Hello from Steyer!
If you have another minute to spare—and can tolerate a personal story—I wanted to explain the photo I chose for today. That’s me in 1976 about to join my neighborhood’s July 4th parade. Yesterday, I was reminded of this pic and shared it on Facebook, noting, “The socks give away how newly American we were.”
It’s a weird thing to move countries and land smack in the middle of Bicentennial celebrations. To be honest, we thought the U.S. was a bit bonkers: Flags were everywhere. The light switch covers in our new house were bedecked with an astonishing number of plastic bald eagles. The shag carpet in my new bedroom was red, white, and blue.
Then again, we were feeling pretty celebratory ourselves. We had left apartheid-era South Africa; we had arrived in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Schoolhouse Rock’s Preamble to the Constitution was my favorite song, and I was pretty sure I’d be asked to sing it as part of the citizenship test we’d take one day.
That did not come to pass. And, as I grew up and learned more, so many other things I believed to be true about America proved to be untrue. Yes, it is a place of extraordinary opportunity—my smart, hardworking, risk-taking parents realized the classic American Dream—but it is not yet a land of equal opportunity. An obvious example: achieving the same success was, and remains, much harder for people of color.
Why do I share all this? Because the disillusionment that has come with age and experience has been painful, but not paralyzing. In fact it’s been the opposite: the ideals of this country still sing to me, and the notion of carefully shaping a workplace to be more in line with those ideals is hugely energizing to me. Importantly, the same is true of the two remarkable leaders—our COO Katelyn Reilly and our CSO Tony Batista—who are now running the company on a day-to-day basis.
The last few years have been dispiriting, with too many companies adopting and discarding initiatives, depending on how the winds blow. Here at Steyer, we’re not all on the same page politically, but we are aligned in our values: we have a shared vision of what progress looks like, and a shared commitment to accountability. You may see us struggling mightily in the coming months and years (these are tough times in many ways!), but I hope you’ll also see our earnestness—how fiercely we want to be part of creating a better future and how keen we are for your ideas as we do that.
In that spirit, we welcome—in fact we hunger for—your feedback on these status reports. Thank you in advance, and thank you as always for reading!
Kate
Photo credit: Gace Family