An Open Letter to Our Investors on the Occasion of Juneteenth
I see you as an investor in Planned Parenthood South Texas. You’ve invested your time, your spirit, and your generous charitable contributions so that PPST will be a strong organization, able to serve our patients, achieve the mission, and do so successfully while enduring significant challenges engineered by our detractors. For that I am grateful and I feel a strong sense of accountability to you.
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It’s been 156 years since Black Texans learned of their freedom from slavery on June 19, 1865. According to history, everyone else, everywhere else, learned sooner.
It’s been a hundred years since a white mob in Tulsa stormed the Greenwood District, a thriving center of African-American business and cultural life, and massacred the place in whole killing an estimated 300 people or more. How many people who have read recent news stories about the Tulsa race massacre were hearing of this atrocity for the first time? Too many.
It has been a little more than a year since the horrific death of George Floyd under a police officer’s knee. Already interest in and support for racial equity and the Black Lives Matter movement has waned in some segments of the U.S. population. Corporations that made supportive statements and promises of greater diversity after Floyd’s death find themselves hard-pressed to show progress toward their stated goals. Short-lived gestures of performative diversity are insufficient.
The inequities and structural discrimination in this nation are longstanding and deeply embedded in how the country operates. This long-overdue reckoning on race and justice and equity cannot be a short-lived endeavor. Such work cannot be topical for a bit and then put on a shelf. It cannot be superficial, cosmetic, nor an exercise in optics for the purpose of image management.
I found myself head-nodding when Philonise Floyd, George’s brother, observed on May 25 this year that if Congress can pass legislation to protect endangered birds then Congress should be able to pass legislation to reform policing so as to protect people of color. The man makes a point and I agree. Simultaneously I am overwhelmed by the scale of the work ahead if we are to disrupt and ultimately remove the institutional discrimination, implicit bias, and structural inequities that surround us.
I try to re-assemble Philonise’s words in my mind as a personal challenge, determined to answer his call. My own brother, Philip, often says, “You need to focus on what you can do, what you can control.”
For 22 years Planned Parenthood South Texas has been my focus and my responsibility. It is important to me that our patients and employees feel they belong, that they are seen, and respected. Despite the flawed world around us, I want PPST to be a place where you can bring all of yourself when you come to us for health care, and when you come to work and provide that care. I want people to find at PPST the kindness and respect each of us deserves. I am fortunate to be surrounded by people who share my commitment to such an environment—my co-workers, our board of directors, our volunteers, our donors. I am grateful to have fantastic partners in my work, and that begins with the PPST Board Chair, Elise Ring Boyan.
Elise and I have focused a great deal of our attention on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Earlier this year, we added emphasis to our DEI statements within the PPST Organizational Goals (DEI refers to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). We wanted to say more, be stronger, articulate our position and our values more clearly than before. That enhanced language includes:
- Provide the finest patient experience, operating our clinics with a DEI-positive mindset, ensuring that our health care practice is absent any implicit bias, and actively pursuing efforts to eliminate ethnic and racial health disparities.
- Be mindful of the demographic and psychographic realities of our people—patients, staff, donors, volunteers, and other supporters—the multiculturalism they embody, and their reasons for engagement with PPST.
- Ensure our employment practices and employee relations are absent of any implicit bias and that we operate with a DEI-positive mindset, actively rejecting privilege or supremacy of any group/identity over another.
- Continue to assemble a Board of Directors that responds to the needs of our patient population, possesses the skills and strengths we need, and represents the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of our service delivery area.
- Strive, as a Board, to govern and exercise oversight in the absence of implicit bias and with active efforts to eliminate structural racism.
Good goals, good words, but we must walk this talk. What will we do, precisely?
Step one, we conducted an anonymous online staff survey— 83 questions—to assess the climate of the organization and measure Belonging—Do you feel that you belong at PPST?...that you can be yourself at work?...that you are met with respect for your entire identity? We partnered with The Perception Institute, a national leader in this work, whose survey design and response analytics are best in class. Survey results confirmed what I hoped, what I felt, would be true: We are a good place, not making terrible DEI missteps.
But DEI work is not a short-term project. It is—like excellent customer service or high-quality health care—a prized value and aspiration of the organization that will require continuous attention. This work is never over; it must be who we are at all times.
With that in mind, we have raised our minimum wage because DEI concerns intersect greatly with economic justice. That’s good, but equity and justice are not issues that you just throw some money at and then celebrate some imagined magnanimous sensibility. This summer we are analyzing our history of pay and promotions to verify there is no structural bias or unintended outcome inequities buried within those decisions. Simultaneously we will assess longevity, disaggregated by race, to be sure that people of all colors and ethnicities, and identities are similarly interested in making PPST their long-term employment home.
We are designing a survey for our newest employees to tell us what PPST “looks like, feels like” when someone is looking for a job with us. I need to know if the windows and doors to our house are welcoming when you are on the outside and looking in.
Our Clinical Leadership Team is selecting a first set of patient care metrics that we will analyze through the DEI lens. We need to be absolutely certain that our patients—of all colors, ethnicities, and identities—experience the same high-quality health care. It would be too simple to assume, “of course we don’t treat different people differently,” and I don’t believe that we do. But we live in a nation and a state where maternal mortality for Black women is frighteningly higher when compared to the population as a whole. And Latinas and Black women are much more likely to die from cervical cancer than White women. Given these and many other health disparities, we can’t assume anything. We must prove ourselves to ourselves. I trust that PPST is a good place, but we will pressure test that assumption and verify.
I hope you are pleased with these plans and these actions. There will be more. We are doing this work while maintaining a busy health care operation and fighting the State of Texas that is hellbent on making abortion impossible. I am sure we could do more on DEI, but I am also managing bandwidth—we have a lot on our plate. Further, I want our DEI focus to be sustainable, enduring. This cannot be something we do for awhile and then let it go. This is who we are.
Of all the powerful wisdom that Maya Angelou shared with the nation over the course of her lifetime, I believe this is one of her very best:
“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.”
In my view, any organization or business that ignores DEI & Belonging does so at its peril. I hope with all my heart the nation has come to a reckoning that, at the very least, makes it impossible to circumvent work on this priority and still achieve organizational success. I believe that society (aka customers and investors who determine the winners and losers in any market of any sort) will begin to punish those who ignore the structural inequalities and implicit bias that have been tolerated and accepted for too long.
Planned Parenthood South Texas is 82 years old. Nationwide, the Planned Parenthood family of organizations is 103. No doubt there are episodes in our own history when we did not live the values we hold today. The president of our national organization, Alexis McGill Johnson, wrote a guest essay published in the New York Times wherein she called out our own history and our own disappointments on race and equity, discrimination and bias and bad behavior. That honesty is required if a reckoning is to be real.
It is clear to me the work we need to achieve a more perfect union for our Black sisters and brothers will help us pursue a more perfect union for all of us. Queer people still face an unfair world. Immigrants are punished for seeking a better life. Women continue to earn less than similarly qualified men in the workplace. The list goes on, I’m afraid. And so, too, will our work to ensure that Planned Parenthood South Texas is a bright example of the good work and allyship that is needed. Once more, we will be the change we want to see in the world.
Jeffrey Hons
President & Chief Executive Officer
Planned Parenthood South Texas
