Crescendo Chats: Scaling Diversity & Inclusion

Going Beyond Statements to Making an Impact with Miriam Warren of Yelp | Episode 17

Welcome to Crescendo Chats: Scaling Diversity & Inclusion. In this series, Crescendo co-founder Stefan Kollenberg hosts conversations with HR and diversity & inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work. Our latest conversation is with Miriam Warren, Senior Vice President, Engagement, Diversity + Belonging at Yelp. Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript. Stefan: For people who might not know you, can you share a bit more about yourself and the work you do? Miriam: Absolutely. I've been at Yelp for a little over 13 years now. I started actually more than 13 years ago as an elite member, our most active and prolific members on the site. They write reviews, upload a lot of photos, and give a lot of great intel on local businesses all over the world. I was one of those folks. In fact, I wrote more than a thousand reviews before I became an employee at Yelp in 2007. I had been living in San Francisco and loved Yelp and an opportunity came my way, and I became a community manager in our Washington D.C. market as my first job at Yelp. Eventually, I took over a team, expanding further, East coast, sort of from Toronto all the way down to Miami, Atlanta and kind of every city in between. I helped open our first New York office, then moved over to London and helped to open our first London office, and worked on international expansion for about seven years. In 2016, I had this incredible opportunity to start to really look at after many years of developing the community externally, really start to look at what our internal community meant to us and what we should be doing for them. And so since 2016, that really has been my role from employee engagement to our social impact and philanthropic efforts, internal communications and of course, diversity inclusion and belonging. Stefan: Have some of these past roles influenced you in ways that maybe you didn't expect? Miriam: Definitely. In university I majored in ethnic studies. I have always been really interested in the voices and stories and histories of folks who are often left out of normal curriculum in grade school. I always had a wondering inside about if this would be something I could do for work. And my initial thought had always been that I'd have to become a university professor in order to be able to think about issues of race, class, sexual identity and gender identity,  particularly the intersection of all of those identities. I never would have guessed it in 2007 as a Community Manager in Washington D.C., but particularly helping Yelp in launching in 30 different countries internationally helped me to realize that the most important asset of any company is their community. We're very lucky that the sense of community is really broad. We have this community of users who obviously write and upload content, and then we have this whole community of business owners who are using Yelp to get more people to come into their businesses. And then we have what I would argue as the most important community, which is all of the people who work at Yelp and who are helping to make this product and support this product. I think all of those roles really did kind of lead me to the one I have now, although I wouldn't have known it at the time. It certainly wasn't something I could have predicted in 2007 or even in 2012 when I was living in London and commuting to a very small office about a block away from my flat. The combination of caring about a community and cultivating a community along with communicating with the community has definitely been a big part of it along with some of my own personal interests around how to create inclusive and diverse environments wherever I go, because obviously those are places that I want to be in myself. I think all of us inherently know what it feels like to belong. We can probably also unfortunately recount moments in our lives when we didn't belong. The visceralness of that feeling of when you do belong is something that's not only really important to me. I've always been the person who kind of helps everyone order their food, make sure everyone has a drink, make sure everyone's invited. To do this work now every day, it feels a bit like second nature and definitely something I really love to do. Stefan: Can you talk a bit more about the structure behind Yelp's D&I? Miriam: In 2016, I sort of took on this role around engagement. As that role evolved in 2017 when I was on maternity leave, my boss, our Chief Operating Officer, gave me a call and said, Miriam, what do you think about adding diversity and inclusion to your remit? I said I love the idea. I think a couple of things that will be really important is that this role and this work continues to remain in the business and continues to report to you. The reason why that's really important is because for this work to really be taken on and for accountability to really be shared among senior leaders in the company, you'd have to have a role in a department that is able to look across all of these different functions and to be able to hold people accountable. If it is in only one area of the organization, it's much more difficult for that to happen. As a person who's been working in the business for many years, it just seems sort of natural to me that we should have some type of work that everyone could be a part of and that everyone would also be held accountable for. That was kind of a hunch on my part back then, but has proven really true. In order for folks to really take this on, they also have to feel like it's really important, and they need to be hearing it from their boss and their boss's boss. They understand that this is important work because they are hearing about it not only from me, but also from our COO as well as our CEO. Stefan: Are there any big impacts or exciting moments that you've seen or had maybe partially due to this structure? Miriam: I think a key thing here is that I am not limited only to the work around diversity, inclusion and belonging, which is sort of focused on recruiting. If you don't have a diverse organization and you want a diverse organization, you will have to bring folks who are not currently in your organization - so incredibly important. However, I think that so much of this work goes beyond simply getting people in the door. When you see things like the fact that your organization is losing folks of color at a much faster rate than others, you have to question why that is. If you are noticing that you have a racial leadership gap or a gender leadership gap inside of the organization, it's important to understand how that came to be. I think being able to use a community channel and engagement channel to be able to drive this work forward has been incredibly important. Taking that sort of corporate social responsibility piece, the social impact side of it has also allowed us to really consider what our role is in spreading equity throughout the community at Yelp, but also beyond our walls, offices, and employees. I think being able to really think about these questions as they relate to diversity, inclusion, and belonging as very holistic and not existing only inside of Yelp, but also about who we want to be and how we live. Our values have been so important and we really truly are embedded in the culture. The coming together of all these different relationships are definitely a big part of the work that I do every day and the way that we get progress to happen inside the organization. I love that that's what I get to spend all of my days doing, and I know that my team really enjoys it as well. Stefan: With all these relationships, I can imagine you have a lot of executive level communication. Do you still have many 1:1 conversations with independent contributors on a day to day basis? Miriam: Oh, absolutely. One of the best parts of my job is that I'm interested in communication. I'm interested in engagement because I'm interested in how people find a path to belonging inside the organization. I absolutely have to talk to people at every level and I have to do that pretty much every day. Certainly, there are weeks that are filled more with operational meetings and more executive-to-executive type of chats, but the vast majority of my days include at least a few meetings with folks at every level of the organization. I think being able to have those conversations really reminds me and keeps me grounded on what we're trying to do. A big part of my role is listening to folks and even listening to some of the roadblocks that they're encountering and moving those hurdles out of the way, either by making an introduction, by providing a suggestion for how they might be able to go about it, or by talking to someone else I know, and it's a real privilege to be able to do that. A lot of times in this work, we talk about privilege. All of us have privileges. One of the things I love the most about having an enormous amount of privileges, which I do, is being able to use that privilege on behalf of others. One of the big ways I can do that as a senior executive inside the company is to be able to share my knowledge, my insights, my cultural capital with other people. Stefan: What is your identity and how does that shape the way you view the world? Miriam: Yeah, so I am an immigrant. I was born in Germany. I'm a mixed race person, Filipino and German. I am adopted, so I grew up as the only person of color in a white family. I am a mom. I am many things. I think what's interesting about the work that I do now is that I have a lot of conversations with people who find talking about race really challenging and pretty scary. That's something I've never felt personally, but totally understand. One of the reasons why I don't feel that way is because race is something I've thought about probably everyday for my entire life, and that's not necessarily always a bad thing. I think it's just something that's always been very obvious to me, mainly because I look differently than everybody else in my family. I had that difference pointed out to me sometimes in very innocuous ways, other times in really not nice ways. It's something that's always been on my mind. I was kind of a weird kid. I'm kind of a weird adult. When I was in seventh grade, I entered the talent show with a speech on the scourge of racism. I was the Co-Founder of my multicultural student union in high school and I majored in ethics at university. There have always been issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation on my mind and to get to have conversations with people about it, even when they find them uncomfortable or tough, I feel like, wow. How lucky for me to be in this spot because I've literally been thinking about this for my entire life. And now all the books, all the articles, and all the conversations that I've had can all be part of the lived experience that I can share with other people and help them along in their own journeys as well. Stefan: I want to hear your thoughts more on the idea of white folks not relying on people of color to educate them. It sounds like you're very open to talking about it. Would you say that’s something you've made an explicit choice to do because it's your daily job or do you navigate that balance? Miriam: I remember first having this conversation around a sort of unpaid teaching or for people of color or women to be constantly having to have this educator hat on. I certainly understand and respect where folks are coming from when they say I don't want to spend my days using my limited energy sources on teaching you or that's not part of my job. I'm lucky that it is actually part of my job, and I also think that if it's not me, then who is it going to be? I would much rather have it be me because I have chosen that and I am happy to talk about it compared to the folks who are just trying to get by, who are just trying to make enough calls to get through their day, make it through their meetings, make it through picking up their kids and entertaining their kids at home, and all of those sorts of things. I do have that expanded capacity. It's really important for white folks and others who are looking to expand their knowledge to really do that on their own. I always say to people like if you were looking for a new surfboard, wouldn't you just go on and start doing some research, checking out the reviews? Maybe you read a couple books, watch some YouTube videos. All those same resources are available on issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation. You want to learn about racial injustice, you want to learn about the history of police brutality in the U.S., you're interested in what happened during the Jim Crow era and the laws that have continued to influence voter suppression in this country. All of that is imminently