Anti-Racism Guide for Founders
Sarah Hodges
Partner at Pillar VC
This guide is intended as a resource to help support founders as you consider how to create an anti-racist culture in your companies, backed by open discussion and action. This guide is in no way comprehensive, rather, it reflects just a few of the resources our own team has found helpful.
A few considerations
- Speak up! Your team is likely hungry for your leadership on diversity, inclusion and belonging. As CEO, you’ll set the tone for your entire company; it’s important that you take the lead to open the door to conversation and be proactive about prioritizing initiatives that promote building a diverse and inclusive team and culture.
- Create tangible goals for your organization around diversity, inclusion and belonging. Making your goals transparent internally — and even externally, if you’re comfortable — is a great way to ensure that your team remains committed to ensuring that diversity and inclusion are part of the fabric of your company.
- Start at the top, ensuring that you’re building a diverse management team and board. You have the freedom and ability to be thoughtful about how you construct your advisory board and management team, and have the ability to influence the investors you choose and independent board members you add to your team. Make sure this group represents the ambitions you have for the composition of your company overall.
- When evaluating new team members, shift your mindset to think about culture add instead of culture fit.
Diversity & Inclusion Consulting
Guides & Articles
- A Guide to Diversity and Inclusion for Startups
- Anti-Racism Resource Guide
- Anti-Racism Resources
- Anti-Racist Resource Guide
- Racial Equity Tools
- How to Be An Anti-Racist CEO
- It’s Time We Dealt With White Supremacy in Tech
- Opportunities for White People in the Fight for Racial Justice
- The Impossible Burden of Being Black in America
Recruiting
Lists of Black Leaders & Companies
Videos & Documentaries
Podcasts & Playlists
Books
- White Fragility
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
- Killing Rage: Ending Racism
- Between the World and Me
- The Fire Next Time
- The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
- How to Be An Anti-Racist
- Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland
- The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America
- A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
