The Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the organization that founded Black History Month, sets a theme for the celebration each year. This year’s theme is “The Black Family: Representation, Identity and Diversity,” and it provides institutions, educators and organizations a way to focus their reflection, education and conversation. Braze, a New York-based customer engagement platform, is taking a similar tack and has declared a theme for its own internal Black History Month celebration: education, community and unapologetic Black joy.
According to Lauren Francis, a customer success operations manager, Braze will celebrate Black History Month by spotlighting and celebrating Black employees, supporting Black entrepreneurs and driving awareness and donations to organizations tackling societal challenges that disproportionately affect the Black community. In addition to touching on its plans for Black History Month, Francis also shared how Braze’s DEI task force and employee resource groups keep diversity a topic of conversation and top of mind throughout the year.
While we initially sat down with Francis to learn about Braze’s plans for Black History Month, we ended up coming away with a rough blueprint of sorts for how companies can uplift and support their Black employees in February and beyond.
In honor of Black History Month, what is your company doing this year to celebrate Black history?
Braze’s employee resource groups and DEI task force are coming together to highlight and celebrate Black history and culture. Braze is holding various initiatives that acknowledge our painful past and help us understand its impact on our societal structures today in the hopes of building a stronger, more empathetic and colorful community tomorrow. We are going to be brazen with our Black joy by encouraging our Black employees specifically to take a moment to truly celebrate and appreciate our Black bodies, music, hair, media and culture.
For example, our Black@Braze ERG strives to celebrate the Black diaspora globally and maintain a space where employees and our network of accomplices can show up as their authentic selves in support of the advancement of Black people. We are also hosting an initiative that encourages all of our employees to buy Black. The pandemic has hurt a lot of businesses, and unsurprisingly, Black-owned businesses were hit especially hard. To have a little fun, we plan to gamify it by having participants share their receipts via Slack or social media.
Braze is holding various initiatives that acknowledge our painful past and help us understand its impact on our societal structures today.”
What other activities or charitable initiatives do you have planned for Black History Month?
Black@Braze is also partnering with our Speaker Series ERG to bring in a Black professional(s) who can speak to how Black employees can successfully navigate the corporate structure, protect their mental health and understand money management and investing to build generational wealth. We’ll also be highlighting Black employees in each department as a way to share their stories, recognize their accomplishments, provide opportunities to form new connections and to normalize representation.
In addition, we’re shining a spotlight on some of the companies in our Tech for Black Founders program. Braze and some of its partners launched Tech for Black Founders last June in response to the ongoing social injustices specific to the Black community. The program is meant to level the playing field by giving our technology away for free to Black-led companies, since only 1 percent of VC-funded companies in the United States are Black. More than 100 companies applied to the program, and 11 are using Braze for free as a result.
Lastly, Braze matches charitable donations up to $100 a year per employee, and we regularly encourage team members to donate to nonprofits and provide a list of recommendations to choose from. This month we’ll be calling attention to organizations that focus on resolving issues that disproportionately affect the Black community, such as mass incarceration and housing inequality.
What are some ongoing programs, initiatives or benefits your company offers to support and empower Black employees throughout the year?
Our DEI task force regularly supports initiatives focused on equity, equality, education and justice. For example, our task force is partnering with ReadySet, our DEI partners, to hold companywide anti-racism and ally skills workshops. The anti-racism training deepens anti-bias learning through a specific focus on racism in the workplace, while the ally skills workshop focuses on techniques to support people across differences and build a more inclusive working environment using an ally-accomplice framework. The goal is to leave with an understanding of the basis by which racial-based bias is perpetuated, how to identify it and how to work toward individual and systemic change. Information from these workshops and other sources are also included in our onboarding course.
Our recruiting and marketing teams also built a pilot program with DEI as a core focus. Over the next six months, these two teams will interview at least one out of every four U.S. candidates from an underrepresented background. They are also dropping the college degree requirement for all marketing jobs to see if this improves the diversity of our recruiting pipeline.
Various ERGs, such as our Culture Club, host “uncomfortable” conversations that relate to race relations in America. Employees listen to podcasts with the goal of having open and honest conversations on the ways in which America’s policies and culture impact marginalized and non-marginalized groups.
Finally, Braze also offers benefits that focus on mental health for all employees. What’s different about these benefits is that it allows Black employees to find a mental health professional who is also Black or identifies as a marginalized person. Because Black experiences are typically very different from white ones, it is important for our marginalized employees to have the option to speak to someone who can better understand their lived experiences.
