Anti-Racist Leadership

6 Building an Inclusive Ecosystem

When I joined Jamba Juice, at the end of 2008, unemployment was at a ten-year high and climbing, but nowhere was it worse than in the Black and brown communities. At the peak of the Great Recession, in mid-2010, the unemployment rate in the United States was 9 percent for white workers, 13 percent for Latinx, and nearly 17 percent for Black workers. In this earlier crisis I knew that, even though I couldn’t single-handedly rid the country of racism and unemployment, as a CEO I had the clout and the platform to create opportunities for underserved youth in the communities we served.

Under President Obama’s Summer Jobs initiatives in 2011 and 2012, we hired more than 2,500 low-income young people, and we partnered ...