Our Anti-Discrimination Policy

Black Lives Matter. Always.

A few weeks ago, PIP released a Black Lives Matter statement with some problematic elements, and we would like to apologize. Our original statement furthered white-normativity, placed our white voices as authority figures to speak about racism, had no plans for specific anti-racist work within our own organization, and didn’t give much room for BIPOC, whose voices should have been the ones uplifted. 

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We are an organization with white founders, who have created a predominantly white team. White people will never understand what the non-white experience is like, and in our BLM post, we placed our white voices as figures of authority on the BLM movement, anti-racism, and allyship. We directed readers to our own anti-racism guide, created by white people from a white perspective. By doing this, we have directed attention back to our own white point of view; centering white people, yet again, as figures of authority, as the most important voice, which is not true. Our post was also written with the assumption that it was a white person reading the post. PIP wants to be an organization that serves everybody, and to do so we cannot default to white when speaking to our audience. We should not have done so when we wrote the post. For everything listed above, we sincerely apologize. We are consistently striving to better our organization and ourselves as we continue to amplify Black and non-white voices. We are working on an actionable plan to make our program an anti-racist one, and we are seeking out resources created by people of color to help us do so.

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We would also like to acknowledge that we cannot truly be an anti-racist organization if we do not continue to hire people of color to be members of our leadership team. It is impossible for a white person to truly understand the worldview of non-white people. Furthermore, white folks should never be speaking over people of color or doing things for those communities; we should instead be uplifting them into positions of leadership and visibility. When hiring our original team, we did not put in the work to refute systems of oppression. Our ease and comfort live within an oppressive, racist system, and we should have actively worked against these systems to hire in an anti-racist manner. We are actively researching hiring biases, and how companies/non-profits in the past have hired outside of their immediate circle. We are still in need of several leadership roles, and we will not hire anybody else without thoroughly learning about what it takes to hire in an anti-racist manner. 

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Black Lives Matter. The PIP Program condemns the murders of George Floyd. Of Breonna Taylor. Of Cornelius Frederick. Of Tony McDade. Of Ahmaud Arbery. Of so many others whose names we have not heard. The police brutality in the US is disgusting. The racist systems it works under are disgusting. We stand in solidarity with the Black community, and all those who have been affected by racist systems, violence, and harassment. We cannot fall back into a racist normality. 

The changes we are making immediately:

1. Researching how recruitment of PIP patrons functions under a racist system, and how organizations in the past have worked against racist systems when recruiting for a new organization. Once we know more, we will implement these strategies as we recruit, and we will set measurable goals for ourselves to hold us accountable and ensure that we are reaching beyond our immediate circle.

2. Amplifying voices of color on all of our platforms. and we’ve added art to our website that was made by people of color. Everything that we have posted/will post is credited unless the creator specifically requests to be anonymous, which we note.

3. Implementing a discrimination policy that the ACLU has recommended for schools. Besides changing the language to fit the PIP program instead of a school district, the wording is identical to that on the ACLU’s website.