Our commitments to racial equity
Our commitments
Supporting racial justice organizations
As part of this commitment, we announced grants—to Equal Justice Initiative, the Center for Policing Equity, the Leadership Conference Education Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Policing Reform Campaign, the Black Lives Matter movement, Marsha P. Johnson Institute, and Essie Justice. You can learn more about organizations fighting against racism and inequality here.
Essie Justice Group
Essie Justice Group is a powerful community of women with incarcerated loved ones working to end mass incarceration.
Equal Justice Initiative
Equal Justice Initiative works to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment, and promotes racial and economic justice.
The Marsha P. Johnson Institute
The Marsha P. Johnson Institute works to end violence against Black trans people across the U.S.
Recognizing that racism is a problem the world over, looking ahead, we will focus on more global solutions, and will be giving grants to local community organizations tackling these issues in Brazil, and across Europe and Africa.
Helping create economic opportunity
- $50 million in financing and grants for small businesses, focused on the Black community and in partnership with Opportunity Finance Network. This commitment builds on our recent $125 million Grow with Google Small Business Fund that is helping underserved minority and women-owned small businesses across the U.S.
- $100 million in funding participation in Black-led capital firms, startups, and organizations supporting Black entrepreneurs, including increased investments in Plexo Capital and non-dilutive funding to Black founders in the Google for Startups network.
- $15 million in training, through partners like the National Urban League, to help Black jobseekers grow their skills.
- $10 million+ to help improve the Black community’s access to education, equipment, and economic opportunities in our developer ecosystem, and increase equity, representation, and inclusion across our developer platforms, including Android, Chrome, Flutter, Firebase, Google Play, and more.
Mentorship is also critical to growing networks and successful businesses. We launched our Google for Startups Accelerator for Black Founders, a three-month digital accelerator program for high potential Seed to Series A startups and announced an expansion of our Digital Coaches program to 8 new cities, including Memphis, Birmingham, and Cleveland, to provide 50K Black-owned businesses in the U.S. with the mentorship, networking, and training they need to grow.
Improving education
To that end, we’re expanding our CS First curriculum to 7,000 more teachers who reach 100,000+ Black students, scaling our Applied Digital Skills program to reach 400,000 Black middle and high school students, and making a $1 million Google.org grant to the DonorsChoose #ISeeMe campaign, to help teachers access materials to make their classrooms more inclusive.
Beyond the classroom, we’re increasing our exploreCSR awards to 16 more universities to address racial gaps in CS research and academia, and we’re also supporting Black in AI with $250,000 to help increase Black representation in the field of AI.
These efforts build on our other education initiatives, including CodeNext, focused on cultivating the next generation of Black and Latinx tech leaders, and TechExchange, which partners with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving Institutions (HSIs) to bring students to Google’s campus for four months to learn about topics from product management to machine learning.
Building products for change
Some activations have already launched, including the Assistant’s responses to questions related to Black Lives Matter and Juneteenth. We're also working quickly to give merchants in the U.S. the option of adding a “Black-owned” business attribute to their Business Profile on Google to help people find and support Black-owned local businesses by using Search and Maps. This opt-in feature is in development and will roll out to Business Profiles in the coming weeks.
Creating products for everyone is a core principle at Google, so our product teams will work to ensure that all users, and particularly Black users, see themselves reflected in our products. In addition, building on YouTube's announcement, our Trust and Safety team will work to strengthen our product policies against hate and harassment.
Building sustainable equity in our workplace
Creating meaningful change starts within our own company. Strengthening our commitment to racial equity and inclusion will help Google build more helpful products for our users and the world. To that end, we’re announcing several commitments to build sustainable equity for our Black+ community.
To help achieve this, we’ll post senior leadership roles externally as well as internally, and increase our investments in places such as Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago, and London, where we already have offices. We'll take the same approach across regions, using site and country-specific plans to recruit and hire more underrepresented Googlers in communities where the social infrastructure already supports a sense of belonging and contributes to a better quality of life.
To help direct that work, we’re establishing a new retention and progression consultant within each product and functional area to mentor and advocate for the progression and retention of Googlers from underrepresented groups. We’re also convening a task force, including senior members of the Black+ community at Google, to develop concrete recommendations and proposals for accountability across all of the areas that affect the Black+ Googler experience, from recruiting and hiring, to performance management, to career progression and retention. The task force will come back with specific proposals (including measurable goals) within 90 days.
Our internal research shows that feelings of belonging are driven by many aspects of our experiences at work, including the psychological safety we feel among our teams, the support of our managers and leaders, equitable people processes, and opportunities to grow and develop our careers. Across all of these dimensions, we’re committed to building more inclusive practices and policies—and revisiting them when we don’t get them right.
As one example, we’ve had a security practice of Googlers watching for “tailgaters” in order to reduce instances of unauthorized visitors in offices. We have realized this process is susceptible to bias. So, over the past year, our Global Security and Resilience team partnering with a cross-functional working group, conducted extensive research, listened to Black Googlers’ experiences, and developed and tested new security procedures to ensure we could maintain the safety and security of the Google community without relying on this type of enforcement. Now, as we prepare to return to the office, we will end the practice of Googlers badge-checking each other and rely on our already robust security infrastructure.
We’ll be welcoming external experts into Google to share their expertise on racial history and structural inequities, and start conversations on education, allyship, and self-reflection. We’ve begun piloting a new, multi-series training for Googlers of all levels that explores systemic racism and racial consciousness, to help develop stronger awareness and capacity for creating spaces where everyone feels they belong. We plan to roll out this training globally by early next year. We’ll also integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into our mandatory manager trainings.
For example, over the past year, we’ve worked with our mental health provider in the U.S., to increase their Black network of counselors from 6.6 percent to 9.8 percent. Our global EAP providers are also working to further diversify their network of counselors. Over the next 90 days, our Benefits team will work with the Equity Project Management Office and Black Leadership Advisory Group to identify areas where we could expand our benefits or provide additional support to Googlers and their families. As one example of the kinds of programs that work: we've made the medical second opinion service available to Googlers’ extended family—something that our Black+ community told us was important to supporting a family structure that includes siblings, parents, parents-in-law, and grandparents.
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Building on $32 million in donations towards criminal justice reform over the past five years, Google.org is committing an additional $12 million in grants to advance racial justice. In addition to grants, Google.org will be providing pro bono technical support to organizations through the Google.org Fellowship program.