Black History Month at Accelevents: A Reflection
As we close out Black History Month for 2022, we’d like to share some reflections on this month and what it has meant to us to celebrate and honor the contributions of Black people in the United States. As an early-stage company, it has been important to us to define and embody our values as a team. This month, in particular, we dedicated considerable time thinking about our most important resource: our people.
We Centered Our Values
What we came to understand through reflections and discussions was that many of the values we celebrate during Black History Month simply reflect our beliefs as a company, and we should do more to demonstrate our commitment to them. In particular Black History Month has helped us reaffirm our belief in our company values of community and inclusion, among several others. Inclusion: We believe diversity in people, experience, and opinion results in optimal outcomes, and we ensure these voices are heard. Community: We feel anything can be accomplished when people come together for a common purpose.
We Are Reviewing Internal Processes
To continue these reflections through the year, we have begun to examine and adjust our internal processes to match these beliefs. Accelevents is committed to hiring, retaining, and promoting talent from all backgrounds, including Black professionals. We recognize there are representation gaps in tech and that Black employees report feeling less included in the workplace. Given our flexibility as a fully remote organization, we know we can do more to stem those trends by finding and retaining Black talent and providing a supportive employment environment for everyone at the company. Despite our commitment to inclusion, we recognize the work we must do to build a more diverse team. To make progress, we are focused on building a diverse talent pipeline. We are centering this as a core goal of the Talent team this year and are putting the appropriate resources behind that effort. In tandem with recruiting, we are examining our processes for developing and advancing talent internally to ensure we retain our employees of color and nurture their leadership potential.
We Are Aligning External Commitments To Internal Ones
We believe our commitment to inclusion should be felt externally in terms of what we do via the business and beyond. Our event management platform and resources give us an opportunity to address the challenges underrepresented groups face. For Accelevents, this has meant partnering with select organizations to provide in-kind support to use our platform or supporting select causes financially like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. This year we are expanding our efforts to offer reimbursement to Accelevents employees supporting Black-owned businesses in their local communities and beyond.
We Have Created A Volunteer Committee For Decision-Making & Execution
In addition, we decided to more formally establish a committee of volunteers who will work with me to decide where and how to invest this annual budget moving forward. This will help us continue supporting our community both internally and externally. We are proud to have done some collaborative brainstorming and action this past month, but we know more important work lies ahead of us. We appreciate our teammates who have come together to spearhead these initiatives across the company and anticipate sharing our work across all these actions throughout the year. We look forward to building a more inclusive team and a better community globally with our efforts.
