Tabor Neighbors!
Recently, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has been in the spotlight. The current federal administration in its first day has dismantled programs designed to provide equity to racial minority and women-owned firms under the notion that they are wasting federal dollars.

In addition to ensuring that equity not be promoted in government, there have been mandates, threats and outright bullying of private sector firms to dismantle their programs to promote equity. Many large companies, including some headquartered here, have relented and eliminated or significantly reduced their programs geared toward recruiting and promoting people of color and women.

There have been some private sector entities that have not embraced the notion that DEI is bad. Notably, Costco Wholesale, based in Issaquah, has pushed back aggressively on the notion that it abandon or reduce its DEI efforts. In addition, our current Governor, while Attorney General, was a strong supporter of DEI, including creating a Civil Rights Division in his office and joining other AGs in sending the message to corporate America that these programs are valuable and should both remain in place and be strengthened.

Of course, for those of us who are people of color and operate businesses, many of us have benefitted from these programs designed to level a playing field in business that has become extremely one-sided due to systemic racism.

Tabor 100 will stand at the forefront of efforts to maintain DEI in government and the private sector and will join other organizations, elected officials and others in bolstering these programs for the benefit of our members and society in general.

We urge our government and private sector partners to continue to embrace and strengthen their efforts to create a just and equitable society. The work of this federal administration to further harm communities of color is shameful. Already, nationally, Black households have 1/10th the wealth of White households (the number is actually 1/16th here in the liberal NW).

I urge all Tabor 100 members and those who support us to reject this anti-DEI trend which is based on a fantasy that non-minorities are suffering as a result of these programs.