Cedric Brown thinks we can all learn a lot from Harriet Tubman
Project Include’s newest board member says that change is made by those who are willing to take risks.
When Cedric Brown was invited to join the board of Project Include, he was excited — and a little bit daunted. It was a “huge honor,” he explains, to be the first man to join a team full of powerful women trying to change Silicon Valley’s approach to diversity and inclusion.
“At first I was a little bit afraid,” he explains. “These founders are such fantastic women, bringing this really rich experience to the table, and they’ve started something that is enormous. I asked myself: Am I up to the task?”
In fact, Brown was more than qualified to take a seat at the table. Having been involved in tech industry philanthropy for nearly 20 years and, as one of the earliest employees of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, he’d helped enable a vibrant, vocal approach to diversity and inclusion to emerge. It’s all a long way from where he started.
Originally from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he trained as an educator and worked in schools. His family background and identity as a Black gay man shaped his passion for helping people gain social mobility. But after arriving in California for graduate school at Stanford, he started to see that there were many ways to achieve the same goal.
Eventually he ended up shepherding more than $70 million of investments in people, communities and companies, and seeing what a difference businesses can make in changing lives and attitudes. And while he says it may not always feel like progress is being made — particularly when short term politics actually seem to be going backward — he says that it is there. Sometimes it’s difficult to see, because there is no fix-all, permanent answer.
“I mean, it’s like the tide,” he says. “During the course of a day, during the course of any time period, you can ebb and flow. And that’s where we are.”
“There are conversations that can happen now because folks are more aware of the challenges, the barriers. It gives the issue a level of credibility and visibility that it didn’t have before — perhaps not enough, but it’s still something it didn’t have five years ago.”
Like any startup entrepreneur, he says that the real answer is to keep forging ahead, keep changing — rather than waiting for everyone to catch up, for agreement. It’s a style of activism that one of his friends dubbed “the Harriet Tubman approach.”
“Harriet Tubman didn’t stay around trying to convince people,” he explains. “She said, ‘If y’all ready to go, we’re going.’ And then she came back for others, when they were ready. I think Project Include has a bit of Harriet Tubman approach to it: We’re going with the folks who are coming and saying, ‘We’re committed to this work and we’re going to do it.’ And then I think there will be subsequent rounds of companies that decide they’re ready, and when that happens Project Include can go with them.”
That’s why he sees himself so aligned with the work that Project Include is doing. Educating those who are ready to make change, tackling assumptions, putting information out in the public sphere, making recommendations on best practice, and giving encouragement to those who are ready to make the leap. All of this can affect change now, and make it easier for others to join in down the line. And there is information; things are known; ideas have been tested. There are strategies that work, and there are strategies that don’t, and businesses can be better when they are provided with the data and the advice to seize a constantly-shifting moment.
“At one point I thought, well, maybe there’s a window of opportunity that’s closing. But now I really feel like it’s still open. We are in a place where someone can say, ‘I had this horrific time, I was constantly harassed. It’s rooted in gender bias and misogyny.’ And people will say ‘That’s unacceptable. We stand with you. We’re going to fight with you.’ That represents a shift to me.”
