Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has donated $100,000 to Arlington County’s antiracism initiative.
The company, which is setting up a headquarters in the Northern Virginia county, made the donation Oct. 14 and the county board will vote on whether or not to accept the funds on Tuesday.
The money will go to funding the county’s "Dialogues on Race and Equity" initiative, which the county announced last week. Amazon’s dollars will help pay for racial bias training for staff during the current fiscal year and for a series of community meetings, held online due to the pandemic, concerning racial equality, according to a staff report.
Amazon commended the county’s leadership for launching such an endeavor, said Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy and chief lobbyist.
“Amazon is committed to helping build a country and a world where everyone can live with dignity and free from fear,” Huseman wrote in a letter to county board Chair Libby Garvey dated Wednesday. “This begins by working together as a community, and we look forward to doing so in our new home in Arlington.”
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While the county’s efforts on this started late last year, the conversation of racial equity took new importance during the summer after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed during police actions.
Amazon, along with many other major corporations, responded with support for the Black Lives Matter movement and a roughly $10 million donation, followed by another $8 million to a dozen organizations pushing for racial equality.
Within Greater Washington, the company has put more funding into computer science education. The company pledged $3.9 million over three years for a number of Virginia public schools in majority minority communities. Last week, the company gave $100,000 to the University of Maryland for robotics and racial equity programming. These can both be seen as an effort by the company to increase diversity within the tech industry and create more tech-savvy workers in the region where it hopes to hire some 25,000 employees over the next 10 years.
The workforce at big technology companies is largely white and male. Many of them admit this. Most tech companies have released detailed data showing progress made toward diversifying their workforces. Amazon hasn't released this data in a few years.
During the summer, the company said it was working to make sure its second headquarters in Arlington was “inclusive and diverse.” It did not answer Washington Business Journal questions about the diversity breakdown of those offices.
