At Brink, we are united with Black communities.

We recognize generational trauma, pain and fatigue after 400 years of enslavement and oppression from our ancestors. We support the uprising that is happening in our cities and in our streets. We refuse to look away from the harm and terror of white supremacy, the countless lives lost to state-sanctioned violence, to poverty, to COVID-19 — to racism.

We know this crisis is not new, and in this moment we have a responsibility to carry the momentum forward into real and lasting change.

As we look outward, we are also looking inward. We are asking: how do we show up in this moment? As colleagues, as consultants, as humans?

Brink is a company owned by three white women. Our senior managers are all white. We still have a long way to go.

We started an intentional journey three years ago to move from focusing on “communications for good” to explicitly centering racial and economic justice. We built a Brink Way that centers community voices and empowers community-led change. Our external communications and campaign work is guided by principles of reciprocity and grassroots power-building.

Internally, we have required all supervisors to engage in racial justice-informed management training. We are in the middle of a year-long process that began with redesigning our recruitment and hiring practices to hire people who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), and continues with revising internal processes to ensure equity and create pathways to leadership for BIPOC team members. We have shifted all our corporate giving to invest in BIPOC-led organizations.

And now, we are taking the next steps to deepen our own understanding and internal practice of racial justice.

We are looking hard at the ways white supremacy has rigged the American business model, the insidious ways it still shows up inside our own doors. We are asking a lot of: why? how? and what if?

We are building a new leadership structure that is representative of the diverse identities and experiences at Brink. And with radical empathy and conscious humility, we are redoubling our commitment to build an organization that is actively anti-racist, inside and out.

We ask our clients and colleagues at white-led organizations to join us in this work — not only to hold us accountable, but also to commit to the same change in your own company and in the world.

As Joan Olsson writes in Detour Spotting for White Anti-Racists: “Racism in North America won’t end because people of color demand it.  Racism will only end when a significant number of white people of conscience, the people who can wield systemic privilege and power with integrity, find the will and take the action to dismantle it.”

This work is ours to do. And we call on you to do it with us.