No lives matter if black lives don’t

Jun 10, 2020 4 min read

Trayvon Martin in Miami Gardens, FL. Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY. Renisha McBride in Detroit, MI. George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN. Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY. Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, GA. Tony McDade in Tallahassee, FL. Dion Johnson in Phoenix, AZ. These are but a few names out of an untold many — police brutality has impacted countless lives. To all the families affected, who have experienced injustice, inequality and incredible pain, we see you and we are with you.

It’s with a heavy heart that we acknowledge the systemic racism in the United States and the long standing oppression of Black Americans, indigenous peoples, and other people of color. Today, we are standing alongside our Getaround family in the fight against racism and racial violence. We are standing up because Black Lives Matter. No lives matter if black lives don’t.

We condemn racism and injustice of all forms and recognize that individuals of color experience discrimination daily. We stand in solidarity with the BIPOC community and the calls to action for justice across the country, and around the world. This includes calling on President Trump and other elected officials to disavow white supremacists and racists and commit to a formal healing and reconciliation process. We also support the call for a national task force and bipartisan legislation to end racial violence through additional police accountability and reform.

But we also must take action. There is much we can do, both as founders and as leaders in the tech community, to combat systemic racism.

We three have benefited from opportunities and white privilege so we are committing to using the privilege we have received to lift up and support others. We believe this starts by looking inward — at our company and the tech industry at large. In the spirit of allyship and to ensure Getaround is a brave and inclusive place for employees and customers, we are immediately taking the following first steps to address how we operate:

  1. Create space to listen and act: As a first step, we are creating space for self-reflection and assessing where our biggest gaps and opportunities are as a company. We will be holding listening sessions with all our employees to share ideas, feedback, feelings, and suggestions on what we can do to drive change both within Getaround and for our communities. We also support employees participating in peaceful demonstrations and will continue to offer flexible work hours to process this moment.
  2. Build an anti-racism culture: We all have unconscious biases rooted in hundreds of years of history. Building awareness through training is an important first step to addressing them. All of our employees, including our executive team, will be required to complete unconscious bias training. For our employees to reference and take action, we will be crowdsourcing anti-racism materials as well as sharing resources and ideas to improve how we operate as a team and community. We will be assessing our business practices to ensure that they comport with our values of equality and inclusivity.
  3. Foster diversity in our organization and the tech community: We will be assessing our recruiting and hiring practices to ensure there are more opportunities for people of color and that our organization favors diversity over homogeneity. As founders, we will continue to support and mentor people of color and help diversify the tech community by working with other tech leaders to enable and encourage people of color to access jobs in the technology industry.
  4. Support BIPOC-owned businesses and partners: We are proud of our diverse set of partners and customers. We are exploring how we work with and strengthen our ecosystem of partners owned by Black Americans, indigenous peoples, and other people of color. We recognize that our success is their success, and that working together is a path to equity for all.
  5. Enable full participation in democracy. We will make Election Day a paid holiday. We support a true representative democracy and we commit to encouraging full participation by all our employees, to helping educate them on issues, and leveraging the Getaround community and platform to help our customers get out the vote.
  6. Make Juneteenth an official company holiday. To honor and remember the emancipation of the last remaining enslaved African Americans, and to give our team a day to reflect, learn, act, and acknowledge the history which has colored our society, all employees worldwide will be given June 19th as an official company holiday.

At Getaround, we are committed to building on these efforts in the days, weeks, and years to come. We hold that the world is what we make of it, and the actions we take now will define the world of tomorrow. Today, we operate in over 300 cities across the world, in thousands of diverse communities and neighborhoods that we care deeply about. We need to take action. It’s at the very core of our mission as a company — not to mention at the core of our hearts — to empower people, and to work tirelessly to create a safe and equitable future society in all cities everywhere. We hope it’s at the core of your heart as well.

Join us in taking action, either by instituting similar policies in your company or organization, getting involved with one of the many institutions currently tackling the problems of racism and racial violence, or by continuing this conversation with others in your community.

“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” -Emma Lazarus

Sam, Jessica & Elliot
Getaround Founders