available to all of us. For folks who may find themselves in a situation where they say, “I want somebody else to teach me or I just don't know, maybe you could tell me”, we also do have to gently push back and say there are a lot of resources available. Read a little bit, do your own research and then absolutely, let's let's have a conversation. It's certainly much more interesting to have that conversation when someone has done their own diligence and says, “Hey, I just read Jess Mercy, can we talk about mass incarceration in the U.S?” It's a much more interesting conversation when you start at a place of similar interest and effort. Stefan: There's been the deaths of Black people at the hands of the police. A lot of companies are donating and matching employee donations in these public statements. What has Yelp been doing it and what are some of the commitments you've made to systemic change? Miriam: I think what's interesting about where we sit uniquely in the world as Yelp is the fact that so many people use our services - millions of people a day to make decisions about where to go. When we first started thinking about what our contribution to the movement for Black lives would be, it became very clear that we should use our platform in service of that. We realized that number one, we could drive more business to Black-owned businesses. We know that Black and Brown businesses have been disproportionately impacted just like Black and Brown people have by COVID-19, even prior to George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis. We can have a serious impact on the lives of Black business owners. We began thinking about what it would look like to have a black owned business attribute, and if we partnered with a black led organization, such as My Black Receipt, which is who we worked with, what might that look like? My black receipt, from June 19th to July 6th, set out a commitment to try to get folks to patronize Black-owned businesses and then share their receipts online. They were hoping for people to spend $5 million during that time in total, but they spent over seven and a half million dollars, with over 19,000 receipts uploaded from Black business owners and from Black-owned businesses. I think what's key about this is that everyone, every business, every organization, every person really has to consider what their role in change could be. Because we're Yelp, and because we help people find great local businesses every day, it just stands to reason and is so kind of obvious that we should use our platform for that. But in addition to that, we also started to dig deeper as a community, in terms of our employees and the people who work at Yelp. We've always had a foundation that matches employee donations, up to a thousand dollars per person to nonprofit organizations. We realized that we could go further, so we raised the matching cap in the month of June for our employees to $10,000. Then, we chose nine organizations, mostly Black-led, but all Black serving to double match the donation. When we thought about which types of organizations we wanted to support, we thought pretty long and hard. And, you know, recognizing that the black experience is not monolithic and wanting to be able to support organizations that really spoke, to a lot of the different issue areas that have led us to the place where we are today, we chose organizations like. The Black Futures Lab is helping to build a Black political power at the helm is Alicia Garza, one of the cofounders of Black Lives Matter. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) based out of Montgomery, Alabama, is working very much on issues of mass incarceration. Organizations like Common Future, a smaller organization based here in Oakland, is working on the racial wealth gap. Organizations are looking at specific issues around bail, around support for the Black LGBTQ community and so on, to really create this list of organizations that would not only speak to each of these issues, but also to help our employees understand that Black folks in this country have a lot of different issues that they're dealing with. In order for us to really say, “Hey, we support Black lives”, we have to understand all of the different ways that we could actually support Black lives. This list of organizations is one way that we did that. Stefan: I know there's sometimes you can give money, but the way that you give money is also very important. What are some ways that you made sure that you were a friendly and simple partner to work with when facilitating that? Miriam: Well, thanks for asking that question because I have a side hustle, which is that I'm the chair of the board of the Yelp foundation. I've been thinking really deeply about the inherent power inequity around funding organizations, so that's something that's been in my mind for a few years now, since I took over as chair of the board. In fact in January, I wrote an op ed about this because after really streamlining the process, so no application, all general operating funds for our grantees, no reporting or erroneous kinds of difficult things that folks had to go through in order to get our money. It also made me realize that as a funder again, I could use my privilege as a funder to get the word out. That doesn't have to be so hard because one of the things I noticed with a lot of tech companies, we've all received venture capital financing in order to make our companies become where they are today. And then we turn around and when we start to do philanthropic funding, we have all of these different strings attached that we wouldn't have had attached to our own funding. A VC would never say how much are you going to pay that person? Or don't spend too much on toilet paper or snacks. When June rolled around and we started thinking about how we can support Black-led and Black-serving organizations, we employed the same methods that we had before, which is we did our own diligence to find these organizations. We simply wrote them a check. We didn't make them go through any erroneous hoops and we also did our best and continued to do this to educate our employee base about what these organizations are doing and why their work is vital. I think that it is really important for folks in different sectors to work together, to solve problems. I don't think that all of our problems will be solved by the corporate sector nor the nonprofit, nor the public sector. I really think that it's important for us to work together on a lot of these issues because there are great solutions everywhere and there are smart people working everywhere. And that's why I feel really lucky to work everyday both with folks, obviously in the corporate sector, because we are a corporation, but also to work with folks from the nonprofit sector, who constantly give me a lot of energy and joy to keep on doing this work because they're thinking about it in such thoughtful ways. Stefan: I love that, and actually, there is an organization I've been mentoring with called DivInc. They just launched a social justice incubator, and so they're bringing together startups, but also nonprofits, into one incubator program, connecting them to mentors, funding opportunities, all that type of stuff to try and blend that nonprofit and for-profit minds together, which I think is so fascinating. I love that comparison you make with venture capital funding. For us, we’re raising right now. We've raised funds. Before on safe agreements, which are essentially like five page documents, very simple, like almost no terms. It's pretty much just like money and valuation cap. Otherwise they believe in you as a team. They're like, okay, we talked to you, we've done our diligence. We believe in you, your team, your idea, the market, the attraction that you do have, and then go take the money and we trust you to make decisions. We should do that with nonprofits as well. Miriam: Yes, you totally should, and it doesn't happen nearly enough. I actually think that the national and international reckoning with racial injustice and lack of racial equity has also caused us to relook at kind of everything. This is why you're seeing it not only happen in corporate spaces, but also in food journalism. You know, the evolving story of Bon Appetit and so many other organizations, which you're also seeing this in philanthropy where the calls obviously didn't start this year, or even this decade around funding organizations led by people of color, but certainly voices around that topic have gotten even louder because if you say you care about people's lives, you also have to care about their agency. You also have to care about their power, which includes political power and power of all other types. In order to do that, you have to show that power to them, so it wouldn't be just like, “Oh, I'm going to still keep all of this power for myself, but I'm going to pretend like you have it.” It's like “No, giving people money is giving people power.” Let's be clear about that. You're absolutely right that in the venture capital funded world. Everything is about how much you believe in the founders or in the founding team. When I go out there and look at the EDS and the CEOs of nonprofit organizations that the Elk Foundation is supporting, I absolutely am funding them and their teams. So many people talk about trust-based philanthropy and responsive philanthropy. A big part of that is saying these folks do know what they're talking about. They know a lot more about what they're talking about than we do as a funder, just because I have the money doesn't mean I have the knowledge and or the experience, right? I think giving money to folks who do have that knowledge and that experience and getting out of the way it should be something that should be sector agnostic. Stefan: Now looking into the future a bit, what is your vision for diversity inclusion, belonging at Yelp? What do you have planned next? Miriam: Yeah. We always have a lot of work to do. I think one of the big pieces is making sure that training is happening for every single employee at the company, so that we can begin in a place where everyone has a baseline foundational understanding of how systemic racism in the U.S. works, of how the country's history has h ad a very unjust and very unequal footing and it continues to have repercussions today. I think in order for people to start taking these next steps and really considering what their role is in making the future better, we have to first make sure that everyone's on the same page. A big piece of this is making sure that training is given to every new hire, to every single employee in the company, so that we can start on that same page. And then from there, what we really can do is say, okay, now that we know what can we do? And I think those are really important questions to ask. As we are all adapting to this new environment of being remote, we look at how our employee resource groups will function in this remote environment in the past. We used to say, “We're having this great event in the Toronto office”, or “We're having this great event in the Chicago office.” Now, we're saying actually it happens at 10:00AM PST, show up from wherever you are. I think what's really cool about that is that while these events were really interesting in the past, the attendance has absolutely skyrocketed because people can come from all over the place and we get a lot more response from folks. So we're doing everything from bringing in a lot of those executive directors and CEOs from the organizations that we've been supporting and having them tell us what's going on. We can certainly obviously do our own research and read, but I think to actually hear it from a person who's on the ground, running one of these organizations is super valuable and is definitely the hope and inspiration that everyone needs right now. Mental health is a big issue that all of us face. To care for our own mental health is perhaps more difficult than it's ever been in this environment of being pretty isolated. As I look to the future, obviously training is going to be important and continuing to have a lot of engagement activities, really keeping our eyes on the fact that the company does in most parts of the organization have a racial leadership gap, one that we need to mitigate, with a lot of different factors. Stefan: Would you be able to share a few of those things that are working and are not working? Miriam: Yeah, so something that has worked exceptionally well for us really comes from this very small operational change that we made, a while back. A big part of our organization, more than half of our organization, is composed of folks who work in the sales side. In order to become a manager on the sales side, you have to go through something called the Management Development Program (MDP). When I started the local sales diversity task force, I started asking