To combat racial injustice and provide direct support to Black communities, RBC has expanded its initial CAD $1.5 million commitment to CAD $150 million to invest in the futures of Black youth, generate wealth for Black communities, and redefine inclusive leadership at RBC.
Investing in the Future
Providing our world’s future leaders with equitable opportunities for personal and professional development is critical to help communities achieve their greatest potential.
RBC is committing to invest CAD $50 million from now up to 2025 to create mentorship and skills development opportunities for 25,000 BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) youth through our RBC Future Launch initiative. Additionally, RBC is allocating 40% of all summer opportunities to BIPOC youth, with a special emphasis on recruiting from Black and Indigenous communities. There will also be measured annual internship and new hire goals for Black and Indigenous talent throughout our offices in the US, the UK, and Canada starting in 2021.
Enabling Economic Growth and Wealth Creation
Systemic racism has significantly restricted Black communities from accessing opportunities for economic advancement and prosperity.
To address this issue of inequity, we’re committing CAD $100 million over the next five years in small business loans to Black entrepreneurs. In addition to this pledge, RBC will also establish a program that consolidates community leaders, marketing and business professionals, as well as digital experts to share ideas and best practices to advance growth for Black-owned businesses.
Redefining Inclusive Leadership
In order to build an inclusive work culture and truly represent the communities we serve at RBC, it is crucial that we focus on growing the number of BIPOC leaders within our bank and creating an environment that cultivates and supports a diverse leadership.
RBC has started to expand our existing company-wide Unconscious Bias training to include mandatory anti-racism and anti-bias training for all employees. We’re also increasing our staffing goals for BIPOC executives from 20% to 30%, with a special focus on increasing Black and Indigenous representation to accelerate the diversity of our leadership pipeline for senior executive roles. RBC will also double our investment in Ignite, a program that provides education and talent development to marginalized, BIPOC young adults.
In order to actualize and follow through on these commitments, we’re adding diversity and inclusion objectives in the performance management goals of all people leaders. We will also begin expanding our annual diversity reporting in 2021 to allow greater transparency on our efforts to hire and sufficiently support BIPOC talent, including enhancing our pay equity reporting to include racial and ethnic pay equity analysis.