PRIDE & Belonging

June is Pride Month and Two Barrels is stoked!

When we say that diversity and inclusion aren’t just buzzwords to us, we mean it. Here we celebrate our differences across race, gender, ability, neurotype, and more. We’re blazing a culture of freedom by embracing being our whole selves and honoring our unique skills and talents. We’re encouraging bold ideas, creative energy, and building an environment where every voice is valued.

This Pride month, we’ve been busy collecting stories. Instead of our usual blogging about best practices, we’re recognizing some of the amazing ways our employees volunteer to champion the LGBTQ+ community—our community.

Employee Volunteer Spotlights

Employees aren’t just workers. We’re whole people with lives outside of the 40-odd hours we contribute every week to making awesome products. Giving back to our communities is just one way we spend our time outside of the office. Here are just a few of the organizations we’ve volunteered with to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and protections:

Out In Tech – Digital Corps

Out in Tech is an organization leveraging tech for social change by connecting LGBTQ+ folx with employers and volunteer opportunities. One way their members pay it forward is by participating in Digital Corps, which provides web services to activists and social entrepreneurs globally. They’ve built over two hundred websites for grassroots organizations in seventy countries, many of which maintain laws restricting the rights of individuals based on their identity or relationships.

A Two Barrels employee who’s volunteered with Digital Corps says:

I’ve been volunteering and building websites with Digital Corp for about three to four years. The event has always changed how I see the world and various LGBT identities and countries. Digital Corps builds sites for places across the globe where being part of the LGBTQ community is still criminalized. A website that is password protected can be a precious resource and lifesaving. Working with people across multiple disciplines, cultures and meeting the leaders from these organizations that we created sites for, has been one of the most meaningful parts of the site builds for me.

Odyssey Youth Movement

One of our employees sits on the board for Odyssey Youth, an organization promoting equity for LGBTQ+ youth in the Inland Northwest. They offer youth-led programs including a weekday Afternoon Drop-in Program with activities and resources for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults; a Basic Needs Program offering books, hygiene items, menstrual supplies, gender-affirming apparel, and more, plus referrals to community resources for care providers and housing support; and a new Inclusive Schools program, which offers guidance and resources to local LGBTQ+ students, their GSA (Gender & Sexuality Alliances), and supportive staff and educators. They also organize Pride in Perry, a community pride event with local vendors, entertainment and art, and more in the South Perry District.

Spokane Arts Asphalt Art Program: Riverfront Park Pride Flag

One of our own in-house graphic designers contributed volunteer hours to this massive Pride flag just outside of Riverfront Park in Spokane, Washington. The Asphalt Art Program is a three-year pilot program making efforts to slow traffic and bring more art into everyday life. Representatives of any city neighborhood council can apply to beautify their local intersections with work from local artists, so the Riverfront Park Pride flag is just one of many art installations bringing communities together.

OPEN

Last but not least, one of our writers has done volunteer work for OPEN. This organization advocates for anti-discrimination protections and other rights to inclusivity for folks in diverse family and relationship structures, from blended families with cooperative co-parenting agreements to folks cohousing with their intentional families. As a result, an employee-led initiative is underway right here at Two Barrels to add “family and relationship structure” to our employee handbook’s list of protected classes—furthering our ability to ensure that every employee can be their whole, real self at work.

Yes, This Matters

Survey after survey, article after article says that one of the biggest keys to employee satisfaction (and employee productivity) is a sense of belonging. Even if it’s a concept that’s tough to define in concrete words, we’ve all known its opposite—that sinking feeling of being sidelined, marginalized, picked last, and left behind. It’s rough! And it’s pretty hardwired in our mammals-love-social-groups brains that to be included, to belong, is a basic psychological safety need. No wonder why people don’t bring their best selves to environments where they don’t expect to be met with acceptance and genuine hospitality.

People are giving us some of the best years of their lives, or at least the better part of their waking hours, and it’s only right that we honor that by making working here as personally fulfilling and rewarding as we can. We want employees to want to work here, and among other things, that means building that sense of belonging. That goes beyond inclusivity statements and bare-minimum legal protections; it even goes beyond pronouns in our bios and freely using our chosen names across internal communications. It’s about making sure that no one is “the only one” in any given room. It’s about listening and responding to our employees’ needs, and it’s about creating a culture where our diverse experiences and identities are recognized as strengths.

“History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.”

—Marsha P. Johnson

We may be kinda goofy, but we take our role in shaping each others’ cumulative realities pretty seriously. We can be pretty impulsive here. We tend to prefer to beg forgiveness than ask permission. So we won’t always get everything right the first time. When part of being our whole human selves includes being messy and making mistakes, we own up to it, and then we work to make it right. We’re pretty sure we’re right about this—and now we’ll work to make it just that little bit better, day by day.