Our Commitments to Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in our Community

100 days ago the world watched a police officer murder George Floyd. During Pride Month, June 2020, we watched our community open up about the LGBTQ+ experience in snowboarding. So many eye-opening moments and experiences are occurring, including conversations that we’ve needed to have for a long, long time.

We’ve taken our time processing, listening, learning, and haven’t always known how or when to speak up. The fact is: It’s time for Burton to take ownership of our part in this. It’s time for change on a national and global scale. And it’s time for Burton and snowboarding to grow the fuck up.

Snowboarding’s history is known for being predominantly white, young, straight, male, fostering an exclusionary bro-centric culture, and full of personal accounts detailing the treatment of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized individuals. This is the reality, and progress has come too late, and too slow. We’ve seen amazing conversations happen over the course of this year as some incredibly brave members of our community have opened up about their experiences with support from leaders throughout the industry, including Torment Mag and Snowboarder. It’s clear that our outdoor spaces, like our society, do not offer the same equity, opportunity, and safety to everyone.

Part of this is taking ownership of our own actions. As a brand, we’ve blown it. When it comes to supporting, including, representing, and even respecting BIPOC and members of the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups, we’ve fallen short, again and again, missing the opportunities we had to make change. The next step is to stop talking and start getting shit done. We’re working to course correct both internally at Burton, and take on making change at the systemic level.

This is our first statement of many on the initiatives here at Burton in response to the killings of countless Black individuals in the United States and the new clarity we’ve all gained on the reality of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized people’s experiences in the outdoor community. We’re committed to confronting systemic racism and increasing equity, representation, and inclusion for all people in our sport, our outdoor spaces, and our society.

Burton is committed to inclusion and equity for the long-term health of our company, sport, and community.

We’ve outlined our action plan for you to review, and there’s a whole wave of actions still in progress that we’ll tell you all about over the next few months so that you can hold us accountable.

This is what it looks like. Let’s keep it going until we make a difference. Let’s stare the future in the face, and make it one we can all be proud of. Let’s break down the barriers of entry to our sport and community. Let’s celebrate non-like-mindedness on and off the mountain. Let’s vote. Let’s show up for the people who need us today so that our community can become healthy and whole.

Burton is committed to inclusion and equity for the long-term health of our company, sport, and community.

Here’s how we’re making it happen: We recognize that driving real change will take action both out in the community and within our own company. Our efforts are focused on listening, learning, increasing representation, advocacy, and tackling cultural shifts on all fronts.

Representation

• We’re committed to diversifying our global workforce and leadership with respect to race, ethnicity, gender identity and sexual orientation.
• Hiring external justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) experts to guide our work forward, including bringing in a full-time high-level internal JEDI leader to report directly to the highest levels of management within our company.
• Assessing the demographics and pay equity of our current workforce through the JEDI lens.
• Auditing and revising our hiring process from job descriptions to candidate outreach, interviewing, selection, on-boarding, and development to ensure marginalized populations are explicitly invited to participate and grow within our company.
• Requiring JEDI training and competencies for our HR department employees, our company leadership, and anyone who manages people at our company.
• Providing support and opportunities to Chill Foundation participants beyond their initial program experience.

Culture and Policy

• Establishing mechanisms to understand and improve the experience of our employee base and engaging with our previous mistakes. Current work includes:
  • Conducting an employee audit that includes consensual one-on-one interviews with employees from marginalized groups and external members of the snowboard community, along with a company-wide survey on the employee experience at Burton in order to establish clarity around where we can do better.
• Developing an innovative ongoing education culture and training program around JEDI and implicit bias within the company.
• Upholding a zero-tolerance policy in which harassment and discrimination are not tolerated for all internal employees, team riders, ambassadors and external contract partners.
• Creating an internal JEDI guidance committee to help lead our efforts and hold us accountable.
• Regularly sharing our progress both internally and externally.

Representation
We’re investing in diverse representation across our external-facing ecosystem to elevate the voices of marginalized people and build an inclusive community of diverse identities, with targets and guidelines across key areas of representation for race, ethnicity, gender, ability and sexuality:

• Communications, advertising, and everywhere people are represented doing things or wearing our product.
• Supporting and elevating people from marginalized groups on the Burton Team, our partners, and ambassador network.
• Auditing our product line and other key offerings with a JEDI lens.
  • This includes everything from the core features of our website to the way we go about clothing fits to ensure that we better represent and include people of all backgrounds, sizes and gender orientations.

Advocacy

• Aligning with and investing in key external partnerships to drive larger change, starting with a $100,000 donation to the NAACP and collaboration with the ACLU.
• Establishing a leadership voice on key issues and policies related to justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, and working with an external network of partners, companies, lawmakers, and leaders to build a collective force for change.
• Endorsing and supporting the power of voting and social justice activism for our employees and community.
• Closing our offices on US federal election day and giving employees universal time off globally to vote in all local elections.
• Offering employees volunteer paid time off to participate in social and environmental justice protesting and activism.

Additional (Not Referenced Above) Actions Taken

• We’ve committed to the Outdoor CEO Diversity Pledge
• Built a partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) around the upcoming US election and will continue to share their resources to educate and activate our community.
• We have joined the city of Burlington, VT in declaring racism as a public health emergency.
• Our company owners signed on to support ending qualified immunity at the federal level.
• We’ve distributed a list of BLM educational resources to the global company that will be consistently updated and refreshed.
• We’ve interviewed nine JEDI training firms to start ongoing JEDI education this fall.
• This July we joined #StopHateForProfit to support their efforts towards influencing major social media platforms to stop prioritizing profits over silencing hatred and disinformation on the web.
• This June, Burton won the ESPN Corporate Community Impact Award for its support of the Chill Foundation, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary
  • The Chill Foundation has committed to centering its work around racial equity and anti-oppression practices, as outlined in their own action plan.

There is more to develop in the coming weeks, months and years, including committing to timelines and metrics. We intend to share those updates regularly with you as a part of our community in order to hold ourselves accountable. This will be a multi-year effort, and in the end we hope that Burton will look like a very different company than it does today, and for the better. We know this work will help evolve Burton, our sport, the outdoors, and ultimately, the world. For today and for future generations.