Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), will fund community engagement projects led by the company’s employees in the U.S. and five other countries through a newly launched grant program.
The new Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Innovation Fund will distribute a total of $315,000 in grants divided evenly among 17 employees who were selected out of 100 submissions, LaDavia Drane, the director and global head of inclusion, diversity and equity at Amazon Web Services, said in an interview with the Washington Business Journal. Drane was based out of the D.C. area, where AWS operates its East Coast hub, until the pandemic when she moved to central Ohio to be near family.
“I believe in providing our employees with the opportunity to take action,” said Drane, who designed the fund. “We talk about an inclusive workplace and how that should feel. But there’s something about making the investment and saying we’re going to actually take the step, move forward and take action, and not just internally, but to take the focus off of ourselves... and be able to focus on our communities."
Her team will share more about the impact and locations of the employees’ projects in the next month, but many are focused on increasing women representation in STEM and empowering women with training needed for their career goals in the tech industry, she said. It is unclear if any projects will be funded in Greater Washington.
The grant recipients are several weeks into the planning process for their projects, which will benefit their communities in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Israel and Singapore, Drane said.
“What I really wanted to do is make sure that we had sustainable funding to give a lot of these ideas that our employees had off the ground,” Drane said. “As you’re going into communities — for instance, communities of color — I think that it’s important that you have partners who practice in this area and can provide tips and can be helpful in this way.”
Drane is also a founding fellow of the DMV Diversity and Inclusion Institute and an executive adviser for the D.C. chapter of the national nonprofit, Advancing Women in Product.