lots of questions about how things are done operationally. One of those questions was how does someone become a manager? And they said, “If they meet a certain level of production, they can apply and potentially be accepted into this program that would then allow them to be considered for roles that come up in management.” So I said, “Okay, great. Walk me through the process.” And they said, “You know, we usually will talk to folks about what the production level is and tell them to raise their hands if they're qualified.” And I thought, hmm, could it be that qualified people for whatever reason that don't raise their hands? And the folks looking back to me asked, “Why wouldn't someone who's qualified raise their hand?” I thought I could think of a lot of reasons why qualified people wouldn't raise their hands. “So, what if we instead sent a note to every single person who's qualified and said you're qualified?” For example, “Dear Stefan, congratulations. You're qualified. Would you like to apply for MDP and potentially start your career in management?” To me, that sounds amazing. That sounds like even if I don't want to or have no interest in managing other people, I'm thinking that is a win for engagement. That feels really good as it relates to our culture and potentially, it also brings about a whole crop of people who would not have thought of themselves as managers or who have never been told that they have leadership ability, but who definitely do, because as we know that they have met the minimum qualifications. When we made that small operational change to let everybody who is qualified, know that they were qualified, we saw overnight change. We saw our largest, most diverse class of qualified applicants, which led to our largest and most diverse class of people who actually went through the program, which directly fed a bench of more diverse folks than we'd ever seen. It also had a major contribution to what we reported in our last diversity report in November of 2019, which led to a 24 percentage point increase in the rate of Black and Brown leadership. I think that's so important because folks often talk about how we brought this many more people in and they don't talk as much about how many people you had to cycle through before you bring in the next crop of people. Here, what you see are folks really rising in the organization into increasing levels of leadership. That is brought about because we noticed that we had a racial leadership gap. We made some very pointed inquiries as to why that's happening, and then we made some changes to mitigate that as well as really holding the leaders of each office accountable for the diversity in their offices and for making sure that it is as inclusive a place as possible. And when I think about inclusion, I think fundamental inclusion is about making sure everyone has the same chance. It's a success. If you really have an inclusive environment, you'll see that. And if you have a less than inclusive environment, you'll see that too, and obviously may need to make some changes. While other organizations may function in different ways. It is really important to ask all of them, these questions about how we got to where we are today, and if we're happy with the results. Stefan: I love that. I use my work all the time like behavioral interviews, understanding the process people go through and how they make decisions. Miriam: Yeah, a community that has been incredibly helpful to me is the Racial Equity Action Institute, and I was part of its first cohort. This is something sponsored by Northern California Grantmakers here in the Bay area and this was a group that they got together, a multi-sector group coming from government, from the nonprofit foundation sectors, as well as the private sector. Whether I'm going to those meetings or writing to them directly, there's about 20 of us and it's just been incredible to be a part of it because their experiences are so varied. I think in my own experience, I tend to get pretty myopic in terms of just looking at what's happening in tech because this is where we are situated and being able to talk to someone who's working on issues of inclusion and belonging in a city government office, like, wow. I thought my job was hard, but my job isn't anything compared to some. Being able to talk to someone who's doing this inside of a foundation and really trying to think about what are the inherently unequal power structures in the world of philanthropy generally and what role do they play in it. This organization has just been so key and I am really grateful to Northern California Grantmakers for bringing us all together. If you're interested in getting a cohort of your own, they're actually accepting applications now for their second cohort. Stefan: Now we're going to hop into the lightning round. You ready? Miriam: I'm ready. Stefan: What is your favorite quote? Miriam: My favorite quote is “A small act is worth a million thoughts.” Stefan: What motivates you in life? Miriam: My daughter, she's almost three years old and every time I look at her, I think I cannot leave this world worse than I found it. I also have this sort of very unabated feeling, which is, if not me, then who? Also, when people ask me when the people that we've been waiting for will show up, I usually have to tell them what I think is the truth, which is that we are the ones we've been waiting for. Stefan: What is a book or movie that changed the way you look at the world? Miriam: Definitely just mercy by Brand Stevenson. Stefan: What is your favorite recipe? Miriam: The Brown butter chocolate chip cookie. This one is actually a bone Appetit recipe that if you've ever seen the video - it's Rick Martinez who's making it. I have to say that it's like my main accomplishment in this sort of quarantined time. I've just made it over and over and over again. My freezer is never without a lot of pre-portioned brown butter chocolate chip cookies with pecan. Stefan: What is the coolest tech product you've ever come across? Miriam: I'm allergic to coffee and I love tea. So I have to say the tea maker by Breville, which is maybe not the high tech thing you were thinking of, but it is definitely technology. And what's so cool about it is that it has a bunch of different settings, which include are you making green tea? Are you making oolong? Are you making black tea or herbal tea? And do you want it strong or do you want it mild? And it can even keep the tea hot and it's just amazing because I love drinking tea and now that I'm next to this tea maker every single day, it really has a big impact on my life. Stefan: Thank you so much. This was so much fun. Miriam: Thank you for having me. It was great chatting. Stefan: Oh my pleasure. How can people connect with you from here? Miriam: Yeah. I am just Miriam Warren on all of the familiar channels. So just my first name and my last name stuck together. Stefan: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining today and have a great rest of your day. Miriam: Same to you. Bye. All right.

Checking Our Privilege as White DEI Professionals with Megan Dalessio | Episode 16

Checking our privilege as white DEI professionals with Megan Dalessio Welcome to Crescendo Chats: Scaling Diversity & Inclusion. In this series, Crescendo co-founder Stefan Kollenberg hosts conversations with HR and diversity & inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work. This week’s conversation with Megan Dalessio, Senior Manager of Equality and Belonging at Gap Inc. Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript. Stefan: For people who might not know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work you do? Megan: I work on the Gap Inc. Equality and Belonging team. Gap Inc. is the parent company of six different brands, including Gap, old Navy banana Republic and a few more. We have a pretty small, but a growing team that supports the entire enterprise. So that includes our headquarters, all of our brands. I manage our portfolio of external partnerships, most notably with this really amazing organization called Harlem’s fashion row. I also support our seven equality and belonging groups, some places call them affinity groups or ERGs. Before I joined Gap Inc., I started my career as a first grade teacher, and after doing that for a couple of years, I transitioned into the high tech sector. That was where I got into recruiting, and from recruiting, is where I got into diversity work full time. Once I made that switch, I ended up building two separate DEI programs, one at Cruise most recently, a self-driving car company, and the other at Box, a cloud software company. Gap Inc. is an entirely new and different scale for me. It's an entirely different industry. It's been really fun to figure out how to work within all these new parameters and also get to work for a legacy organization that has a tangible product that we can impact. Stefan: Something I love to talk about with guests is identity. It’s something I personally do a lot of reflection on, and so I‘d love to hear from you - what do you think of as your identity and how does that shape the way you view the world? Megan: Yeah, absolutely. As white people working in the D&I space, it is incredibly important for us to constantly be interrogating our own biases, our relationship to whiteness, and other vertices of oppression. For me, I definitely own my identity as a white woman and all of the complexities that come along with that, particularly in the line of work. Other aspects of my identity that impact how I move through the world are that I am able bodied and I have struggled with mental health issues for many years in the form of clinical anxiety and depression. Outside of that, I am cisgender. I'm recently starting to really own and come into my identity as queer. The last thing relevant to the work I do for Gap Inc. is that I sit at the top of what we call the straight size range, so I have been into learning more about the fat liberation movement, and really trying to understand weight as a dimension of oppression, particularly because it impacts my life on the daily. I'll say identity is definitely super complex and there are lots of other factors, but those are probably the aspects that are most top of mind for me recently. The thing that has been most interesting is the body positivity movement, which is all about the self. The idea of fat liberation is about not putting all the pressure on yourself, but contending with the burden of how all of us, regardless of size, think about and process our own bodies and our weight as something that is systemically oppressive. That has been super transformative for me. Stefan: What privileges has whiteness afforded you throughout your career? Megan: It's indisputable, right? Specifically, really in a way that it has enabled me to assert myself in spaces that don't often feel safe or even accessible for people of color. Particularly when it comes to issues of inclusion. It's afforded me a lot of privileges. Whiteness predates my career, so I'll share a story from my college days that I think helps kind of illustrate that. It's my sophomore year at Berkeley and I joined this white anti-racist group and we were discussing the concept of taking up space in predominantly people of color or POC spaces. At the time, it was something that I really struggled with because I felt like my unique personality just wasn't fully taken into account. I'm just the kind of person who grapples with new ideas by thinking out loud. I'm very conversational. It's not that I'm taking up space. Our facilitator said, “Megan, that may be the case. And it's important to recognize that in POC spaces, that is likely not how you are being perceived.” I return to that moment a lot for the way that my own relationship with whiteness meant that I felt entitled to be treated as an individual without considering my impact or even the disparity of experience for people who don't look like me. A really important part of my practice as a DEI professional is to actively be cultivating curiosity and self awareness so that I can be a better accomplice in the struggle for justice and a more critical, double agent in my work. Stefan: How have you gone about unpacking your own privilege along the way? Megan: It's lifelong work, it doesn't stop. It's not like I graduated from Cal and was done with my learning. I'm still learning all the time. The most part of unpacking my privilege has been having a community. A community that is also committed to reckoning with white supremacy and other systems of oppression that I benefit from, and to have friends and colleagues who are committed to that same kind of ongoing process of interrogation. It is really helpful to have folks that I can talk through those big ideas with, and the other thing I'll share that has been probably the single most important thing that I do as a pretty avid