With this being the second Black History Month celebrated remotely at LaunchDarkly, we were eager to ensure that we could stay safe while marking this ever-vital month to celebrate the past, present, and future of our African American employees.
This year's theme for Black History Month was "Black Health and Wellness." To echo this topic, we hosted a series of virtual events throughout the month of February and set up a fund for a selection of non-profit organizations that work to support Black health and wellness.
We wanted to center our celebrations around the expression of "Black Joy," a term that has evolved to take on its own meaning. One of its proponents is the New York-based writer Kleaver Cruz, who started The Black Joy Project in 2015. In an interview with Vogue magazine, he cited a message that is central to their coalition: "Black Joy is an act of resistance."
"Amplifying black joy is not about dismissing or creating an 'alternative' black narrative that ignores the realities of our collective pain; rather, it is about holding the pain and injustices we experience as black folks around the world in tension with the joy we experience in pain's midst," Cruz told Vogue. "It's about using that joy as an entry into understanding the oppressive forces we navigate through as a means to imagine and create a world free of them."
In the spirit of Black Joy and health and wellness, LaunchDarkly spent February putting on a series of events to celebrate what it means to be Black in America in 2022. In this post, I'll recap some of those activities and provide some insight on why we chose each of our activities.
Celebrating an icon
We kicked off the month with our First Friday celebrations—a monthly ode to the arts where we connect and enjoy each other's company. Having recently said goodbye to prolific stylist, journalist, and creative director André Leon Talley, we decided to come together and watch a documentary chronicling his life, "The Gospel According to André." The epic film takes us from the struggles of his youth through to his move to New York to fulfill his dream of working in the fashion industry and later, to iconic, barrier-breaking work at publications like Women's Wear Daily, W, and Vogue. We felt it important to spend our time commemorating a legend of the arts and his cultural contributions.
Having a feast
We express so much of ourselves through our food. From charting our roots to showing how we feel, meals can be a personal experience. For the second week of February, we held our Black Food Fest. Our LaunchDarkly employees contributed to a crowd-sourced cookbook helping us to honor the rich history of Black food. We also supported our employees in buying from Black-owned food businesses local to them as a way to enjoy Black Food while supporting Black chefs and businesses.
Giving back locally
We decided that buying from Black-owned food businesses was a start, but not where we wanted our contributions to end. As a nod to this year's theme of Black health and wellness, we created a fund supporting a group of non-profit organizations working to support the mental health and well being of Black people of all genders across the nation. For the month of February, we matched all donations to this fund up to $400. We wanted to ensure that we were making a meaningful contribution to the lives of people inside and outside of LaunchDarkly, and we thought this could be a good place to start.
To close out the month, we hosted a collaborative event between two of our employee resource groups (ERGs) to discuss how intersectionality occurs in our everyday lives. In the last week of February, The Rainbow Gems, our ERG created for, by and of the LGBTQIA+ workforce at LaunchDarkly, worked with the support of The Force, our Black employee ERG, for one final event. Both groups came together to host external speaker Madison Butler to discuss how our identities and behaviors intersect and considerations on how we can scale as an inclusive organization.
We see this as just beginning to cultivate an environment where our employees can feel happy and supported in bringing as much of themselves to work as they choose.
If you are interested in joining the LaunchDarkly team, check out our open opportunities.
