Pride Month is here and many of you are in the midst of hosting all kinds of events to celebrate throughout June. This year is an especially exciting one as Pride celebrates 50 years since the Stonewall Uprising, the event that was the catalyst for the LGBTQ rights movement. From educational to celebratory to service-focused, these events are a great way to reinforce the important year-round work your organization is doing to build an inclusive culture for LGBTQ employees and for the communities in which you do business.
In no way an exhaustive list, below are some resources that you can leverage to provide additional tools to your employees to ensure that the conversations and commitment to LGBTQ inclusion continue after the events are over.
HAPPY PRIDE!!
DBP
LGBTQ Stories
As we know, storytelling is a powerful tool to create empathy for a group of people some may not have much experience with — a key to building an inclusive culture. Bringing in speakers or encouraging employees to tell their stories are great ways to do this. However, this isn’t always feasible. Videos and podcasts are excellent alternatives to bring life to stories, when in-person events are not an option.
The author of the seminal book, Making Gay History, has created a podcast from the interviews he conducted as research for the book. This month there will be a “special season of Making Gay History to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. Hear the voices of the rioters, and of the activists who turned a riot into Gay Liberation—a new and expansive phase in the LGBTQ rights movement.”
We also like these two video series highlighting transgender stories, one from the NY Times called Transgender Lives: Your Stories and I am: Transgender People Speak created by GLAAD.
Mynamebadges.com
LGBTQ Basics
If you haven’t already, a great idea for Pride Month is to use it as a kicking-off point to talk about personal pronouns. Your organization may not be ready to make organizational changes like adding pronouns to email signatures, or adding gender neutral pronouns to the HR system, and that’s fine. The first step to inclusion is education, so maybe start with HRC’s “Talking About Pronouns in the Workplace” guide.
Our friend, Jenn Grace, suggests four words we should drop from our vocabulary as a first step in being more inclusive to the LGBTQ community. This short piece that is easily shareable as a conversation starter at a lunch and learn or other informal gathering.
Need some help to start a conversation about transgender inclusion? Our article, Getting the Language Right: The Transgender Conversation, lays out some key “trans 101” facts and provides some additional reading suggestions if employees want to learn more.
Intersectionality
Often during Pride month, myths surrounding the intersection of LGBTQ and religious identities can emerge that sometimes derail progress toward inclusion for all employees. Our friends at Tanenbaum Center for Inter-religious Understanding and Straight for Equality collaborated to create Three Myths About Religious and LGBT Identities and How to Dispel Them. This article works well as an entry point for what can be a challenging conversation about this topic.
In our recent interview with Wade Davis, former NFL player and D&I consultant, we explore the intersection between race and LGBTQ identity and ways organizations can address this often challenging topic.
DBP
LGBTQ Facts & Figures
Diversity Best Practices presents key data about LGBTQ buying power and media and internet usage in a handy one-pager using infographics to illustrate the trends in this community.
CNN.com updates their LGBT rights “fast facts” list annually. The list highlights key milestones in the fight for LGBT rights in the US.
PFLAG
Building an Ally Program
June is the perfect month to launch an ally program at your organization. There are many ways to do this and much will depend on your organization’s culture.
Straight for Equality, an arm of PFLAG, has created fantastic materials to support your efforts to build an ally culture for the LGBTQ community. Resources include tips on “coming out” as an ally, and materials you can use to organize an allyship campaign.
