It’s 2018 and we refuse to be silent. For who we are, for who we love. And it’s with that sentiment that we begin this blog post.
Meet Miguel Escamilla, Product Marketing — Vehicle Solutions for Uber, but more importantly (to us at least), co-chair of the UberPride employee resource group. Two years at Uber and already making enormous strides for the LGBTQ+ community throughout the company.
It’s already well-known that we have a longstanding relationship with Uber, built over multiple years now and across multiple music festivals even. But, that relationship’s been taken to new heights with our newfound understanding of their ERGs — Employee Resource Groups — designed to facilitate communities of all kinds, from the LGBTQ+ community to Women in Tech and further out.
ERGs foster belonging and support among Uber employees, bringing together individuals from all walks of life to advocate for common concerns within a specific community.
Enter: UberPride, and Miguel’s journey.
Miguel started off our meeting with “Uber can’t be itself without its people,” altogether rudimentary while also being groundbreaking. We’re over here all like. He then proceeded to discuss how the quality he saw in people working towards their passion at Uber ignited his own drive to take a stand for the LGBTQ+ community within the company, keeping with his own personal strides in learning to love everything about who he is.
It’s worth noting here that ERGs are meant to bring communities together. But, that doesn’t mean their impact stops at community-building.
UberPride has been around for over 3 years now, and boasts almost a thousand members across the globe (constituting members of the LGBTQ+ community in addition to allies and so on). And despite Pride season being a hallmark event for the community, there’s so much more to the group.
Enter (specifically): UberPride’s impact on the transgender community of Uber riders and driver-partners.
Outside of Pride season, UberPride seeks to raise awareness of the community continuously, by expanding global markets and integrating allies of all kinds, onwards to the C-suite of the company (e.g. Tony West, Chief Legal Officer for Uber, and ally to the LGBTQ+ community). Through this constant integration, cases like ‘how to adapt on-boarding for the transgender community’ have been given wide-spread company resources to make a ‘change.’
What does an individual do where, say, living in a country that refuses to accept your gender because it doesn’t match up to the sex you were born with, is forced to use identification that doesn’t match up to who they actually are in an on-boarding process just to become an Uber driver-partner?
The solution: an adapted and personalized on-boarding process for members of the transgender community, no matter what country they might come from. That’s the impact of UberPride.
It’s in this conversation with Miguel that we fully realized the power of Uber’s ERGs, specifically bringing an issue from the ground up to affect widespread policy across a company that spans the length of the globe. Chatting with Miguel left us feeling so inspired to be a part of the Uber community, even just as riders, knowing that even our concerns as LGBTQ+ individuals would be considered important and valuable.
We could go on and on about everything else UberPride has lined up for the LGBTQ+ community throughout Uber. But, then we’re just getting bogged down in the details. The fact is UberPride has had an enormous impact on the culture of Uber where it concerns the LGBTQ+ community — and that’s important.
We have faith in a company like Uber to stand for what’s right. Even when the going gets tough.
<3 B+C
In partnership with Uber.