Pia Flanagan didn’t want to just talk the talk on racial equality in the business community. The corporate lawyer and chief of staff to the CEO of MassMutual sought to actually walk the walk. So, this year, she and several other employees stepped away from their day jobs to effect change.
Flanagan became COO of the CEO Action for Racial Equity, a fellowship that launched this fall to identify, develop, and promote scalable and sustainable public policies and corporate engagement strategies that “will address systemic racism, social injustice, and improve societal well-being.”
Each fellow is spending one to two years on the effort, using a business approach that includes technology-enabled strategies. The fellowship has drawn more than 250 professionals from over 100 cross-industry organizations, according to a RYOT Studio article for HuffPost.
“We know that there are about 48 million people Black people in the United States,” Flanagan told the outlet. “Everything we do will relate back to that number. So, how many Black people are we touching with any of the policy proposals on which we work?”
For our regular curation of must-read innovation and tech news, the Plug In South LA Beat, we’re going inside Flanagan’s quest to advance racial societal equity nationwide:
For Black Executives like Pia Flanagan, the Fight for Racial Equity Is Personal
Photo Credit: CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion