Our D&I Journey

Denise Rosplock, VP of Marketing, NY

“Are you OK?”The day after George Floyd’s murder I picked up the phone to ask my teammate, Wayne, this question. I was still reeling from the images, heart-broken and angry. I knew the answer to the question I was asking: no, he’s not OK. This isn’t OK, not for Wayne, nor for any of our BIPOC teammates. I felt the pangs of my privilege. No one would ever need to call me and ask that question.

The proverbial straw seemed to have finally broken the camel’s back. We were not going to sit still and well-wish ourselves past this. We were speaking out in our private lives. Brands around the globe found their own words to denounce what had transpired; we sought the same. We accepted the complexities that introduced for a global company.How would that translate within our various industries? What could we do more locally? As a community of marketers working at the individual brand level, we felt stuck.

So we unstuck ourselves.

That’s how our journey began. Eight marketing leaders on an impromptu evening call, openly expressing our feelings, supporting each other, committed to change. We ran a range of emotions, but one sentiment was clear: it was time to move beyond conversation and take action. Everyone was ready and on board to do the work.

We reached out to our wider leadership team with three requests which persist as our group’s core tenets:

Open, title-less conversations: to build a safe, honest forum where necessary and uncomfortable conversations would take place and all voices were equal

Ongoing learning: to seek and share information and experts to help us overcome biases and work and communicate authentically; and

Local empowerment: to surface and act upon opportunities to effect change, whether as a peer group or within the industries we serve.

That was Day One of the journey; eight people wanting to make good, overdue change happen. And as we rapidly learned, those conversations were happening all around us and thus our NY D&I group was born!
The group has grown from eight colleagues to over 20 since May. We’ve taken up the torch at the brand level in a variety of ways, a sampling of which you’ll see here. We’re forging new partnerships, listening to our colleagues, and taking a hard look at our own practices. Each of us as individuals, and each of our brands within different industries, is at a different point in this journey. And that is OK. As long as we’re on the journey, working internally and within our brand communities, we will make good change happen.

So let’s keep going. This will be a long journey with a lot of work to do, but we’re on our way.Reach out at anytime if you’d like to learn more! --Denise