Reposted from Target Market News.

The Rainbow PUSH Coalition concluded its 43rd annual conference in Chicago by stating it plans to continue its current initiative to increase diversity among technology firms.
The conference was preceded by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s visits in May to shareholder and executive meetings for Facebook, Google, and other firms in which he called for all companies to publicly release their EEO-1 documents. The federally mandated forms require firms to disclose the breakdown of their workforce by race, ethnicity and gender. Intel and H-P had been in the practice of sharing their data. After some delay, numbers were eventually released by Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

David C. Drummond (pictured), Google Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, personally attended the PUSH conference, where he announced initiatives to address the company’s commitment diversity.

Rainbow Push and Google announced that they will use the new Rainbow PUSH video as part of an upcoming joint PUSH-Google Community Empowerment and Education event in Atlanta in mid- August. The gathering will be aimed at engaging community and educational leaders, and forging a pipeline to the technology industry.

“We have a lot of work to do when it comes to diversity in our workforce,” said Google’s Drummond. “We’re committed to working with civic, community and education groups and leaders like Rev. Jackson to turn these gaps into new bridges of opportunity.”

“Google prides themselves on moonshot thinking,” said Rev. Jackson. “And the technology industry writ large prides themselves on innovation. It’s time to harness that moonshot thinking and innovation towards closing the gap when it comes to minorities and technology. We look forward to working together with Google and other tech companies across America to raise the employment of African Americans in technology to achieve parity with their consumer market and population.”