Terrasmart Celebrates Black History Month
Diversity in organizations benefits everybody – a rising tide indeed lifts all boats. Scores of studies highlight the quantifiable benefits of diversity in the workplace, including a Boston Consulting Group study that found companies with diverse management teams were more innovative and had 19% higher revenues than less diverse peer companies.
Of course, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) is about more than metrics. It’s about people’s experience in the workforce. Attracting and hiring candidates from various backgrounds, identities, and experiences is essential for building a diverse and inclusive workforce in renewable energy. Still, hiring diverse talent is not enough – DEIB needs to ensure that employees feel valued, respected, and engaged in the workplace, regardless of background. To retain and develop diverse employees in renewable energy, it is essential to implement practices that foster a sense of belonging, growth, and recognition.
This is what we strive for at Terrasmart.
DEIB in Action
We launched a DEIB Action Committee close to a year ago to accelerate our existing DEIB efforts and continually raise our own bar. One notable new diversity initiative is our ALLY Speaker Series. These speaker events give people from a variety of backgrounds a stage to share their experiences and insights. Hearing their stories and perspectives raises awareness, encourages dialogue, and generates advocacy for an inclusive culture based on trust and safety for everyone.
In honor of Black History Month, we invited Rodney McCord to present as part of our ALLY series on February 9th on the topic of: “Diversity & The Workplace: Creating a Safe Space for All.” First elected in November of 1993, McCord holds the distinction of being the youngest Mayor of Griffin, Georgia. He served as Mayor in 1998, 2006, and again in 2017.
In the spirit of embedding DEIB throughout an organization and not in a siloed committee, Terrasmart employees across a full range of roles participated in the ALLY series conversation. Annette Poulimenos, Terrasmart’s Talent Acquisition Manager and our DEIB Action Committee leader, moderated the candid discussion with McCord, who shared his experiences with DEIB – or a lack thereof – throughout different phases of his life.
Some of Rodney’s most compelling points were around personal leadership traits that we can all adopt at any level of our organization – that it’s not about winning, it’s about understanding. Rodney inspired participants by inviting them to be humble, open-minded, and find strength in vulnerability. “To be a leader, be intentional, and be okay with agreeing to disagree.” And finally “be willing to grow and be respectful of all humans.”
“Be humble, be open-minded, be vulnerable, be a leader, be intentional, be okay with agreeing to disagree.
Be willing to grow, and be respectful of all.”
– Rodney McCord, Mayor of Griffin, Georgia
He noted that we’ve collectively come a long way as a society, recalling his beloved grandfather who was a sharecropper with no formal education, while two generations later, McCord attended both Morehouse College and Mercy University. He also marveled at the experience his sons have in school with their diverse and accepting friend groups, while also emphasizing there is still much work to be done to make DEIB the norm.
Powering Diversity in Solar
While we strive to make DEIB part of the fabric at Terrasmart, we also look externally to see how we can support diversity in the industry. According to a 2022 solar jobs census, black and African-American solar workers made up 9% of the solar industry workforce in 2022, while the percentage in the overall workforce was 13%. Comparatively Asian representation was also 9% of the solar workforce, higher than the 7% representation across the entire economy. Although the percentage of black and Asian solar workers has grown over the past five years, our goal is to continue to find ways to seek and embrace diversity within our company and within the industry.
Building on History
Working toward a clean energy future with a diverse and engaged workforce means acknowledging pioneers of the past. We’re grateful for the contributions of these black and African American innovators. Here are just a few of many past industry leaders we celebrate as part of Black History Month:
- Lewis H. Latimer was an African American inventor and patent draftsman who invented an improved process for manufacturing carbon filaments for light bulbs and filed it for a patent in 1881. The carbon filament made light bulbs more practical for everyday use and was just one of Latimer’s many groundbreaking inventions. His legacy in the lighting industry informs the way we seek more energy-efficient and earth-friendly sources of power today.
- Annie Easley was one of the first African American employees at NASA, beginning her career there in 1955. In a tenure that spanned more than three decades, she provided countless contributions that we rely on today, including a computer code that helps analyze wind and solar energy projects and innovations that helped create batteries for early hybrid vehicles.
Annie Easley: Computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist at NASA.
- Sossina Haile is a modern-era pioneer who leads solar discoveries as part of a research group at Northwestern University. Earlier in her career, she fabricated the first solid-acid fuel cell in the 1990s, which allowed for the conversion of chemical energy into electrical energy. She’s also a recipient of a National Science Foundation fellowship, awarded to her because of her industry-leading research in the energy field.
Terrasmart’s DEIB Series
This is one of a series of ongoing DEIB-themed blogs and updates we’ll be sharing throughout the course of the year. We love the depth of information that celebratory months like Black History Month and Women’s History Month provide, yet we also make DEIB part of our 365-days-a-year focus.
