Pride Supplies
Don't worry; I'm not recommending where to buy your rainbow-colored office decorations.
Dear friends,
I was hoping to bring you some easy ways of finding LGBTQ+ vendors. A small but significant way of practicing equity in the workplace is by paying attention to who supplies you with equipment, financial services, janitorial services, HR consulting, legal support, and office supplies.
The National Lesbian and Gay Chamber of Commerce has a formal registry of LGBTQ+ majority businesses, and corporations who are certified LGBTQ+ supportive businesses have access to that list. If you’re in a position to access it, please do! But that certification may be more than your organization or company can manage.
So I wanted to provide you with an alternative strategy if you can’t access that registry:
It might be worth gathering key staff together and doing a DEI assessment of your protocols regarding suppliers.
It may not be your top DEI priority organizationally, but it’s a great way of modeling to staff, board, clients, and community that diversity, equity and inclusion are part of the life of your organization to such an extent it also shapes how you approach suppliers.
A couple of GREAT resources you could use at a staff or board meeting include the following:
THIS supplier diversity quick start guide, which includes a supplier diversity tool kit (by semi.org), and
THIS supplier diversity survey created by Survey Monkey so you can survey your current suppliers about their DEI practices and make-up, so that suppliers also begin to realize that diversity matters.
Either of these will help you if this is new terrain, and both might also help you re-tool.
What’s important about this process is that you actually develop a consistent practice, that diversity in vendor selection become part of how you do work together. Otherwise it ends up being just for show, and too much corporate and nonprofit engagement with Pride is already that.
This might be my least sexy Pride message, but sometimes it’s nice to have a manageable, defineable, achievable goal in the midst of so much Change The World work that we do together.
May you encounter joy in the achievement of something real and lasting, and may it remind you to keep paying attention to the work on the ground as well as the vision in the clouds…because the rainbow may start in the clouds, but the reward happens when it reaches the ground. (Forgive me if I just confused Pride with St. Patrick’s Day.)
With gratitude,
Sandhya
What's keeping me connected!
The fourth week of the month, the Joy in Justice newsletter features a social media recommendation of someone Sandhya follows and gleans inspiration from.
If you're as much of a history nerd as I am, and if you're about Queer Liberation, and (and this is the big and) if you're still on Facebook...my big discovery of the month is Dr. Eric Cervini, who also delivers a slide of queer history 101 into my inbox every week. A recent issue was on three rennaisances: the Italian Rennaisance (Michelangelo may have been queer?), the Harlem Rennaisance (Ma Rainey was featured), and the Digital Rennaisance, lifting up Alan Turing, Sally Ride, and others. Really rich content!