consumer of social media, is diversifying my social feeds. I used to have a pretty long commute to work and I'm a huge podcast head because of that. I remember going through my podcast one day and realizing that every single podcast I listened to was hosted and produced by white men. From there, I made a really concerted effort, in the same way I had already done with my Instagram, to mix it up and get some new voices and perspectives. It's super important to actively seek out perspectives different from your own and I do that across every platform. Having the point of view of queer people, Black people, indigenous folks, people who are disabled, people who are experts in immigration, and fat liberation activists has contributed to and continues to contribute to my own personal growth. Stefan: What are a couple of podcasts you'd recommend listening to? Megan: First and foremost, I am a die-hard Code Switch fan - it's a really fantastic podcast, all about race and culture, hosted by Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji. She's half Persian and half Puerto Rican and Gene himself a Black man. They regularly have guest hosts that are entirely people of color. I've been pretty obsessed with Throughline, which is all about connecting current events to parallel moments throughout history, so that we can understand the current moment better. Stefan: a lot of white people have been woken up to the reality of racism and discrimination - and so I think it’s crucial that we talk about white supremacy & privilege to start our conversation today. As a white D&I practitioner, what are some of the things that you are mindful of when doing this work? Megan: Absolutely. There's often this real cult of personality in this space, and I feel pretty strongly that it's important for me as a white woman in this space to primarily use my platform to amplify the voices of people of color. This looks like crediting the POC leaders that I learned from. It means that I defer to the leadership of people of color. I'm always in that process of suspend your disbelief. Let's honor the fact that for this person, that experience is true. If there's a disconnect here, what am I missing? Constantly arriving with curiosity and humility to those conversations. Stefan: What mistakes have you made along the way? Megan: I think that it’s really important to be open and honest about our own learning. At Cruise, I was pretty new in my role. I had been there for a little over a month and we were coming up on Juneteenth, the celebration of the end of slavery. The prior year, Box had this really beautiful, amazing, Juneteenth celebration. It really was an inspiring and uplifting moment for the Black community at that organization. So I came in, fired up, and I went to the Black employee group meeting. “We got Juneteenth coming up. Let's pull our committee together. We got to get to planning.” And I was pretty much met with blank stares, which I was surprised about. The first thing going through my head, in all transparency, was what is wrong with these folks? Why don't they want to celebrate Juneteenth? I had to take a step back and say, help me understand what the disconnect is here and what it came down to was the fact that that community just wasn't ready to have a visible celebration centering around the end of slavery within the organization. My assumption put everyone in an awkward position. I hadn't asked the right questions. I did my best to receive that feedback and gratitude, and to apologize sincerely for my mistake and rectify the way that I had been so hasty, to listen. It's important to be a continual student in this space. Stefan: Did someone call you out or call you in for that mistake? How did you respond? Megan: In the previous example, the blank stares were a bit of a call out, right? I would say the most important thing is to receive feedback. However, it comes with a spirit of gratitude because you think about the amount of discomfort and energy it takes for a lot of folks to call out a racist moment or an inappropriate moment. I often think about all the times that I have made hurtful comments that I wasn't aware of that impacted people. They just swallowed it and wrote me off. I think feedback in general and call outs can be such precious gifts to us in our own growth. It's a sign of mutual respect and what I mean by mutual is that whoever is calling me out is showing respect for themselves, either their identity or their values, by naming a behavior that's problematic. They're respecting me enough to trust that I can and will do better, and I'm able to receive it. Stefan: When someone is being called in or called out for a comment that they didn’t perceive as racist, but is racist, how should they react and respond in order to reduce any further harm being caused to the individual who took the time to share that feedback? Megan: In terms of responding to feedback. The approach that I take first is pause, breathe, sit with it. Try not to react because when it comes to issues of identity, belonging, fundamentally, those are questions about our values, and our values are at the core of who we are as people. When people are generous enough to really share that feedback and to say something important, receive it. First is pause, the second is to be curious. “I didn't realize that I was doing that. Can you help me understand?” Ask questions and know that no one owes you answers to those questions. It's important to be interrogating yourself in that moment. The third thing is you have to own it. Own a mistake, own the impact it had, and most importantly, commit to doing better. The thing about all of this is no one owes you any follow up. White people must reckon with the fact that people of color may not ever fully trust you, which is fair and deserved given the history. Stefan: How can you effectively create space for Black employees to be open and vulnerable with the challenges they face at work without putting the burden to solve those problems on them? Megan: It's not Black people's job to educate folks on the Black Lives Matter movement or why their personal Black life matters. It is our job. We have chairs of our Black employee group, called AANG, an African American networking group. I had side conversations with the two leaders of that group and I said, “I want to fully empower and give you space to lean into this conversation. However much you want. You're a valued extended member of this team, and this is a huge moment for the community. At the same time, it's an exhausting moment to be a Black person, so whenever you need support, throw it my way, because it's my full time job. I literally get paid to field these questions.” I think there's a little bit of a balance where you give people the space to lean in and make sure they know that they have your support. Give them the permission to act out what I had noticed in a lot of conversations. We've been doing these listening tours, with our Black and Latinx employees. A lot of the Black people on the call expressed a feeling of guilt around not having been more actively engaged in conversations before, and actually the lead of our Black employee group, Carrie, made a really beautiful return question when this one employee mentioned that and said, “but did you feel safe to do that at the time?” I want to help make this as safe as possible for you at this time and feel free to lean out. They've been stepping up and doing amazing work and they're very high in demand. Every now and then, I'll get an email saying, “Hey, I'm looping in Megan from the equality and belonging team, she's actually a better resource for you on this than I am.” So it's a little bit of a give and take, but that's how I've been navigating that specific conversation. Stefan: What are some of the things you’ve done at Gap Inc. to help employees start their anti-racism journey? Megan: The one thing that I’m most excited to share is this virtual series that we're hosting called Real Talk. It's essentially a moment for all of our employees across the company to tune in or to watch a recording of a conversation about race. This past week, the discussion topic was microaggressions, and we've talked about Black lives matter versus all lives matter. Not only are we hosting these real talk sessions, we are also providing tools and resources for teams to have follow up and debrief discussions. For a lot of folks, this is the first time they're being exposed to this information. We've seen a lot of really amazing vulnerability come out of those sessions. It's been a good reminder to me that everyone's in a different place. It's super important to create space for newcomers to learn, mess up, and recover and acquire new knowledge. It's also really important to protect people who are living through those experiences. The other thing is supporting and coaching leaders, people leaders, for how that conversation is going to look different when you have Black people on your team. Stefan: Who are three amazing Black Practitioners that you look up to in the DEI field? Can you share a memory that really sticks out for each of them? Megan: On the Real Talk series that we're hosting, one of the main featured guests who has been creating and planning a lot of that content is Amber Cabral, who owns and operates Cabral Co., a full cycle DEI consulting firm. The memory I'll share about her is when she was delivering her first quote, “Real Talk” to the organization. There was a moment going through the content where she was talking about how being Black is a never-ending experience. You could kind of hear it in her voice and see the emotion in her face. That generosity of spirit to share herself in that way to be engaged in this work, in this way, when it is so deeply personal, that is part of what makes her so effective. I want to highlight Stacy Parson and Angela Taylor, two folks who operate the Dignitas Agency together. I worked for them for a time, and the memory that I'll share from my time partnering with them was when we got together at this cafe in Palo Alto for a brainstorming session. Just getting to watch them bounce off each other - they are both such big thinkers who are truly taking off on systemic change. What is brilliant and beautiful about their practice is the way that they managed to break it down into bite sized pieces that are digestible for individuals. Both of them have backgrounds in executive coaching and have been mentors and coaches to me. I would also give a shoutout to Abby Maldonado, now an HRBP at Pinterest, who was the person that really built up their D&I program in the early days. When I was starting to dip my foot in at Box, Abby was super generous with her time and resources. We were trying to figure out how to redefine our university recruiting practices and our employee referral program. We talked through her journey and her experience and that advice was fundamental to my own development and establishing myself. I want to give a shout out to Kisha Modica, Head of Equality and Belonging at Gap Inc., and then an educator, an activist, a writer who does not work in the D&I space specifically, but has been an incredible teacher to me, Sonya Renee Taylor. If you're not following Sonya Renee Taylor on Instagram, I strongly and highly recommend checking out some of her videos. Stefan: Do you follow any Black Yoga Teachers? Any recommendations? Megan: Anasa Yoga is co-founded and managed by two Black women, Jean Marie and Zola, and they are currently offering virtual classes online right now during the shelter in place, which is exciting because it means everyone has access to them. They use a variety of different instructors as well, so there is a little something for everyone. The other Black Yogi that I really admire is Jessamyn Stanley, and if you're not following her already, definitely missing out. She's someone who really understands the mental and physical connections between well-being and brings that lens of body positivity to the yoga space. Stefan: Lightning round: Favorite quote? Megan: Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves, which is a Leo Tolstoy quote. Stefan: What motivates you in life? Megan: Justice, the goodness of people, ice cream and my dog Peperoncini. Stefan: Top recommendation for social media accounts to follow? Megan: Sonya Renee Taylor, but I would also give a plug for the Fat Liberation Movement, Your Fat Friend @yrfatfriend [https://www.instagram.com/yrfatfriend]. Stefan: Favorite podcast? Megan: Code switch. Stefan: What is the coolest tech product you've ever come across? Megan: I got to tell ya that I am not much of a gadget gal, but what I will say is I did buy a battery operated handheld fan that saved my life when I was in Italy last summer. Stefan: How can people connect with you? Megan: Absolutely LinkedIn [http://linkedin.com/in/megandalessio]. Stefan: Thank you so much for joining us today!

