or rather, keys to a Google Doc) and collectively wrote our DEI Mission Statement.
It may seem like a simple enough task, to string words together about your beliefs, but if you’ve never tried it, it is rather daunting. As a group of 12 people, we had to find our collective voice for both the DEI Committee and for EverTrue at-large.
In the end, we realized it all comes back to EverTrue’s mission — of building relationships in pursuit of a better world. There is so much goodness in our core statement that we simply needed to build upon it and be more explicit. ICYMI, it’s below.
EverTrue’s mission is to build relationships in pursuit of a better world. We seek to deliver on this mission through the people we employ and partner with, the values we embrace as a company, and the software and services we offer. EverTrue embraces diversity and equal opportunity. We value a team that brings a variety of backgrounds, viewpoints, and skills to the table. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better we will be.
As I said in my first blog post, I’m proud to work with such a talented and engaged group of people. Now that we have over eight months of showing up together each week as part of our practice, we have a greater understanding of each other’s strengths and passions… and personalities! Our intersectionality is our greatest asset and I look forward to contributing to the work we are all doing to make EverTrue a more diverse and inclusive company.
Read Jessica’s reflections on DEI Committee activities from Q1 2020 and Q3/Q4 2020.