As students at the University of Virginia, Danya Abutaleb and Taylor Trumble bonded over diversity and inclusion discussions.
When George Floyd was killed last year, they decided to resume the conversation full-time, even though it meant quitting their jobs during a pandemic.
And so Pip DEI Collective was born.
Based in Charlottesville, the startup is a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) consulting firm, offering organizations coaching, dialogue facilitation, workshops and training. Its name is a reference to a small fruit seed, imagery that resonated with the co-founders’ approach to cultivating an inclusive workplace culture.
“Just like a seed needs to be tended to, so does a culture of inclusion,” Trumble said. “It needs to actually be cultivated; there need to be policies in place, and it needs to be a long-term thing.”
“It’s not a one-day conversation,” she added.
Creating an inclusive culture improves the workplace experience for everyone, the co-founders said. But there’s also a strong business and financial argument to be made.
“Companies who do not have diverse presences or have diversity training as a baseline, do not prosper financially,” Abutaleb said.
In their DEI consulting, Pip recommends important first steps, such as having a bias incident reporting mechanism and a public-facing diversity statement. As a long-term goal, the Pip team encourages making DEI topics a recurring agenda item, rather than a once-a-year discussion or training.
“I think businesses have a really unique opportunity, as being one of the only places that diverse folks who don’t know each other are encountering each other,” Trumble said.
Pip’s clients include Georgetown University School of Medicine, Eastern Shore’s Own Arts Center and Richmond’s Lighthouse Labs accelerator program, which is partnering with Pip to provide DEI consultation internally and to the startups it works with.
“Lighthouse Labs is thrilled to partner with Pip Collective to provide holistic diversity, equity and inclusion support for the teams of our milestone 10th cohort,” said Outreach Manager Ali Greenberg. “With Lighthouse’s most representative cohort to date, and as the startup ecosystem at large begins to better represent its true and more diverse potential, it is essential that we provide our teams with the support to grow and thrive sustainably and inclusively.”
As they move forward, Abutaleb and Trumble are interested in returning to their beginnings and expanding further into the higher education space. But they also want to see more commitment from startups.
“We challenge all the big name accelerators and VC firms to actually put their money where their mouth is and commit to DEI training,” Abutaleb said.