Building Intersectional Pride with Ashantè Fray | Episode 15

iPride’s Ashantè Fray On Building Intersectional Pride Welcome to Crescendo Chats: Scaling Diversity & Inclusion. In this series, Crescendo co-founder Stefan Kollenberg hosts conversations with HR and diversity & inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work. This week’s conversation is with Ashantè Fray, Team Lead, Inside Sales & iPride Regional Co-Chair [Americas] at Indeed. Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript. Stefan: Can you share a bit about yourselves to get us started? Ashantè: Of course. I want to start off with my day job. I currently work at Indeed as a Team Lead. I was promoted back in September 2019 after being promoted to a Senior Client Success Specialist back in February. A lot of my day to day is finding ways to support my manager and my team. I also strategize with sales reps to figure out ways that we’re helping our clients. Outside of that, I have my “gay job,” as I call it. I’m the regional co-chair of iPride, a position I was promoted into after being Site Lead in Toronto. I was overseeing all Pride events in Toronto and now I moved up to help oversee that on a global scale. I currently manage a remote team of five people - a lot of what we do is figuring out ways we can manage our iPride chapters. Right now, I believe we have 18. We also figure out ways to help develop strategies for diversity, inclusion, and belonging at Indeed to make sure that we’re always in alignment. Stefan: What is your identity and how has that shaped how you show up at work? Ashantè: When I speak about my identity, I like to take the time to break it down intersectionally, because I wholly believe that we are multifaceted people by nature. I like to start with that I’m a Black female woman and I am bisexual. I’m 25 years old and I’m second-generation Canadian. Our background in Jamaican. I grew up Christian, but I now identify as being spiritual. I’m also a small business owner - I own a business called Synchronized Soul [https://synchronizedsoul.com/home]. I also did my masters in English literature, focusing on intersectionality in Toni Morrison’s novels. I’m also a survivor of sexual abuse and I’m living with PTSD. Those identities on the whole very much shape the way I show up to work. What aspects I’m able to bring to work authentically shapes the way I’m able to interact with my coworkers. I try every day to be as authentic as I can and to show up. If that means I’m crying, at least I’m being honest. Stefan: What does your business do? Ashantè: What I do specifically is Taro and Oracle readings. It’s a different form of divination that I use to connect with guides and with your higher self to bring clarity. It’s focused on self-development. I feel like all forms of religion or self-development are really focusing on growth. I try to be that person to intuitively use my gift to help. Stefan: What are parts of your Jamaican heritage that you bring into your life today? Ashantè: I love my Jamaican culture. We’re very proud people and we have every reason to be. Jamaica is about the small things like taking a walk or bathing in a river - it can be moments of happiness and joy. I feel like North American culture doesn’t really appreciate the small things. We’re so focused on where we’re heading that we don’t really focus on where we’re at. I love going back and being able to just be present in the moment and really find myself again. But there are faults with all cultures. And for me, one thing I have a big struggle with is finding a place between how proud I am with my culture but also recognizing how they feel about homophobia. A lot of the songs I grew up with explicitly stated, for instance, that Adam and Steve did not work or stating that girls can’t dance with each other. It was something that was constantly reinforced in that culture. It didn’t really occur to me that it could be ok to be bisexual until I really started my education and really opened my eyes to what is out there. It’s tough at times to navigate the differences, especially when seeing old family, friends, and stuff like that. You’re never sure. Stefan: What was your coming out journey? Ashantè: It was really hard. Honestly it didn’t occur to me that I could be bisexual. And it really took a lot of time for that to even be a thought. A lot of that came from the fact that there wasn’t a lot of representation of Black queer females or Black queer individuals - period - that I could identify with. In addition to that I had grown up Jamaican. In that culture, it’s reinforced that the LGBTQ community is a white people thing. It was always: we can’t be gay because we’re not white. It wasn’t until university when I was out on my own that I started seeing a therapist and started unpacking my sexual abuse, but also what it was like to be on my own for the first time, but still trying to uphold the expectations that I feel were reinforced by society. My therapist convinced me to start experimenting and doing things I’ve never done before. So I got dressed up for Halloween as a kid, but I never got dressed up again because growing up Christian, it was always reinforced as the devil’s work. I didn’t really do it again until I was seeing this therapist and she convinced me. It was something I fell in love with. I came out a little later when I was at Indeed. I had such a support system and this incredible therapist who was reinforcing it and saying to do it - go out there and experiment. I had done my masters and still didn’t come out. Then our VP of Human Resources at Indeed came to Toronto for a panel and started talking about the importance of being yourself fully. Hearing him say that was a wake up call. I came out at work and called my mom when I was in the office. She said it was ok, and that kind of it. I’m happy to be in a place in my life where I can show up authentically. When you’re fully yourself, you start inspiring other people to be themselves, because they recognize what’s possible. Stefan: What does having an intersectional pride mean to you? Ashantè: Intersectionality is really important to me. I honestly believe that it’s probably one of the reasons I was appointed to the position of Regional Co-Chair, because that was something the DIB team also recognized at Indeed. We wanted to start opening up these IRGs that were historically very white representation. It was about how we ensure that Black queer women or transgender individuals also have representation and are highlighted. So myself and co-chair Shannon were very intentional about pride because we wanted to make sure that we were not just representing ourselves, but creating space for other people to be represented, seen, and heard. In the beginning of 2020, we sent out our mission, vision, and values statements. One of our values was authenticity, but also learning. We wanted to make sure that we were creating those spaces. So when we ran into the COVID situation, intersectionality for us was about amplifying those voices. We had a jam-packed pride month, and I am so proud of our team. So many IRG leaders were reaching out asking how they could support. It really does take a village. A lot of people see my face and they credit it to me, but I credit pride month to everybody on the team. Stefan: Can you say more about being an active ally - with other IRGs supporting your pride efforts? Ashantè: Yeah, the important thing to acknowledge here is sometimes people assume that because you are an ally, you can’t make a mistake or can’t have a negative impact on somebody because your intentions were good. But even being a regional lead, I’m not perfect. I will always make mistakes and my intentions will always come from a good place, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the impact was negative. That is what I have to hold myself accountable to as an ally to ensure that I’m continuing to educate and continuing to amplify. If I don’t know, then it’s about creating those spaces and saying I don’t know, which is something I openly do with my team. But then I will find the knowledge or create a space so that experts in that particular space can speak. Stefan: What do you love most about pride? Ashantè: When I started with Indeed in 2018, it was my first pride event. A lot of people think of pride and they think of parades. I’m grateful that I was able to find myself in a community with great people - the whole place was love all the time. I never felt so much joy in my life until pride. But the important thing to recognize is that it’s still a march. It’s still a fight for equality and something I wanted to recognize, especially being Canadian, is that a lot of the things people are fighting for in the States we already have, especially healthcare. Until we’re all free and there is no discrimination, none of us is going to be free. So it’s taking the time to recognize we’re still fighting, even if you aren’t currently. Something I always heard was “what kind of gay are you?” A sports gay, a video game gay… What do I need to do? Do I qualify? I felt like I didn’t understand all these stereotypes - it’s a spectrum, and it’s fluid, and I’m allowed to sit down and take the time to figure out what that means for me. Stefan: What’s a heartwarming story you’ve heard lately from the Black queer community? Ashantè: The media has been so filled with negative energy. Important information is going out but it’s so heavy and overwhelming. I’ve been feeling numb a lot of the time. Something that woke me up a little bit and made me feel was watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. I was watching this particular season with Jada. I took the time to research her story and found that she auditioned back in season seven. She had to re-audition in season 12 to get the role. At the same time there was a post floating around instagram talking about the fact that prior, she was a makeup artist and was actually doing some of the queens’ makeup for their season finale. So it was being in that space and being so close, but not being close enough. But recognizing year after year, she would have been a winner. With 2020 as this year of disaster, I’ve been taking the time to wake up and recognize what it is that I’m fighting for, what I stand for, and what I value. Until I know those foundations, I don’t think I’ll be able to go anywhere. I feel like 2020 is a really great time of awakening and taking the time to look within - it’s causing a lot of various reactions. But one thing that I say, especially being in Canada, is that a lot of the racism that we face here is very subtle. I don’t know who likes me or doesn’t like me because they’re very politically correct. They use correct terms. They