Welcome to the second annual Embedding Justice report by Greenpeace USA. This report serves as a significant milestone for our organization, enabling us to realign our diversity objectives and celebrate our achievements while identifying areas for improvement.
As we prioritize operational alignment and respond to the evolving needs of the moment, we recognize the importance of marginalized communities, beginning with our own staff. In this blog post, we will delve into the key highlights and insights provided by the report, showcasing Greenpeace USA’s commitment to embedding racial justice and equity throughout all aspects of our work.
Click to Download PDF
In 2022, we continued to grow our organizational commitment to Embedding Justice by hiring a Justice & Equity Director, embedding justice and equity in our organizational planning, process, and rolling out our Vision for a Justice Centered Greenpeace USA. In the Fall, our Strategic Leadership Team met to reaffirm our commitments to moving from racial justice theory to practice.
Who We Are:
Our Transformation
To cultivate stronger, balanced, and more united leadership, Greenpeace USA, Inc. and Greenpeace USA Fund, Inc. have both adopted a multiracial co-leadership model at both our board and executive levels. Our combined boards are 79% BIPOC, which has remained steady, and 54% women, an 11% decline from 2020–2021. For the second year, the Greenpeace Fund Board is headed by Jakada Imani, the first Black Greenpeace USA board chair, and the Greenpeace, Inc. Board is led by Elizabeth Gilchrist, the first woman board chair of Greenpeace Fund.
Key highlights of 2022
Our first mission was to remove significant structural barriers in talent management and acquisition to create more equitable outcomes for our BIPOC employees. Since then, the number of staff who identify as people of color has tripled and those in management positions have more than quadrupled to 45%.
Successes
Women continue to lead across the organization, including 67% in senior management, 43% on our boards of directors, and 57% across management.
Age diversity among our staff continues to demonstrate our commitment to the success and development of both new career and experienced employees.
Lessons
As part of our commitment to LGBTQ+ justice, we still have room to grow to recruit and retain nonbinary and trans leaders.
We’re working to improve our data collection and reporting capabilities to capture additional dimensions of diversity, such as ability, LGBTQIA+ status, mental health status, parental status, and immigration status while preserving employee privacy, anonymity and safety in reporting.
What we do: Who, how and what we have delivered
Communication
To diversify our communications, we built a more diverse Communications team. As of December 1, 2022, Communications is 60% BIPOC and 75% women. The leadership team is 50% BIPOC and 5 of 6 members are women. We’re rebuilding our community management capacity across our social media platforms to engage audiences in tough conversations and minimize bad actors that can toxify our social presence.
Social media
Roughly 10% of posts across all Greenpeace USA social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram) in 2022 were explicitly about environmental justice or creating a more diverse, equitable, and inviting movement.
Communications Campaigns
This is legacy-building work to fortify racial justice and advance equity as a core part of the Greenpeace USA mission and identity, and it will matter 5 days, 5 months, 5 years from now. To do it, we’re actively gathering feedback and assessing our progress on equity initiatives to measure our success and, perhaps most important, we’re asking questions to prioritize our own internal learning and listening to heighten our external outreach. We’re addressing more issues with outsized impacts on marginalized and BIPOC communities, such as Roe v. Wade, and other issues facing Americans alarmed and concerned about climate change. They are all interconnected: healthcare, gun violence, women’s rights. And by adding our collective voice to the solution-making, Greenpeace is taking action that will ultimately help us mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
Program
After establishing effective guidelines on how to plan objectives and key results in work and development at the leadership level, our team crafted equally effective objectives and key results in racial justice and equity. They include centering frontline and climate-impacted communities—many of whom are BIPOC—and developing collaborative plans to organize and mobilize.
Program Campaigns
There isn’t one linear methodology to sustain a department that is high-performing, well-led, and reflective of our commitment to justice and equity. We are working to establish our own successful model. Program supports Greenpeace USA’s campaigning, engagement, and development work and the broader movement of environmental justice through strategic planning. We are and remain agile and willing to learn how to best do that in the urgent circumstances of any moment. Right now, we’re building a more diverse movement of Greenpeace supporters to activate volunteerism, direct action, policy research and analysis, and grassroots-to-grasstops organizing by securing our resources to build the power of people and win a green, just, and peaceful future.
Our road ahead
Our forward vision
Looking forward, we expect 2023 to be a year of focus. We want Greenpeace to be a place where people bring their best selves and do their best work because the stakes are too high to not make that daily investment in the communities that need the support and resources we cultivate. We need to be armored with intent and action for the collective, ongoing fight. But we also want to be an internal reflection of the external equity and justice we fight daily to actualize.
In 2023, we will explore and roll out new programs, including a Justice and Equity Accountability Committee and identity-based communities of practice, and explore new ways to get more mentoring and coaching to more Greenpeace staff. We will introduce more voluntary self-reported categories, both through Paycom and an anonymous survey, and expand pay transparency, fluency, and our commitment to pay equity. We will build the internal culture of direct action that Greenpeace was founded on and continue to diversify the community of activists we support and partner with across the movement.
Stay tuned to see how GPUSA will be advancing racial justice and building people power in our upcoming internal as well as external campaigns.
