What is it like to lead and give expectations from a Black perspective?
The first thing was to make sure, you know, that we were thoughtful. It’s important to make sure that we’re doing the right thing and whatever we committed to, we can commit to for the long haul and not just be a part of the moment. As Black executives, we all shared that and wanting to make sure that the company wanted to do that.
Why do you believe this is so important?
You think about the inequities faced [by] Black Americans in the community. What do we pick? After a lot of thought, I realized that probably the two that we thought would have the most impact would be education and economic empowerment. Then, after identifying those two areas, what was interesting is that we started to look back and say, well, we’re actually not starting from scratch. We realized that we had a lot of things already in place that we could build on and that we could actually make sure they work together. So, I’ll give you some examples. We were already involved in scholarships, but now we can be even more intentional. We already had a deep relationship with the United Negro College Fund. Now we could add more into that and think about how we can make it bigger. We can be a lot more intentional around making sure that we have even more inclusion in our overall scholarship program with the African American community.
How are young entrepreneurs intersecting with the economic development at Foot Locker?
We have a program called Homegrown. It’s about partnering with local designers in local communities and allowing them to put their product in our stores and also having the product online. It’s an opportunity for people who look like us young brothers and sisters to now put their product in a Foot Locker Inc. and it’s a part of our initiative.
