Mark This! Podcast, Episode 25, PRIDE ERG
Host: Heather Dotchel (she/her), Corporate Communications
Guests:
- Chris Stearns, Founding Member and Senior Advisor of PRIDE, He/Him,Vice President and Assistant General Counsel for Aramark
- Patti Pactanac, Co-Chair for PRIDE, She/Her, Vice President of Compliance for Aramark
- Brisbane Vaillancourt, Executive Sponsor for PRIDE, She/Her, Regional Vice President for Aramark Collegiate Hospitality
It is time to Mark This, a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs, and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business. I'm Heather Dotchel. My pronouns are she/her. As a member of Aramark's Communications team, I see and hear amazing things that are happening across our company every day. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them, building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
We are exploring another of our employee resource groups today, our PRIDE ERG, as we celebrate National Coming Out Day October 11th. You might remember that our 11 ERGs are voluntary employee-led groups made up of individuals who come together based on common interests, backgrounds, or demographic factors. Each ERG is open to all Aramark employees regardless of their background and provides opportunities for networking, outreach, professional development, and more.
Chris Stearns, Patti Pactanac, and Brisbane Vaillancourt are here today to talk about PRIDE. Chris is a founding member and senior advisor of PRIDE. Patti is the current co-chair, and Bris is the executive sponsor. Welcome to all of you. I cannot wait to dig into the history of this group of which I am a member and to learn more. Chris, as mentioned, you are a founding member for PRIDE. Can you give us a bit of your personal biography and then the history of our PRIDE ERG? I believe it's one of the oldest ERGs, and Aramark was an early corporate adapter of a PRIDE group? Am I right?
Hi Heather. I'm excited to be part of this today. My name is Chris Stearns. My pronouns are he/him, and I am vice president and assistant general counsel supporting Aramark's sports and entertainment destinations and facilities businesses. And over my career at Aramark have had the privilege of supporting most of Aramark's business units. I'm also very excited to be here to celebrate in this forum several of PRIDE's major milestones since its founding in 2009.
When I first arrived here at Aramark, I inquired about the resources available to LGBTQ+ employees and allies and discovered pretty quickly that it was an area I thought that we could work together to improve for Aramark and set to work doing that and was very excited to find that there was a lot of interest and support from Aramark's executive leadership, from my managers in the legal department. And so about five of us gathered around a conference room table and we rolled up our sleeves and set to work. At that time, Aramark's ERG program was in its infancy.
There was only one ERG that preceded PRIDE that was at the time called the Women's Business Resource Network, which is now EMPOWER. And we were a small and mighty team committed to creating these resources, and I'm happy to report that we've made significant progress over the intervening years. One of the first milestones was in 2012 when PRIDE officially launched as Aramark's second ERG. Again, we were very grateful to have the corporate support in those early days, including an executive sponsor and a modest budget, which we put to good use.
And in 2014, one of the first things that we did was work with our corporate benefits team to improve Aramark's benefit offerings, which then enabled us to achieve a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index. And very happy to say that that is an honor that we have continued to maintain and every year since 2012 through an ever-evolving range of CEI requirements. Not long after that with, again, support from our executive leadership, Aramark joined hundreds of others in other organizations in corporate America to support marriage equality arguments before the Supreme Court.
The end result of which was a joint submission of an amicus brief in 2015. In 2017, Aramark with the support of the PRIDE ERG launched gender transition guidelines that we developed to help Aramark employees and their managers make the workplace more inclusive and productive for its trans team members. In 2019, Aramark joined another Supreme Court amicus brief in support of Title VII expansion, which ultimately prohibited employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
And those two moments for me as a lawyer for Aramark really are some of the things that I will look back on my career at Aramark and beyond Aramark as very, very significant and meaningful and impactful to not only the broader LGBTQ+ community but also for me personally. Since 2019, PRIDE has continued to have a positive impact for Aramark's LGBTQ+ employees and allies, and I think Patti and Bris will share some of those with you.
Thanks for that history, Chris. I mean, it's certainly wonderful to hear. Bris, I'm going to turn to you. First of all, congratulations on being our very first repeat podcast guest. Can you share your history in connection with PRIDE for us? And then talk to me about the amazing growth of PRIDE, like our current snapshot. What does that look like?
