Sprout Social stands with the Black community

“We want our lives to be valued. We want protection. We want what is promised to all of us. Our inalienable right to life and equality.”

—Black@Sprout Employee Resource Group, June 2020

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To our Sprout community,

The events of the past couple weeks have laid bare the broken aspects of our society, and the pain and suffering that too often sit in the blurry periphery of our collective vision.

Black lives matter. And to make change, we need to make commitments: to speaking up and standing in solidarity with the Black community, to amplifying the voices of Black leaders, to educating ourselves and to contributing to progress.

Sprout Social’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion

The systemic inequality in the spotlight right now isn’t new. But because it is so important to address, we wanted to ensure our response was both meaningful and sustainable for the long-term.

At Sprout Social, DEI is woven into the fabric of our company. Our team members are at the center of driving our DEI initiatives, from planning monthly company-wide DEI Guild meetings to leading our Sprout Serves volunteer initiative to hosting networking and hiring events focused on identity groups that are historically underrepresented in tech.

This approach enables us to dedicate more collective time and investment to DEI work and ensure our entire team is involved, rather than siloing DEI within human resources. It also means we can integrate different skills and perspectives, get buy-in across the business and foster advocates who champion DEI throughout departmental efforts and planning.

Acting with urgency: our immediate & future steps

While a long-term plan is incredibly important, there is urgency in this situation—we need change, now.

As an immediate action step, we will be donating $250,000 total to local and national nonprofit organizations that advance racial equity and justice. Like all of our DEI efforts, we want to ensure our team is part of the process; therefore, each of our employees will select one of these organizations for Sprout to direct their donation toward:

• Black Lives Matter
• NAACP
• Assata’s Daughters (Chicago)
• King County Equity Now (Seattle)
• Irish Network Against Racism (Dublin)

Seeing our team come together over the past two weeks, gathering and sharing educational resources, highlighting volunteer opportunities and having hard but important conversations has been inspiring.

These resources set the scene for last Friday, June 5, when we took a team-wide day of action to ensure our employees had the space to reflect and engage in the work needed to create change. Our team spent this day in different ways: from making our voices heard in-person and on social, to reading books and watching documentaries, to calling family members to talk about police brutality, to dropping off water and supplies for protestors, to resting and reflecting.

It is critical that dialogue and action to be anti-racist, to step up as allies and to amplify the experiences of our Black colleagues be a sustained, ongoing effort. Beyond our immediate action steps, it is important to us to continue this work and to do so with input and direction from our team and community.  As we work to develop a long-term and sustainable action plan, we will focus on education, hiring, community engagement and using our platform, and we’ll continue to share specific updates and learnings on our social channels.

We’re in this together

We are deeply saddened that this is where we are in our society. To our Black colleagues, customers, family and communities, we are grateful to you for sharing your voices with us, and grateful for everyone who is lifting those voices up. Whatever you are feeling is real, and valid, and it matters. You matter. Our actions matter. Our ability to recognize and expand our limited perspectives and our ability to fight for change matter.

We are grateful for the opportunity to work with an incredible, diverse and passionate team that is committed to moving us forward. As business leaders, we can do more. We all can do more, so that the world can be more.

This post Sprout Social stands with the Black community originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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