Today is Juneteenth. It’s a day of remembrance, action, and celebration for Black lives, signaling the day the last enslaved Black Americans heard of their freedom on June 19, 1865.
We’ve spent most of the last few weeks listening to and learning from our Black employees, friends, and partners. We recognize that we have so much more to learn, and so much more to do.
ProviderTrust will continue to stumble bravely in pursuit of equality, inclusion, and anti-racism. We are committing to be better, and today in many ways marks a start for us.
Two weeks ago, we said Black Lives Matter as we stood and protested with our Black employees, community, clients, partners, and friends in demanding an end to systemic racism in the United States.
Today, we are detailing a few specific ways we are beginning to change our culture, company, and finances in pursuit of a more inclusive world. We are committed to being an ally for change, spreading love, and speaking out against hate.
As a beginning, our leaders made this promise to our company this week in our monthly all-company meeting:
At ProviderTrust we value differences of opinions and embrace everyone’s unique perspective. We desire an environment that allows all team members to bring their full selves to work, unashamedly.
We recognize that an environment of inclusivity doesn’t come naturally but requires constant vigilance and work to create inclusive systems and environments. We will champion building a team that embodies empathy, equity, respect, and inclusivity while actively supporting our community, clients, partners, and friends.
We will ensure that each team member has opportunities to belong to the ProviderTrust mosaic and has the power to share opinions and feedback at all times.
Our Diversity and Inclusion Promise
How we’re beginning:
We will live and lead our commitments on diversity, inclusion, and equality.
- Our core values are everything to us. We regularly discuss, coach to, and strive to live out these values in everything we do. They are our foundation of our vision. And sadly, we’ve realized that they do not represent our views on inclusivity and diversity. We are committed to adding language to our core values that speak to equality, empathy, diversity, and inclusivity to be a permanent part of our culture.
- We will create accountability for diversity and inclusivity within our organization with ongoing, clear goals and will report transparent progress against them internally and externally.
We will create a talent system for inclusive recruitment, promotion, and representation on our teams.
- Immediately, we’ve begun to diversify our recruiting and candidate pools for future positions by expanding our target channels.
- We are reviewing all job descriptions to establish inclusive behaviors.
- We will engage diversity and inclusion anti-bias trainers in our hiring and performance coaching processes for leadership and hiring managers.
- We are committed to increase the diversity of our internal team over time as we continue to grow and add to our culture. It has become a core focus and is an area in which we know we can improve.
We will spend our money with purpose.
- We will conduct a vendor and supply-chain diversity review to ensure we are using our company dollars best, supporting minority-owned entrepreneurs and small businesses to drive economic impact right here in the Nashville community.
- Broadly, we will review our supply chain to ensure our core suppliers and partners are in alignment with our core values and commitments to diversity and inclusion. We will actively choose to partner with and select vendors based on these criteria.
We will ensure we have an inclusive environment within ProviderTrust.
- We will establish an employee resource group and are committed to giving this group a collective, recurring voice in our events calendar, lunch-and-learns, internal communications, and external activity planning.
- We will conduct an annual diversity and inclusion survey to collect feedback from everyone at ProviderTrust, using the inputs to inform organizational direction and change.
- Our employees are seeking out inclusive resources and hosting open discussions within book clubs and sharing of ideas in our internal channels of communication. We have begun by collectively reading “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo to discuss systemic racism and white privilege in our society.
We will advance equality with our clients, products, and in our community.
- Immediately, we are analyzing our own suite of healthcare SaaS products to ensure when possible we can contribute to and promote healthcare equity, particularly in supply chain diversity across the healthcare system.
- We are committed to putting resources toward and making space for grassroots activism within our organization and in our communities.
We will continue to pursue a more inclusive world in which everyone can belong. Until then, we will continue to learn, to listen, to act, and to change.
