Black Lives Matter, and what we're doing about it

Here’s what Haven Connect is doing to become a more explicitly anti-racist organization.

• Re-ignited our book club. Last year, we read Automating Inequality and Remote, but during the move to Denver, Book Club got lost in the shuffle. We will purchase books from POC-owned bookstores and read books by POC authors.

• Started a news channel in Slack. Previously we had an industry news channel, but nothing explicitly about current events.

• Being more intentional about learning about race, and the history of racism in affordable housing. We plan to screen movies and podcasts to the team, on company time, then have a conversation amongst the team about what we’ve seen.

• We added Juneteenth as a company holiday, to celebrate the day when slavery ended and all Americans became legally free. However, it’s important to note that Black women didn’t get the legal right to vote until 1920, and the ability to vote in practice until the Civil Rights Act in 1965.

• We added a mental health policy that allows the team to take time off, as needed, to recover from the world stress that is happening (and has been, for years).

• Provide anti-racist resource lists for the team

This is a starting point for us, and I’m excited to share how this evolves as we grow.

Black Lives Matter, and making values explicit

We went from a 2 person to a 10 person company last year, and it’s been a huge change - both for me, and for the company. As a solo founder, I didn’t really understand what it took to develop a high performing team, or how my role would be different when I had a team.

One thing I’ve been surprised by is how much I have to make explicit. When we were a two person team, my CTO knew I was an activist since college. I never put out a company statement or wrote down our values - it wasn’t necessary. Now that we’re a bigger team, I made the mistake of assuming my employees would know how I felt about the Black Lives Matter movement, or that I see affordable housing access as a way to combat systemic racism. Yet, I didn’t make it explicit by writing it down or telling new employees.

Part of my resistance to making things explicit is my allergy to performative actions. I don’t like it when words are used to placate and don’t create real change.

So, I went to protests, donated, and cried over George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmed Arbery’s unjust murders. But, I didn’t talk about this with my team, and my silence could be interpreted as ignorance or indifference.

Two members of my team asked me for more - to release a statement, and to take further action to make Haven Connect more explicitly anti-racist. After those requests, I realized that while the most important thing is for there to be real societal change, that does start with the words I use in my organization. And provided the words are backed up with action, it’s not performative.

So, while I was late to the game in realizing what we needed to do as an organization, I’m grateful that my team helped move us as an organization forward. Here’s where we’re starting.

Perhaps realizing that I have to talk about what we as an organization believe in is a “no, duh” moment, but there is a difference in seeing something obvious and actually internalizing it. It was a wake up call for me to be more intentional about communicating Haven Connect’s values and antiracist culture. My personal next steps include reading The Color of the Law and a book on building culture (recommendations?).