Reexamining our role, and getting specific about our ongoing commitments to anti-racism.
We recently held a small Zoom celebration for our 5th birthday as a company. After viewing a fun, nostalgic slideshow of old pitch decks, launch party photos, offsite sticky notes and more, it dawned on me that we say and see those two words — “For All” — a lot around here.
They are right there at the end of our mission statement: “… to deliver safe autonomy for all.”
They are upfront and center in our partner Toyota’s motto: “Mobility for All.”
And the list goes on with others who have similar visions:
- “We won’t stop until anyone, anywhere can summon a Voyage.”
— Voyage - “Only by growing the ecosystem together … can the full potential of autonomous vehicles and services be realized for the benefit of all.”
— Baidu Apollo - “To inform the public about automated vehicles … so everyone can fully participate in shaping the future of transportation.”
— PAVE
We’ve written before about how we can play our part in making autonomy work for all, and we feel as committed as ever given both the role transportation has played as a tool of discrimination and how access to safe, affordable, convenient transportation is known to be a key predictor of socioeconomic mobility.
Today, with the long overdue reckoning regarding the lack of equal treatment and opportunity for all in Black communities, those two words have a much bigger meaning, that in truth we haven’t fully embraced to date at CARMERA.
Since George Floyd’s murder, we’ve taken some time as a company to talk about what we can do to advance that bigger meaning of For All. I’d like to share four initial areas we are focusing on going forward:
- Talent: We won’t pretend that we can transform the composition of our company overnight, but we can assess where in our hiring process and work norms we need to make changes to improve our racial diversity, particularly in attracting and retaining Black talent. A similar audit we did a few years ago helped us build a more gender-diverse team, but we stopped short and need to expand on that. That work has begun, including specific actions to broaden our target hiring pools and uncover blind spots in employee experience.
- Technology: One of the foundations of our crowdsourced approach to mapping is a safety monitoring service for professional fleets, such as delivery vans, to help protect both drivers and the public. One key source of value that our fleet partners have voiced is the on-demand access to video documentation for driving incidents that occur often, but inevitably end up in conflicting accounts about what happened. Time and time again, video evidence has been crucial in spotlighting systemically racist practices that otherwise get brushed aside. As we continue to evaluate new partners for this free service, we will work to direct outreach specifically to Black-operated fleets who we feel could benefit even more from this technology. If you manage or know of such a fleet, please reach out here — we will respond to all inquiries within 48 hours.
- Mentorship: Our headquarters in New York and Seattle are both adjacent to vibrant, diverse areas that still have exposure to far less opportunity than their neighboring regions. They should benefit from greater bottom-up involvement and inclusion from knowledge workers who themselves have benefited greatly from working there — us included. To date, we’ve had ad hoc interactions with institutions that facilitate mentoring for subjects like computer science and math. Beginning in the next school term, we will shift to recurring engagements with schools that have majority populations of color, located in our Seattle and Brooklyn communities, and look to build this into future paid intern programs.
- Empowerment: As individuals, CARMERA employees have shown a great deal of energy in getting more involved based on personal passions such as protest, research and policy. We believe this is the right time to support that desire more proactively as a company. While we’ve always had flexible work and PTO policies, we know there’s a big difference in open-ended time off vs. coordinated blocks set aside to focus on non-work priorities as a collective. We recently experimented with an all-company physical/mental well-being day off, which was a success. Beginning this summer, we will be extending these days to at least a semi-annual cadence, and expanding the scope of “well-being” to a broader set of factors — namely, causes and service in support of For All ideals.
There is much more we need to do on a personal level, but we believe CARMERA should have a specific and ongoing role to play as well. Those may be different for a given organization, and a given time, but we feel those words specific and ongoing are important. It’s been 3 weeks and 3 days since the killing of George Floyd. We have chosen to publish this summary and make commitments that by nature will hold us accountable on whether we made tangible, sustained impact when we look back in 3 months, 3 years and beyond.
For now, I’ve been happy to see our team coalesce around these actions, but I’m well aware that we don’t have all the answers, nor can move the needle by ourselves. However, in these times, one of many hopeful messages I’ve seen shared recently (aptly, a driving metaphor) reminds me that this movement does feel different, and if we all keep moving it can be:
