Racial Equity Initiative

Justice reform

We’ve established 20+ new partnerships this fiscal year, collaborating on a variety of projects designed to help reduce racial disparities in the justice system. We’ve partnered with a variety of organizations using technology and data to better understand community needs and help improve policing, prosecution, and diversion practices.

For example, in 2020, in response to the ongoing racial injustice in the Black and African American community, we donated a total of $1.5 million to several racial justice organizations, including the Equal Justice Initiative, Innocence Project, Minnesota Freedom Fund, and NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund. Since June 2020, we have seen $11 million in donations (inclusive of employee match) to civil rights, social action, and advocacy nonprofit organizations.

In less than 12 months we have seen nearly two times the donations to these organizations than what we saw in the previous six years combined. We also committed another $50 million to strengthen and expand our existing Justice Reform Initiative by June 2025.

Skills and education grants

We have awarded grants to 50 nonprofit workforce development and digital skilling organizations to Black and African American-led and supported community-based nonprofits across the US.  These nonprofits will collectively receive $15 million over three years to support operations and capacity building and will be provided with tech enablement services.

Of the 50 organizations, 49 are new grantees to Microsoft, including the Hidden Genius Project in Oakland, which trains and mentors young Black men in technology creation and entrepreneurship; and TechBridge in Atlanta, which aims to break the cycle of poverty through the innovative use of technology.

We have also provided $2 million in grants to 12 Historically Black Colleges and Universities to support curriculum development, student scholarship, faculty training, and online learning during COVID-19.

Expanding access to broadband

We have launched partnerships and projects driving adoption of affordable broadband, devices, and skilling in eight target cities: Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, El Paso, Los Angeles, Memphis, Milwaukee, and New York City.

Our projects will test a variety of models for connecting Black and African American families, and other families of color, to affordable internet service, computers, and digital skills, with a goal of improving outcomes in education, healthcare, and economic opportunity.

Nonprofits

We introduced our Nonprofit Tech Acceleration for Black and African American Communities program, which uses data, technology, and partnerships to help local organizations across the country modernize and streamline operations with technical solutions including licenses, discounts, implementation consulting, and concierge services.

The program works with organizations large and small at all stages, including startup nonprofits. The short-term goal is to help 1,000 community-based organizations accelerate their missions and drive greater impact through digital transformation.

Culture of inclusion

Strengthening a culture of inclusion is about a company-wide, sustained focus on understanding and practicing the behaviors that can improve the lived experience for all employees at Microsoft. Shared language and shared understanding go a long way in building the foundation for those culture shifts.

Starting with learning, we are seeing more than 96 percent completion rate for the newly required D&I learning courses on allyship, covering, and privilege in the workplace. We have begun pilots of the executive D&I conversations focused on corporate workplace experiences of those who are Black and African American, and we will begin the pilots for conversations on Hispanic and Latinx workplace experiences within the year. These are the beginning of executive discussions on dimensions of identity, community, and geography which we will continue to expand in the future.

We hosted Include 2021, our internal and external D&I event on March 17 & 18, with more than 110 sessions and 70,000 registrants from 185 countries. We also shared event content for on demand viewing as part of the launch of a new Microsoft Inclusion Journey site. This site also supports our commitment to share some of our internal D&I learning courses with our larger ecosystem including partners, customers, vendors, and developers. We will continue to add new content and conversations in the coming months.

Career planning and talent development

Growing global networks, enhancing business acumen, building skills, and leadership development have never been more important. With that in mind, we're investing in programs internally and partnerships externally that provide employees with a variety of options throughout their careers to learn and explore across professional opportunities and leadership excellence.

We have launched 33 cohorts of our mid-level and senior-level leadership development programs, with further staged cohorts planned for next year and beyond. Differentiated development programs have positive effects on employee experience and career development because they provide psychological safety for learning and growth, but are only one offering in the larger suite of learning and development programs for all employees. The programs are opt-in and require managers of all participants are required to participate in a parallel track to support and grow how they understand and support their employees.

As we strive to increase manager capability on inclusion, we are curating learning and enablement content to allow them to be successful in a hybrid work environment. We will continue to invest in strengthening our ability to have constructive conversations on topics related to D&I as part of our manager learning path.

Accountability for progress

Sustained progress on representation requires deep accountability at the most senior levels of the company. Over the last five years, Microsoft has increased representation for all demographics and levels reported in the 2021 D&I Data Disclosure and Report.

This year, we focused on enhancing the hiring and interview processes to include discussions on both culture and inclusion for management positions and employee hiring broadly, launching refreshed interview guides with an increased focus on inclusive interview processes and increased representation outcomes. We launched a pilot program to provide external coaches to some executives to accelerate progress on D&I, and plan to scale the program in the coming year.

We are well on our way to fulfilling our commitment to double the number of Black and African American and Hispanic and Latinx leaders in the US by 2025. As of June 2021, we are 71 percent of the way for Black and African American people managers (below director level), and 39.1 percent of the way for Black and African American directors+ (people managers and individual contributors). Additionally, we are 25.7 percent of the way for Hispanic and Latinx people managers (below director level), and 23.1 percent of the way for Hispanic and Latinx directors+ (people managers and individual contributors).

To more deeply and regularly monitor sentiment on employee inclusion and voice, new questions on the topic of allyship behaviors and the safety of speaking up were added to employee listening systems in October 2020. These new questions, plus additional longstanding questions about our aspire-to inclusive culture, are analyzed on an on-going basis to help support and inform ongoing diversity and inclusion initiatives at the company.

Broadening our work with suppliers

To date, we have increased the number of Black and African American-owned approved suppliers by more than 300 percent. We have also accomplished more than 50 percent of our goal to spend an incremental $500 million with those existing and new suppliers.

We’re continuing to encourage Black and African American representation progress in our top 100 suppliers, which account for over 50 percent of our indirect spend, by requesting annual disclosure of their diversity profile information (e.g., workforce diversity, goals) that we’re incorporating into our RFP evaluations. We have also made several enhancements to our supplier policies, sourcing processes, and tools. Specifically, we have digitally transformed our diversity certification validation process to accurately identify diverse-owned businesses for supplier diversity program benefits. As a result, in our fiscal year 2021, Black ​and African American-owned suppliers were awarded 43 percent of Corporate Procurement RFPs they were invited to participate in.

To ensure new suppliers are ready for business and receive adequate resources and support to be successful at Microsoft, we have implemented a program called AMP’D (Advocates, Mentors, Peers for Diverse Suppliers) that focuses on supplier mentorship, advocacy, development, and access to capital programs through our banking relationships. AMP’D pairs Black and African American-owned suppliers with an advocate in the business, a mentor and/or supplier peers to help suppliers easily connect and address the topics most important to their businesses.

We have also implemented a supplier diversity strategy for our corporate-wide contingent staffing program, called Contractor Services, to increase participation and spending with Black and African American-owned suppliers. Last year, we made significant enhancements to this program, increasing Black and African American supplier participation by more than 200 percent.

Investment in financial institutions

We are using our own banking needs to grow our portfolio investment activity with Black and African American-owned financial institutions. In June of 2020, we committed to double the percentage of our transaction volumes through these institutions by 2023. Nearly 18 months later, we have exceeded our goal, increasing the percentage to more than 2.5x prior levels. In addition, we are increasing investment activity with Black and African American-owned asset managers.

We have also met our goal of creating a $100 million program focused on mission-driven banks. Since then, we have made investments focused on strengthening these institutions­–directly enabling them to deploy increased capital in local communities. For example, we have committed to the Mission-Driven Bank Fund as an anchor investor in collaboration with the FDIC to target Minority Owned Depository Institutions (MDIs), which directly enables an increase of funds into local community businesses, restaurants, housing, etc. We also invested in the Entrepreneur Backed Asset Fund investment to increase capital to MDIs and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs)​.

Additionally, we have accomplished our $50 million commitment to create an investment fund focused on supporting Black and African American-owned small businesses. The fund focuses on investing to improve access to capital, increasing skill development, and reducing the technology gaps that exist today. Some of these investments include:

• Clear Vision Impact Fund investment with Siebert Williams Shank, created to mitigate deficits in capital access that minority-owned businesses often encounter and to enhance the positive impact that these companies have on the communities in which they operate.
• Investment in the Southern Opportunity and Resilience Fund aimed at helping small businesses and nonprofits in southern and southeastern states with less than 50 employees navigate and rebuild from the COVID-19 health and economic crisis.
• Investment in the Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund, which primarily focuses on early-stage technology and technology-enabled companies with diverse or women members as part of the founding team.

Partner investment

Partners are vital to ecosystem growth and transformation, which is why we’ve continued our investments to increase the number of Black and African American-owned partners in our US partner community. Since June 2020, the number of identified Black and African American partners has increased by more than 150 percent, surpassing our initial growth goal of 20 percent by 2023.

In addition to rapid growth in Black and African American-owned technology partners in the Microsoft Partner Network, we have also built active partnerships with technology communities such as Black Women Talk Tech, Black is Tech, Black Men in Tech, and Black and Brown Founders and have sponsored and participated in conference opportunities. Currently, we are building longer term future partnerships with these organizations to share how Microsoft supports partners and founders and works collaboratively to support Black and African American-owned business growth.

The Black Partner Growth Initiative (BPGI) has evolved as an umbrella portfolio of programs and projects to reach, recruit, support, and learn from Black and African American–owned businesses who become partners in the Microsoft ecosystem. We have also recognized the necessity of providing access to capital, cashflow support, and business training. We have utilized $3 million towards training programs covering financial management, tech solutions, and go-to-market readiness for Black partners.

We are working towards the following program investments, currently as pilots:

• We are helping Black and African American-owned partners leverage our $50 million general partner fund that helps with access to capital and providing loans to support partners through their startup phase, with the loans recovered over time as their business grows.
• A $20 million financing program for existing and new Black and African American partners to support their cashflow needs.

Along with these programs, we are continuing to invest in areas where Black and African American partners are creating impact for the business community. We are accomplishing this through strategic relationships such as the Black Channel Partner Alliance (BCPA): an economic empowerment initiative founded by and for Black and African American partners to deepen partner-to-partner relationships, expand development opportunities, provide business mentorship/coaching, and fuel inclusive community growth.