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#BlackLivesMatter

Ryan Carson

Actions > words. What we’re doing to support #BlackLivesMatter

As of today, June 9th at 9am Pacific, any company in the world can use our Treehouse Apprenticeship Program for free – it is now open source for all.

Here’s why:

At Treehouse we’ve been thinking deeply about what we can do to actively tear down White Supremacy in the United States of America.

We know that systemic racism was built into the foundations of our nation, going all the way back from when the first slave ship arrived on the coast of Virginia in 1619.

Part of that system is education and hiring practices in corporate America, which perpetuate the generational racial wealth gap.

For the past three years, we’ve partnered with amazing organizations like the Boys & Girls Clubs, Dress for Success, AnitaB, Kapor Center, Urban League, ChickTech, Edison Job Corps, Goodwill, Salvation Army and companies like NPower, Verizon, Mailchimp, Niantic, Nike and more, to disrupt that racist system as much as possible.

We invested over $1.4m in building a repeatable, scalable, diverse talent pipeline that empowered underrepresented families to get high-paying engineering and design jobs. 

We saw …

All with $0 of student debt.

47 apprentices in Atlanta, Dallas, New Jersey, Portland and more, went through the program and successfully converted to full-time employees. Here is one of those amazing groups – they worked hard to start careers at companies like Mailchimp. They’re still successfully employed today.

However, a lot of companies could not afford the apprenticeship program. We needed to charge companies $230k so we could support a full-time team at Treehouse who could install and manage the program to make it successful.

We want to remove that cost barrier completely.

By open sourcing the Treehouse Apprenticeship Program, any company in the world can use it for free. Any company can now reliably, repeatedly and affordably hire amazing talent from the underrepresented community in their town or city. Any company can do it. 

Here’s an overview of how the program works:

CEOs, it’s over to you

We will be launching a simple site soon to explain how the program works, including a training video, and providing free access to the project management tools and methods.

What about Treehouse?

Treehouse is a small team of 45 people. Although we are a small company, we understand the impact of our privileges. We are committed to continue and improve our fight against these injustices.

We are not perfect and I, personally, have made many mistakes in my on-going journey to become an educated ally to the Black community. Posting on social media or putting a #BlackLivesMatter sign in my yard will not change the underlying system.

However, empowering the Black community to build generational wealth for their families and children will begin to change the system. Money = Power.

In addition to open-sourcing our Apprenticeship program, we are doing the following …

  1. Training 100% of all Treehouse Employees on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
  2. Committing to use apprenticeship to diversify our team and ensure non-biased hiring practices.
  3. Amplifying the voices of Black individuals across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn by re-sharing posts every week.
  4. Giving all of our employees $100 gift cards to support Black-owned businesses.
  5. Instituting a flexible-work policy to ensure that everyone has the time and mental space to support their loved ones during these scary times.
  6. Donating $6,000 to joincampaignzero.org.

Resources

The list below includes resources so you can support the #BlackLivesMatter movement that is happening in our country right now.

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