Brisbane Vaillancourt (06:29):
Well, Heather, thanks for having me. Again, my name is Brisbane Vaillancourt. I'm the regional vice president in collegiate hospitality, and I work in the Northeast region. My pronouns are she her. I started with the company in 2016, and actually my first week on the job, I was having lunch with my new boss, and he asked me, "What's your husband do for work?" And I stopped for a second and wasn't quite sure what to say, and I said, "Well, I'm not married to a he, and my wife is home with our young little six-month daughter." And that's when he said, "You should sign up for PRIDE."
And I learned all about employee resource groups. I came from a much smaller organization before, where we did not have employee resource groups. Fast-forward into 2020, the world shuts down. While I had been a member of PRIDE since 2016, had never really been... joined any of the PRIDE events and had the opportunity to get to Philly. But as I mentioned earlier, in 2020, the world shut down, and our DE&I team quickly changed the model of our employee resource groups and turned them into a virtual and employee resource group.
In 2020, they also put out the opportunity for any of our managers to become part of the leadership team. And I put my name in the hat to become part of the PRIDE Leadership team. And for the last four years, I've had the honor of working with some great individuals. I started off in one of the chairs, and now I'm the executive sponsor and really proud of the great work and the progress that we've made since the founding of PRIDE, like Chris talks about, and we've been able to do in the last four years that I know have personally made an impact.
In 2021, we also released our first version of Coming Out Stories, and I was brave enough to share my story then to the rest of Aramark. And now we're working through our fifth version, which is quite exciting and is released in October as well. This past year, we have grown our membership growth numbers by 63%. That may have changed in the last two days, as you'll get to learn a little bit more from Patti. And I know the number has increased by a couple of members these last few days. It is peak hiring season in our education business.
So this is always part of onboarding and encouraging our employees to bring their whole self to work and become members of one of our 11 employee resource groups. We are on a mission to get to a thousand members, which is made up of members of our community as well as allies. And you'll hear a lot through today about the importance of allyship and some of the things that we are focused on in our employee resource group with PRIDE. One of the things besides kind of focusing on growth that we've been focused on across the ERG is the development of our team and overall wellness.
And so you guys have seen there's a lot of noise out there around the LGBTQ+ community and some of the challenges people are faced with on a daily basis. And so this past PRIDE Month in June, we built a lot of our programming around the development of our team and then focusing on overall wellness and reminding ourselves to take care of each other and to lean to each other and support our friends and our allies.
So I find it really interesting that your previous company didn't have ERG groups because that's very analogous to where I came from. The same thing. It was a new experience for me coming into Aramark and being exposed to the ERGs and having the opportunity to join them.
I will share that the ERGs were a primary inspiration for this podcast because I wanted to share all of these robust internal connections that are made at a company. And as I say in the intro, kind of peel back that curtain to let other people see in. Patti, welcome to Mark This. Can you share your work as co-chair of Pride and what it means to you? What initiatives have we championed to make ever-improving and more inclusive workplace for LGBTQ+ members?
Hi, Heather. Yes, thanks for having me. Patti Pactanac, she/her. I'm currently vice president of compliance supporting destinations, collegiate hospitality, Healthcare+ in the refreshments businesses, and happy to be here as co-chair of PRIDE. I joined PRIDE in large part due to our prior co-chair, Alyx's passion and dedication to PRIDE. She always made it really exciting to hear what was happening, and I wanted to do my part to build an environment where everyone is welcome and has a voice.
I think showing up as an ally is important. And all of our initiatives, Pronouns Matter that was launched in 2022, the myWholeSelf campaign in 2023, and our OUTSpoken with Pride series that we launched this year, are really built to support the members of the community to give them a place to ensure that they're seen, but also to educate allies like myself on a lived experience that is different than my own.
Working with my co-chair, Michael, today, we come with different experiences and perspectives, and I think that has really allowed us to build out strong programming that supports a diverse community and gives a voice to things that, as an ally, things upset me, that I feel empowered to comment on that. Sometimes, Michael will look at me and say, "Thank you. I didn't think I could say that, but I was feeling that." And that's exciting with all the things that we're working on to have that partnership and to be building on that for the organization.
So let's talk a little bit more about these initiatives that are going on. Bris, can you talk about the Pronouns Matter initiative?
Brisbane Vaillancourt (13:08):
So, in today's world, understanding someone's pronouns is vital for protecting our employee well-being and psychological safety. It's also an act of allyship, which you heard me talk a bit about a little bit earlier today. We partner with PFLAG to help support us with this training. And about two years ago, we made it mandatory in collegiate hospitality and had all of our managers go through pronoun training.
We're excited as we roll into these next couple months and just finalized our fiscal year '25 strategy for our PRIDE employee resource group that we are going to continue to put an emphasis on this and find ways to provide this training to all of our employees as part of their onboarding and just across the enterprise on a regular basis.