say the things they need to say in my face. I don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes. In America, if someone is outrightly racist in your face, I know what you value. Not saying either should take place. Just that I feel like I’m in a place where I don’t know where my enemies are. It’s a very Canadian thing. Stefan: What are some authentic actions you’ve seen from brands during pride? Ashantè: Everything is so performative, especially the examples of brands and logos with rainbows. I can’t really attest or speak to what work they’re doing behind the scenes, which means it’s so hard to figure out where that is a performance or whether they are taking the time to be an advocate. Something I’ve been asking people to start being is an accomplice. I’m over allyship and logos and brands. I’m over people stepping up saying that we’re doing things. I want to know about the work that you’re actually doing - with concrete evidence. I also want to start hearing people call people out. I’ve been loving LinkedIn for that to call out racist remarks, tag managers, and say this is what your people have been saying. We’re in a day and age where people have to start holding themselves accountable and recognizing that the things they do and say have actual consequences. The internet is literally forever. Stefan: What are some things you organized during pride? Ashantè: I was asked to be part of a Here to Help interview with Chris Hyams, our CEO. I was so excited. The interviewer took time out to talk about my identities and talk about the way we can start being an intersectional ally. So we took time this pride month to focus on allyship. We had a 21 day allyship challenge with Pride Circle that was taking place - we were a rewards partner for that. Every day there was a new challenge where people talked about different ways to be an ally. We also took the time to do a Gender Cool workshop with the Gender Cool Project. They’re doing great things - they say who we are, not what we are. That was something that resonated with Indeed-ians because we were really focusing on core empathy and compassion and realizing that we’re all human. We also did Say Her Name for unsung heroines. Taking the time to highlight women throughout history who have not been highlighted for whatever reason. We had guest speakers come in who really took the time to sit down and start talking about their own unsung heroines and what we need to do be allies to Black women and the Black trans community. Another thing I organized was a panel on intersectional allyship, moderated by Chris Hyams. He took the time to ask questions and create space that needed to be created for our panelists. I think that’s what any month is about and what any organization is about - how do we build engagement and leaders? Because that’s what I’m trying to build at the end of the day. I want to figure out who can take over for me when I need to step down from this position, because I want to make sure there’s a constant flow to the next generation. Stefan: How have you pivoted programming to be more remote friendly? Ashantè: I was quite happy that everything was remote this year. It’s so hard to fly out senior leadership to Canada. It’s so hard to link up schedules to figure out when they could possibly fit in time for an event with various stakeholders - then things like budget. This is my gay job, not my day job. Going remote this year was a blessing because I got access to a lot of senior leadership who were already participating and stepping up, but also recognized that we all had to figure out time zones. We even did a virtual pride celebration with a call for virtual DJs. There were a few glitches, but nothing crazy. In the end, people actually requested that we start doing monthly virtual dance parties - we actually had people joining from Australia and London because of time zones. I was really happy to see children, families, dogs, cats - all on zoom. People were having the time of their lives. It’s so hard to feel that sense of belonging, and I was really happy and very proud we were able to do that even with the pivot to remote. Stefan: What are the biggest learnings from your time as an IRG leader? Ashantè: First: We are lifetime learners - there’s always more learning to be done and more educating that needs to be done. Even recognizing that we had a successful pride month, it’s taking the time to recognize how we make it better and continually do better. The second learning is that you can’t please the world. You will make mistakes and there will be times when you mess up. But support given in silence is not support. I would rather you make a mistake, talk it out, flush it out, and ensure it doesn’t happen again instead of being silent and not being a support system at all. Stefan: Is there a community for IRG leaders to learn from? Ashantè: One thing I use as a database is Catalyst. That’s a huge I go to. In addition to that, I would say start finding mentors and sponsors. I’m out there. A mentor can be anybody in a position that has experience to give you, whereas a sponsor you’re looking for somebody at the senior leadership level. You can have both as a support system. Stefan: Lightning round: Favorite quote? Ashantè: “In times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists” - Eric Hoffer. Stefan: What motivates you in life? Ashantè: Resilience, or some would say grit or optimism. The ability to pursue goals after setbacks. Stefan: What’s a book or movie that changed the way you think about the world? Ashantè: You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life by Jen Sincero. Stefan: Favorite podcast or music? Ashantè: Serial. Stefan: What’s the coolest tech product you’ve ever come across? Ashantè: Muse Headband - a meditation headband synchronized with an app to tell you when you’re calm or at peace. Stefan: How can people connect with you? Ashantè: People can connect with me on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashant%C3%A8-fray-she-her-hers-6ba651152/] or an email (ashante@synchronizedsoul.com [ashante@synchronizedsoul.com]) Stefan: Thank you!

Building Accessibility Into Products with KR Liu | Episode 14

Building Accessibility Into Products Welcome to Crescendo Chats: Scaling Diversity & Inclusion. In this series, Crescendo co-founder Stefan Kollenberg hosts conversations with HR and diversity & inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work. This week’s conversation is with KR Liu, the Head of Brand Accessibility at Google’s Brand Studio. Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript. Stefan: Can you share a bit about yourselves to get us started? KR: Absolutely. I’m currently the head of brand accessibility at Google. I’m a very passionate, fierce advocate for people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and women in tech. I’ve been in the industry in sales and marketing for over 25 years, and I’m very passionate about inclusive design and bringing an inclusive lens to brand accessibility in our content, media, and products. Stefan: How does your identity shape the way you view the world? KR: I’m a very curious, passionate, empathetic person. I’m always looking for ways I can help people and how I can change perceptions in areas where there’s a lot of stigma and pushback. I’m someone who has had hearing loss her entire life and struggled to belong. It’s been hard when you don’t feel like you don’t see yourself anywhere. And that really shaped me into what I do now. I want people with disabilities - which is itself a diverse community - to see themselves. To make sure that they are heard and their stories are told. Over the years, living through different challenges, hiding my hearing loss, and then not coming out as a gay woman… I had steps I had to take to feel like I could truly be myself. Once I started doing that, it opened up the door for me to see that there are more people like me, so how do I use the position I’m in to elevate that and to show the world that. Stefan: How do you help someone else feel heard and seen? KR: I was fortunate. I only came out 8 years ago when I met my now-wife and she had also not publicly come out. So it took the both of us saying we want to be proud of our relationship and we know this is long-term, so why hide it. If people don’t accept us, that’s on them, not us. Stefan: How has that shaped the way you build user or customer personas? KR: I’m always bringing the lens of a few different areas where I don’t see a lot of representation. Whether it’s disability, LGBTQ, race, gender, sexual orientation… it’s something I definitely try to amplify in a more positive light. For me, it’s about the story. I’m in a product field, so I’m all about how you tie products to the human connection - and thinking about how it’s helping someone do something they love or pursue a passion or create new opportunities. I’m always thinking about that when I’m building a user story or looking at how to apply a product or a tool. And my area of expertise is very much about accessibility, so we are thinking about how we help people solve problems so that they can do things everyone else can. Stefan: Can you share some examples from your years of experience? KR: For many years I had hearing loss. I worked in hardware for at least 10 years before I came out with my hearing loss. And there was this moment where I wanted to break into the audio industry and innovate in hearing. The reason being is I had a brick-wall moment where I wear hearing aids, and they are thousands of dollars not covered by insurance. So a lot of people have hearing loss that don’t wear aids or can’t afford them. They are also highly stigmatized, so even if they could wear them, they wouldn’t. So one day at work, my hearing aid stopped working and I had to go to an audiologist on my lunch break to try to get it repaired. They said I couldn’t repair it and it would be over $3,000 - I did not have that money. I couldn’t believe it. I was thinking, do I pay my rent or pay for hearing aids? I just need to be able to hear and communicate. I gave him two credit cards and my life savings, sat in my car, cried my eyes out, and went back to work. I had to keep figuring out how to do my job. In that moment I was vulnerable for a second. When I went back into the office, I was grateful that my CEO at the time saw me and pulled me aside, asking what was wrong. I told her I have hearing loss - and I can’t hear because my hearing aid broke. She said first of all they would have supported me but then second that I needed to do something about this problem of access. I remember sitting thinking who is going to listen to me. No one will take me seriously. I’m just trying to be taken seriously