Pride Month Continues and we continue to celebrate it. Queer author Roxane Gay says “When you can’t find someone to follow, you have to find a way to lead by example.” In addition to a pandemic, we've found ourselves in the midst of an important moment for changing how we look at racial justice and equity in our country. At times, it may seem like we lack leadership, but it's important to remember we can all lead where we are from our seats and play a key role in the movement towards creating change. That might look like advocating for your pay equity for women, Black employees & other groups at work, pushing your company to use Black vendors and pay them fairly, support Black nonprofit organizations, and create programs that truly support the retention and advancement of Black and other underrepresented employees at work. As mentioned in Angelina's 2017 TedX talk, showing up, using your voice and advocating for others in not only a demonstration of your leadership, but an act of social justice.
The Importance of Expansion
We also wanted to share news of how some of our programs are expanding! In 2017, Google partnered with C-Suite Coach to be one of the 8 launch partners of the Google Digital Coaches program in the United states. This program was designed to focus on providing FREE resources, workshops, and coaching to Black and LatinX small businesses owners and entrepreneurs. In the launch year, C-Suite Coach was able to connect with over 1,000 small minority business owners all over New Your City and immediately started offering tactical/digital skills training needed in underserved communities.
The following year, in 2018, C-Suite Coach extended our contract with Google and was tasked with staffing, training & managing coaches for the program. Today the program covers 11 markets, has trained over 45K Black and LatinX SMBs and last week as Google has committed to expand a wide array of resources for black owned business, this work if a key part of that. We are immediately expanding to covering 3 more markets (see details below).
We are incredibly grateful to all the coaches on our team because if the work we were doing didn’t work, it wouldn’t be worth expanding. We are also grateful to every Black & Latinx employee at every corporation for championing programs that drive equity in our communities. Your leadership, the risks you take in the walls of your offices, the voices you use unapologetically, matter so much and is proving that when you advocate loudly, change does happen.
Check out Google's Instagram Story as our CEO Angelina Darrisaw chats about tools small businesses can use right now to grow their businesses at 2:00 PM EST.