New Year, New Perspectives

Hi! Welcome to an update from Whiteboard’s Change Committee. We’re an internal team committed to activating on our Anti-Racism Plan. At the end of every quarter, we take a moment to reflect on our progress as a company. We review what we've done well and what we need to do better, and we think it’s importantto do this work in the open. So—let’s review!

With a new year comes new perspectives, new energy, and often, excitement. We’re happy to report that our new season of Change Committee has all three! In January, we began prepping for new committee members and prioritized 3 goals to collectively focus on throughout the year. For the first half of the year, we’ll be focusing on Goal 5 (Develop a protégé program) and Goal 9 (Develop an industry directed initiative focused on advancing anti-racism within the digital design industry). And for Q3-Q4, we’ll be focusing our efforts towards Goal 11 (Launch virtual coffee listening tour with community leaders to assess needs and opportunities).

While we’re focusing on these two main goals this season, we have made a couple other updates and have continued work in other areas. Our team took a look at another at-risk goal, Goal 4 (Provide subsidized support to two Black or Latinx-led organizations per year) and decided to combine this with Goal 3 (Provide pro bono support to Black or Latinx-led organizations), thereby expanding the number of companies we support pro bono. In January, we also began working on a new pro bono website (Goal 3), kicked off our Q1 Book Club reading “The Color of Law” (Goal 2), and began our after-school program with a local charter school (completing Goal 12)!

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In February, we welcomed several new committee members for a new term and put our heads together to workshop our priority goals: Goal 5 (a protege program) and Goal 9 (an industry-directed initiative). Together, we took a long, honest look at these goals, identified bottlenecks, brainstormed solutions, and outlined action steps to revitalize these efforts:

We looked at the two elements of Goal 5 (mentoring and contracting), and decided to focus exclusively on the contracting side to support, work with, and learn from BIPOC creative professionals. The committee is currently working on researching new contractors / partners and creating an internal resource for our expanded network. We are also looking at renaming this goal to more accurately represent its intention and action steps.

For Goal 9, we brainstormed on a tangible outcome for advancing anti-racism within the digital design industry. Drawing from our own experience, we landed on creating a repository available to other agencies and white-owned businesses who are interested in engaging in Anti-Racism work. This repository will be published in early 2024, and revolve around the BIPOC authors / mentors we’ve learned from and the collection of resources we’ve discovered during the past 3 years. We plan to reflect and share what worked (and what didn’t work) for our agency, and our learnings from both. Our team is currently in the process of site mapping and outlining this repository!

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We’re excited about the momentum around these two goals and look forward to seeing what our collective focus brings in Q2! Looking back towards the past two years, and ahead at the one in store, we feel invigorated to find creative solutions in order to do better in our Anti-Racism work. Our team is ready for what the rest of the year brings!