Oxeon Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives

June 2020

Team Oxeon,

I am proud of all of you and the millions of other people who have protested and turned to social media to make their personal statements in opposition to racism and to affirm that Black Lives Matter. Our country has failed to achieve equality for all, and seeing so many people expressing their disgust that all people are not treated equally in this country is a cause for optimism.

While I am proud of Oxeon’s efforts, investments and commitments to diversity at our company and support for vulnerable populations through our work, we have failed to make it comprehensive, we have failed to make it a high enough priority and we have failed to achieve our own objectives. We can, must and will do more, both at Oxeon and beyond. 

The national/international spotlight being directed on our police and criminal justice system is warranted; it must be reformed and we should never accept events like George Floyd or Rayshard Brooks or Breonna Taylor or any other person senselessly losing their life at the hands of our police. I also believe racism in our society begins in the womb of a Black Indigenous, and/or Person Of Color (BIPOC) due to widespread lack of prenatal care. It is present at birth, during infancy and in early childhood through disparities in healthcare access and quality. It manifests in determinants of health like food and housing insecurities. Once a child of color reaches school age, the inequities accelerate with a lack of early childhood education and our failed urban public school systems, which eventually destroy one’s hope and belief in their career and economic prospects. As that happens, the deeply broken dynamic between BIPOC communities and our criminal justice system shows itself with a devastating lack of trust, higher rates of incarceration, biased sentencing guidelines and by kneeling on a Black man's neck for eight minutes and forty six seconds.

I encourage all of you to continue to express your individual voices through protests and through social media. But Oxeon has a unique platform to do more and we are going to do more. As a leadership team, we have spent the last several weeks, since my initial email to you, looking at our internal People and Business operations, at how we deliver services to our clients and at how we can utilize our platform to broaden and expand our ability to fight and bring down these forms of institutionalized racism. Importantly, we have made the decision to hold ourselves accountable for these efforts to each of you and the public, by publishing diversity metrics and scorecards on our website, in our FWIW newsletter and elsewhere. We are committed to leading by example not only through in-person or social media protests and donating to worthy causes, but we are going to leverage our platform to have long-term and sustained impacts and we are going to hold ourselves accountable by publishing our results. 

I encourage you to look here for the full range of commitments we are making. They include revamping our internal sourcing, hiring and promotion/development processes, reprioritizing elements of our ongoing Chief People Officer search around DEI expertise, providing employees with a week of PTO and a T&E stipend to work for key political elections and forming a Diversity Council to lead our internal efforts. In taking a page from the “Carbon Offset” climate change movement, we will donate up to $100,000 to organizations fighting for equality and ending racism when we don’t achieve our diversity objectives on any given executive search mandate. We will share these results and donations publicly.  We will also co-found a 501(c)(3) to create board opportunities for BIPOC executives. 

I am deeply energized, excited and committed to these initiatives and to Oxeon being a force for change. Fighting racism is fundamentally aligned with our mission To Make People Healthier. I am also proud that like with so many other aspects of Oxeon, we will do what is hard. We will operate with transparency and hold ourselves accountable by sharing our results with the outside world.

David, Mia, Michael and I want to express our deep appreciation to Kate, Rebecca and the BoO team for all their hard work in helping shape our DEI commitments.

When we look up in 10, 25 or 50 years, I hope these past weeks are the beginning of real societal change. I believe we will look back and say with pride that our work at Oxeon in building healthcare companies, in supporting vulnerable populations in our day jobs, through our COVID Rapid Response Coalition, and through our commitments to lead and be accountable on promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, have resulted in a better world.  

Thank you and keep doing great things.

Trevor