Black Lives Matter

TCG supports the Black Lives Matter movement.
TCG supports the protests against police violence.
TCG demands that we individually and as a country recognize and reject America’s racist past and present, in education, in health outcomes, in criminal justice, in policy, in voting rights, and well beyond.

TCG’s mission is to improve the world around us, in big and little ways, every day. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many other Black* Americans evince the urgency of our mission and how much further we have to go. TCG can do better. We — all of us together — can do better.

Since TCG, as a company, has not done all it can do, we are taking steps, starting immediately, to work at improving our company and the world around us in terms of diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Our initial steps are below, focusing on actions in the DMV and intra-TCG actions.

DMV actions:

  1. We will adopt a second park in a lower-income neighborhood in DC, and we will work with the local ANC commissioner to create a beautiful, open, inclusive space for that community.
  2. Our charity focus for 2020/21 is Food-Insecure Families. We will make sure that in addition to helping food banks and the like, we will also partner with a nonprofit to encourage a grocery store or co-op to open or to begin delivering food in a food desert in an underserved minority-majority area in the DC region.
  3. TCG will work with a nonprofit that focuses on criminal justice reform in the DMV. This may involve bail reform, reducing incarceration rates, decriminalizing non-violent offenses that disproportionately affect Black Americans, or other issues.

Intra-TCG actions:

  1. The affirmative action audit we commission from an outside firm every year shows that we are hiring close to the optimal diversity numbers (compared to the population locally, and considering the size of the company). But we can do better. To that end, our recruiting team has created a “recruiting diversity plan” to improve our hiring diversity. That plan has numerous facets, and includes: 
        • creating recruiting relationships with HBCUs,
        • training hiring managers for diversity in recruiting, and
        • working to win Diversity Awards. (We find that when we go after an award, we adopt best practices for doing the things needed to win the award.)
  2. We are reviewing our employee handbook to ensure that racist behavior is explicitly identified as completely unacceptable and grounds for termination.
  3. TCGers will meet regularly to find ways for TCG to improve the way our society addresses race.
  4. We will bring in a professional advisor to conduct training for all employees in unconscious bias and mitigation tactics.

These are just our first steps. We are working on a long-term strategy, and plan to provide quarterly updates — watch this space.

We believe strongly that we can improve, as a culture, as a society. We will do what we can to help make that happen.

 

*The question of what to call people whose skin color or genetics links them with others with a similar color or genetics is a very complicated one. We have selected “Black” (as opposed to “African American,” “person of color,” or “black”) after some research, but we’re happy to change that if we turn out to be wrong.