as a sales and marketing person in this industry right now. She said to think about it and keep telling my story because you never know when the right moment might come. I left that company a few years later, and ended up at Pebble. I was fascinated by Pebble, which is a smartwatch before the Apple watch or anything like that. I loved it because it would give me a vibration notification on my wrist when I would get a call or text message. I was often missing my phone calls because I couldn’t hear them, so Pebble was a really cool accessibility tool for me. So when I started running their national sales and marketing division, the CEO came up to me one day and asked me why I loved the watch. I said because it allows me to know when my phone is ringing. Then a couple of weeks later I went to him with the idea of bluetooth hearing aids that allow me to stream my phone calls to my ears, but whenever I want to change the volume, I have to pull out my phone and people think I’m being rude. I said I had an idea - the watch has an open API where I could work with the company to make an app that would go on my watch, so I could touch my watch when I want to change the volume so I don’t have to pull out my phone. He said I could work on it as a side project. I contacted a hearing aid company and met with them - we built an app in a week. It was really just a passion project for me. I showed it to a couple people in my office. Our PR team saw it and asked if they could tell my story. I said yes, and my story was published on this idea and changed my entire life - it kickstarted my career into innovating in hearing technology and becoming a known advocate in the space. Stefan: What was the story you told? KR: I didn’t want to hide my hearing loss. I was tired of the stigma and being ashamed. And I wanted to show that you could merge the world of medical devices that are highly stigmatized and wearable devices that are socially acceptable, affordable, and cool. So an idea that came from a random person like myself, who’s not even an engineer, is something that is massively used today. And I think there are so many stories like that, especially around disability, that people don’t know. Like email and text messaging: those were things created by people with disabilities, and people don’t know that. You never know. The lesson for me in that was if I had been too afraid or I was too worried I was going to get rejected, where would I be now? So I always tell people the worst thing that can happen is you hear no. You always have to try - and that’s hard. We all don’t like that feeling. But sometimes you’re not right. Other times someone will listen and the timing is right. For me, the timing happened to be perfect. Stefan: How can people start when building intersectional, diverse personas? KR: For me, it’s always starting with the disability lens. Then looking at things like demographic, geographic, and sociographic lenses. That’s how I approach it because that’s the world I’m in. I’m trying to solve problems and create opportunities for people with disabilities, so I’m coming from that lens of who is my audience and who I am trying to help. Stefan: Are there any mistakes you’ve made that you do differently? KR: A couple stand out for me. I wish I had not hid my disability for 10 years. I think the emotional, psychological drain on me personally and on my mental health was so painful. The other I would say is that I used to be very stubborn and think that my way was the way and I would push for something that I thought was the direction to go. And instead of sitting back and listening to all the opportunities or voices or looking at the bigger picture, I’m thinking about the right direction for that moment and whether I agreed or not. Now I take a different approach where I’m looking at the product narrative. I’m taking a broader view. And I’m bringing more voices to the table including ones that don’t agree with me. I think all of that was because I felt intimidated - I was the only woman in the room 95% of the time so I felt like I had to put my foot down and be pushy and strong about it. You have to have your voice be heard, but you have to make sure that you’re looking at the whole picture, all the voices, and really being thoughtful in your decision making process. Stefan: How has your work in accessibility changed due to COVID-19? KR: Disability has always been looked at in certain buckets. You have an older population, you have people with physical disabilities, hearing loss, low vision. In representation, people always thought it’s an older white person. What I’ve seen happen with disability representation is more people are self-identifying because more people are at risk with COVID-19 now. If you have high blood pressure, lung disease, heart disease, or if you’re recovering from cancer. Those are all disabilities, but people never really looked at it like that before. More people are talking about it than ever before, and learning from people in the disability community who have been living with these issues their entire life. We’re learning from each other and helping each other, and that’s definitely been a huge shift that I’ve seen. The community is also much more vocal than before. The disability community was vocal, but usually within our circles. It wasn’t such a mainstream conversation. Stefan: Have any personal stories stood out to you in the community around COVID-19? KR: There are two things I’ve seen. Representation is showing up more diverse. It’s not just white. It’s Asian, it’s Black, and so many other different backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses. I always knew it was there, but it just wasn’t gaining the platform or the visibility. And not just from the COVID situation, but also the Black Lives Matter movement. The disability community is stepping up - and there’s the Black Disabled Lives Matter movement happening in parallel. That’s really important as well to make sure that the community is really getting seen. Stefan: Have you seen interesting virtual ways of getting involved with movements? KR: One of my favorite campaigns right now is the Crip Impact Campaign, which is based off of the Netflix documentary Crip Camp, which talks about the history of the Americans with Disabilities Act and how that came about. It’s a very diverse amazing group of disability advocates that have come together every Sunday and do a town hall to talk about the different issues facing the disability community. And there are incredible conversations being had with thought leaders in the community, and even around the Black Lives Matter movement and COVID-19. Our community is thinking about things and how we can support each other not just now but in the future. That’s been wonderful to see. If you go to CripCamp.com [https://cripcamp.com/] and go to Crip Impact, you’ll see a webinar to sign up for that they do every Sunday. Stefan: Have you seen increased talk about mental health in the disabilities community? KR: Absolutely. The disability community has always talked about social isolation and depression, because often we are very isolated, but now even more so - the conversation has rapidly grown. There have been some great thought leaders in this space. One is a personal friend, Margaux Joffee, the director of accessibility marketing at Verizon. She also started her own organization called Kaleidoscope Society, which is a platform for women with ADHD. And more thought leaders are gaining a platform to elevate the conversation, not only where they are in the workplace but also the things they are passionate about bringing up and raising awareness on. The disability community is worried - emotionally, mentally, and physically. Our unemployment rate was already high. Now it’s super high with COVID-19. Then there’s access to healthcare and worrying about if they are going to save you because maybe you’re too high risk. Or will they give you access to a ventilator. Those are real things that are happening - the disability community has lost a lot of people through this. There’s a fear that even if we get through this pandemic, what’s going to be left for us. How are we going to go back into the classroom? How are we going to continue to work? How are we going to financially support ourselves? There are some serious fears and worries about if people are going to do anything to help us. Stefan: What do you see as the future of accessibility in tech? KR: We’re definitely seeing where voice is going. The power of voice technology and how that has given so much to people with disabilities. So much more independence and being able to do things as simple as turning on a light or being able to control different devices in your home. Or when you go outside using voice to navigate your phone. Those technologies will continue to get better and better. Also help with visual impairments and ways that people can stay connected when you’re blind or low-vision. I see that definitely getting more advanced. I dream of a world where I have devices in my ears and I walk into a room and I look at someone -- and that is the only thing I hear because that’s the thing I want to hear in a moment. So voice segmentation is something I’m really excited about in the future, and I think that’s a couple years away. I also see the hearing aid industry maybe not being the same. I think AirPods could be something you wear to listen to phone calls I use to hear the world. We’re both wearing the same thing and it costs a couple hundred bucks. I see that becoming more and more standard that companies will see just how massive this market is and how big the disability community is. And more focus will go towards innovating in that space. Stefan: Lightning round: Favorite quote? KR: “Nothing about us without us” Stefan: What motivates you in life? KR: Helping people. Stefan: What’s a book or movie that changed the way you think about the world? KR: Crip Camp documentary on Netflix. Stefan: Favorite podcast or music? KR: I don’t listen to too many podcasts cause there are no captions. I’m looking forward to that technology evolving more. I listen to all kinds of music. But I would say my favorite podcast right now is 13 Letters by Be My Eyes. Stefan: What’s the coolest tech product you’ve ever come across? KR: When I worked at Doppler Labs -- the hearing augmentation earbuds we made were definitely a life changing moment. It was two wireless earbuds that you put in your ears. With an app on your phone, you could control everything you heard around you. You could filter out noise, change the frequency, all of that. Stefan: How can people connect with you? KR: Check out my website [http://krliu.com] and get in touch. Stefan: Thank you!

