Janaye Ingram is the director of community partner programs and engagement at Airbnb. At Airbnb, Ingram plays a leading role in the company’s efforts to fight discrimination on the platform, including leading partnerships with civil rights organizations including Color Of Change and the NAACP. Ingram also serves as the head of Airbnb’s $100M Community Fund, which awards grants — based on recommendations by Airbnb’s host community — to organizations that support communities around the world.
What should people know about community when they talk about Airbnb?
We use the word community a lot in Airbnb, we think of ourselves as a community. We are a platform that enables people to connect in real life, and that’s bringing people together. A lot of platforms are thinking about online things, but we are in the real world. We want people to connect, we want people to have a chance to get to know each other and to share space. It’s the most intimate thing that you can do. We love this idea of connection and community being a part of that. So we talk about our host community, we talk about our guest community, but we also recognize that we’re in these places where people live were in the communities that they live in. We are a fabric and part of the fabric of that community.
What are some ways that Airbnb is fighting discrimination?
We’ve developed several policies and programs that have helped us fight discrimination, and make our platform and community much more inclusive for our hosts and guests in our user community. Some of the changes that we’ve made include creating a strict non-discrimination policy. Other companies have that, but I think the differentiator is the community commitment. The community commitment is something that every Airbnb user has to attest to and it says that you will not discriminate against other users based on a whole host of protected categories, including race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and the list could go on to disability. Everyone has to agree to that before they use the platform, and it’s called a modal blocker, meaning it pops up on the screen, and you can’t get past it until you accept. To date, we have had over 2.5 million people decline that agreement and be removed from our community. That means that there were 2.5 million people who said, “I don’t agree to treat everyone the same [way], regardless of how they show up in the world and what their identity or intersectional identity is,” and we have removed them from our platform. That’s a big one and it’s really important. It’s a guiding principle within our community. Another one is changing when a guest’s profile photo is shown to a host. If you go to make a reservation, the host will not see your picture until after the reservation is accepted.
