As Best Buy celebrates Pride month this year, we also recognize the challenges and continued attacks the LGBTQIA+ community has faced over the past year — especially transgender and gender non-conforming people.
We’re committed to creating an inclusive culture, both inside our company and beyond. We’ve achieved a 100% rating on the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)’s Corporate Equality Index for 16 years in a row, earning the distinction of being a Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality.
We’ve also joined with HRC and hundreds of companies and organizations to support the Equality Act. The bill would amend existing civil rights law to explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected characteristics and prohibit discrimination in public spaces and services and federally funded programs on the basis of gender identification.
“At Best Buy, our message is clear: You are welcome here, and you should be welcome everywhere,” said Mark Irvin, our chief inclusion, diversity and talent officer. “Everyone should feel safe, valued and supported in being their authentic selves.”
Additionally, we recently donated $25,000 to the Trevor Project, a national 24-hour, toll-free confidential suicide hotline for LGBTQIA+ youth.
Taking action
Here are some other ways we are supporting our LGBTQIA+ employees and communities:
- We have added new benefits, including Included Health, a comprehensive health platform service for the LGBTQIA+ community that connects individuals to culturally competent, high-quality providers who understand the specific needs of the community.
- We offer adoption and surrogacy benefits for employees who want to grow their families.
- As part of our Workplace Transition and Gender Identity Toolkit, we completed system enhancements that allow preferred names to be displayed across various customer and internal-facing systems.
- Best Buy’s Asian Employee Resource Group (ERG), which has grown 70% over the past year, continues to champion new ways to foster an inclusive environment for LGBTQIA+ employees.
- Best Buy was the first company to sponsor Our Gay History in 50 States, a book written by Zaylore Stout with the help of diverse LGBTQIA+ youth and teens from across the country.
Sharing stories of Pride
As part of our broader celebration of Pride, we’re sharing a variety of stories that celebrate LGBTQIA+ culture and heritage.
Those stories include:
- LGBTQIA+ employees reflecting on the meaning of Pride.
- Best Buy and PopSockets partnering to create a line of PopGrips designed by youth from LGBTQIA+ communities.
Other related stories include:
- The story of Keegan Shoutz and his husband, who adopted a baby girl in the summer of 2019 with the help of Best Buy’s adoption benefit.
- The story of Best Buy employees who reflected on the meaning of Coming Out Day.
Click here to view our Pride landing page on BestBuy.com.