Building Antiracist Organizations with Marcus Cooper | Episode 13

Building Antiracist Organizations Welcome to Crescendo Chats: Scaling Diversity & Inclusion. In this series, Crescendo co-founder Stefan Kollenberg hosts conversations with HR and diversity & inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work. This week’s conversation is with Marcus Cooper, the Global Head of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity at PagerDuty. Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript. Stefan: Can you share a bit about yourselves to get us started? Marcus: I’m a native New Yorker and have spent my whole life and career in New York City, which is a place that’s right for the kind of social justice work that I do. I’m pretty passionate about the city and the potential that it has to really change lives, particularly through local government and some of the social programs we have. As it pertains to my work, I’m the head of inclusion, diversity, and equity at PagerDuty. Our collective mission is to enable all of our people, which we affectionately call Newtonians, to be champion facilitators. If I had to break down my role, it would be into three main buckets: systems of equity and compliance (like EEO and affirmative action planning), talent development (like executive development and coaching), and community (like volunteerism and our foundation). Stefan: Why did you get into this work? Marcus: It’s the typical tale of a person of color being marginalized and feeling frustrated with the status quo. I started out my career in recruiting, working for a San Francisco-based recruiting agency, and I could not believe the homogeneity in the candidates that we’d engage. We would service these incredibly aspirational, famous, well-publicized tech companies. They were looking for carbon copies of talent and they would come back to us when a certain hire wouldn’t work out, and I would say the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over again and expect different results. I was sneaky about it, to be honest. I just started sending over full panels of Black and Brown candidates. The first time that I did that, I’ll never forget the hiring manager sending me a direct email and asking if I was new on the account. I said oh I’m still learning, can I send candidates that are different from the main profile. She said I could send them, but they probably wouldn’t end up engaging them. It was such a bias thing. Then they started to get interviewed and started to get hired. It was truly the most gratifying feeling to see them break down barriers and change their professional and economic landscape for their entire future, just by landing their first job in tech. At that time I was already volunteering and pursuing some more of my social justice oriented passions. I thought to myself that this might be an opportunity to merge those worlds and really do some good. It took a more substantial form when I joined Oscar Health in New York a few years ago, which is where I was before I joined PagerDuty. Stefan: What challenges have you faced or mistakes did you make in your journey? Marcus: The biggest lesson I’ve learned is probably around the meaning and value of service leadership. Early in my career, there was some ego involved. It was all about I understood there was a need, but I had done my diligence, talked to professionals… I thought I had all the answers and I wanted my ideas to win more so than I wanted specific communities to win and more so than I wanted my team to win. It’s a mistake a lot of young people make, but the truth is sometimes my ideas aren’t what certain communities need nor are they always the right decisions for the organization. I had to reorient myself on our people and our community and take my ego out of the equation. I’m reminded that this is not about me - people are depending on my resilience. I have to keep going. Stefan: What are some things you’ve shared with employees to keep them engaged in Juneteenth antiracist work? Marcus: The content we posted on LinkedIn around the murders of George Floyd and Breona Taylor and many others - and the role we play as an organization in one of the wealthiest countries in the world - it’s a clear responsibility on our part to not just say the things that sound right but to do something ongoing. So we came together as a leadership team and decided what we are going to do. We introduced an initiative, called A Date for Change, and this is essentially a company sponsored holiday for all of our people to take action in service of the Black community. From education to volunteerism to protest and lobbying, we saw hundreds of employees step up to practice real, tangible allyship. It was an incredible moment for us to not only leverage our platform but also our resources to educate our staff but also support a critical population within our community. Stefan: How do you decide on which resources to share? Marcus: We tried to make this structured as a program in terms of setting the right expectations for our staff and giving them opportunities, but also wanting them to have their own identity and voice. When it came specifically to lobbying, that was offered across a suite of other opportunities. It was for people who felt passionately enough for change that they were willing to go above and beyond and use their voice for good. All we did was put the resources out there. To be honest with you, I didn’t expect that particular opportunity to be as popular as it was. Stefan: How do you make sure momentum continues? Marcus: It’s at the heart of everything we do. We did a video interview with the Wall Street Journal and they asked me how we are differentiating ourselves from other public statements we’ve seen from other companies. And number one, the best thing about A Date for Change is that it’s annual. Meaning we’ll be closing our business to support our Black community every single year. Consistency is what creates change. It’s also worth mentioning that a deeper change isn’t an isolated effort. It’s part of a suite of commitments we made as part of our corporate platform in response to many of the things we’re seeing in the world. We’re committing over half a million dollars to creating justice and equitable communities. We’ll use our foundation, PagerDuty.org, for the bulk of that work. We’ve totally refreshed our volunteer time off policy, which is the hourly allocation to all of our employees to participate in volunteer activities throughout the year. We allocate 20 hours per year, but we’ve augmented it to allow employees to participate in human rights protests as a form of volunteerism. We’ve also changed it so it supports voter engagement work with a focus on voter turnout in underrepresented communities. We’ve also committed to driving more transparency around our inclusion, diversity, and equity work and we’ll be launching pagerduty.com/diversity in July 2020. It will be its own unique format, but similar to the reports you might see in the industry. Lastly, we’ve renewed our commitment to doing business with partners who demonstrate and prioritize IDE. That means looking at our current contracts and thinking through what the plan is to get them to a space where we feel like they’re demonstrating the values that are consistent with ours. And how do we make sure that any new business we engage going forward has an awareness and understanding of what we mean when we say you have to prioritize IDE. Stefan: What ways have you seen systematic racism exist within companies and how can we adjust processes to address that? Marcus: I try to pay respect to the fact that it might be a triggering question for a lot of folks. For a long time, racism was considered in such binary terms.It was either you're overtly racist or you're just not at all racist. Of course we know that's not the case.There's a number of microaggressions to speak to that. But more broadly, people are just kind of starting to wake up to it. Consider first that the systems we have today are relics of hundreds, of years of government regulated business, right? These are the same governing bodies that made discrimination, slavery, et cetera, all legally permissible. It's almost like a game of telephone. The message might dramatically change by the time it reaches the destination, but it still has elements of that original note, our HR and people systems, even the way we buy, sell, or just generally do business, all STEM from those original racist governing bodies, regardless of how much we've innovated. We have to actively seek out and audit our systems that have the capacity to adversely harm underrepresented populations. This is what it means to be actively anti-racist. We see this pop up in all areas from benefits compensation to our corporate policy, to promotion and performance management, hiring the entire end to end talent experience, to be quite honest.My advice would be to map out your talent process from brand exposure, which is more along the lines of talent branding all the way through to post hire and even exit, and then ask yourself, what are the critical moments or milestones within each step? What structures exist within those? How are we mitigating bias within those structures? Are you even aware of how bias might impact these structures? To be totally clear, this is going to be a lot of work.It's a tremendous amount of work to deconstruct every element of your people experience. I'll tell you that you won't see the benefits of this overnight, but the key is just to get started and you'll see those changes happen. You have to pay respect to the fact that it took a hundred plus years for our particular industry to get to this place. We won't be able to solve it right away. Stefan: What are your opinions on unconscious bias trainings? Marcus: They're flawed in the way that humans are flawed. They don’t quite get to the root of the matter. Many times they've become these check the box type of learning engagements for the operations.I do think they have some utility, but the challenge is most unconscious bias trainings, focus on bias awareness and not necessarily bias mitigation. Now I see these trainings being really successful when you can ground an audience in bias awareness first and then deliver a bias mitigation module that is specific and measurable enough, for example, Michelle Kim’s company Awaken [https://www.visionawaken.com/team]. It's great because they absolutely cover the basics of bias awareness, but they help drive action and behavioral change by rooting the mitigation element in our feedback culture. Stefan: What actions can recruiters take to have more balanced groups of candidates and hires? Marcus: Yeah, they have a tough job, because I think a lot of organizations don't spend enough time enabling and coaching these teams. So, in my mind, I see this in three critical buckets. Tools and systems. This is more focused on the resources available to recruiters to both hire efficiently and inclusively. My recommendation is to invest in tools that support a candidate centric hiring process. That's typically activated by your ATS and supportive tools like, travel and relocation, et cetera. Recruiters should always be expert relationship builders. So they should want to see talent win and be successful, but that means setting the right expectations and over communicating, coaching for the interview, and advocating for them behind closed doors. I’ve seen a few companies do this really well, an example that’s top of mind right now is the way Google recruits. They’re great at coaching candidates through the process. The third bucket is more around domain expertise and consultation. This is the concentrated nature of the recruiter and the hiring manager. Recruiters should educate hiring managers on things like market trends and availability, role expectations, search criteria, and everything in between. This is an opportunity for recruiters to create a pathway into the organization for underrepresented talent by setting a fair and equitable hiring bar. Stefan: Lightning round - favorite quote? Marcus: From a colleague back at Oscar. I don’t know who originally said it: “Service unto others is the price we pay for our time here on earth.” Stefan: What motivates you in life? Marcus: Family is a key driver for me. My grandfather is a personal hero. He was the original director of the NAACP and was one of the first Black engineers at IBM. Stefan: What book or movie changed the way you think about the world? Marcus: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Stefan: Favorite podcast? Marcus: I don’t know that I have a favorite podcast. Stefan: What’s the coolest tech product you’ve ever come across? Marcus: I saw a Kickstarter campaign for a mobile dog washing station. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I was watching the videos and thought it was so cool. Stefan: How can people connect with you? Marcus: Check out my LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-cooper-he-him-78445654/] or Twitter [https://twitter.com/carcusmooper] and get in touch. Stefan: Thank you!