More than a year into my role as president of KQED, the Bay Area's public media organization, we're taking a hard look at our organization and our work in a way we've never done before. While Americans continue to protest and expose racist behaviors and legacies, we're listening with humility and a sense of urgency to calls for action within KQED. This is a difficult and delicate undertaking, but we believe in bold conversations.

As a community supported organization, we have a special responsibility to demonstrate our commitment with concrete actions that will make KQED more diverse, inclusive, equitable and powered by our community.

Over the last month, we’ve had detailed, necessary and hard conversations about race, equity, inclusion, representation and power — and how KQED reports on these issues. Some of our Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) staff have shared painful, personal experiences to deepen our understanding and help KQED become a better place to work. We now see more clearly the inequities within our organization and how our work culture too often perpetuates racism. I acknowledge that KQED has not yet done enough to address issues of racial and ethnic diversity, equity or inclusion or to advance understanding. We have a lot of work to do to create a truly inclusive workplace. And we’re determined to lead in this work.

In addition to our commitment to improving our workplace and employee experience, we’re continually making changes to our programming and news coverage to present a wider range of stories, perspectives and experiences. Beginning July 13, the second hour of our weekday call-in program Forum will be devoted to current affairs through the lens of race, justice and equality. Hosted by Mina Kim, this hour will be available for statewide broadcast so we can include more diverse voices and perspectives. 

Schedule changes on KQED Public Radio make our weekday lineup more diverse, engaging and up to the moment. We’ve also been diversifying our suite of podcasts. Next year we’ll launch Unsealed, a new collaboration between KQED and NPR that comes out of the police misconduct reporting project we’ve been leading. That limited series follows our recently released podcasts — Truth Be Told, which explores what it means to be a person of color in our country, and Rightnowish, which profiles underrepresented artists who are making a difference in our Bay Area communities.

We'll also take a careful look at our editorial process. By this fall, we'll invest in an independent source audit of our news coverage to determine who our stories come from and to identify voices that may be underrepresented. Collecting this data will become a regular practice to ensure that our sources reflect the diversity of the Bay Area. Finally, we’ll add a Diversity Editor to our team to support our journalists in how they select, frame and present stories. 

Becoming a more culturally competent organization is dependent on the composition of our staff. Our leadership team and senior managers will be held accountable with specific goals for improving our diversity, especially among our managers and creative teams. With an eye towards the future, we’ll hire a Manager of Newsroom Talent Development to oversee interns and on-call roles to increase the diversity, development and retention of emerging talent. Additionally, we’ll better support the work of our full-time Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to continue educational programs for all employees on anti-racism, implicit bias and allyship. Our goal is a workplace where staff can bring their full selves to KQED and do their best work in service to the public.