And Patti, can you tell us a bit more about myWholeSelf?
Yeah, sure. So myWholeSelf, when we think about just making sure we have a diverse workforce, myWholeSelf really brings to light our ability to set targets around LGBTQ+ individuals in the workplace.
So, as we invite individuals to tell us if they're a member of the community, just like individuals identify veteran status or a disability status, it allows us to have visibility to where we are with LGBTQ+ members in our organization as a whole and then within leadership teams.
So we want to be able to know where we are today and hopefully grow that population to make sure that we have a diverse community at all levels of the organization, and myWholeSelf empowers us to do that.
And what about OUTSpoken with Pride? Can you elaborate on that too?
This is one of those series that we had inspiration from our fellow ERGs and how they were bringing conversations to life with their members and members of the leadership team. So we started an OUTSpoken with Pride series earlier this year, and it's about starting conversations and looking at the different conversations that are relevant to the community. That's not specific just to PRIDE, but just the organization.
So we started with Chris and Bris talking about the history of PRIDE and where we're going. Then we invited our DEI leader, Fenimore Fisher, for our last session, that we got to talk about the current state of DEI initiatives and let our members ask questions and build comfort and reassurance that Aramark continues to be committed to a diverse workforce and seeing progress.
And as we close out the year, we're going to have a member share their coming out story live and their journey to again reinforce that it's... Aramark's a safe place to do this, and we're really honored to feel like they feel comfortable and they're going to do that during October with us. And then, we're going to focus on leadership in December and talk about the journey of things that spur individuals to become more active in the community and supporting initiative. So we're excited to see how this continues to build throughout the years.
And October, this is coming out in October, and it's very purposeful for our coming out day on October 11th. What are we doing in celebration of that?
So, as Bris mentioned, during PRIDE Month, we focused on self-care, and we're continuing that theme and all the different elements that impact people's lives. We're going to talk about real stories, but we're going to support a Suicide Prevention Walk to kick off the month with some of our hub memberships. And we're going to be really continuing to encourage people to live authentically, and it's safe to do so here at Aramark.
And I believe we're publishing our fifth volume, correct, of Coming Out Stories within the company.
Yes. Fifth and biggest volume yet. So we're just so... What are we so? What's the word? As we...
We're proud, Patti.
Yes, thank you. Thank you.
Brisbane Vaillancourt (17:59):
I was going to say the same thing. I mean, we have almost... we have about 25 stories, and it's just such a wonderful mix of every story. And I've gone through and read all of them, and it's just... it makes my heart smile to see that so many people are either willing to share their allyship story or their personal story. And then we have some people that are sharing that were in the first version but are sharing a different coming out story.
Because for those of us that have been on this journey of feeling different and having to explain ourselves throughout our life, there may have been that time when you were 18 or 19 and started to come out to people, and then you waited until you told your parents and then you waited until you had your first day at your... a new job and told your new boss. So having people share those different stories is incredibly important and creates that inclusive environment that Patti's talking about.
So you've started down this path, Bris, and so I'm going to ask you to continue. You're talking about why these initiatives are important. Is there anything else you want to say about that?
Brisbane Vaillancourt (19:13):
So, at Aramark, creating an inclusive environment and having allies across the enterprise is very, very important. Both Chris, Patti, and myself actually just spent the last two days at our headquarters in Philadelphia for an employee resource group summit where we were able to spend time with the other 10 employee resource groups and people that are in the same seats we're in and able to learn what they're doing to make improvements in their employee resource group and how they're connecting with different people across the enterprise.
We are also really focused on intersectionality and having events where we partner with our co-ERGs and can touch a broader base of our employees. And so having these different initiatives, connecting with our employees, encouraging people to come out and be allies is creating a very safe environment for people to bring their whole self to work at Aramark. I've always kind of been my whole self here. I think it can be challenging is we are a client-based organization, and sometimes it's not as easy to be who we are in the client space.
So really trying to encourage our employees to feel safe no matter where they are and having a network for them to reach out to. A member of our PRIDE Leadership team, she started working on my team about three years ago as a district manager, and her story is coming out in version five, but when we were writing her bio to send out to our team and also to share with our clients, I said to her, "You're going to come out in that bio. You're going to share with them who you're married to and the name of your daughter, and it's okay."
And so was the first... While she had been with us for double-digit years, she... people that she worked with and that she was close with, she shared with, but she had never taken that next step and put it in her bio and shared it with clients. And it was really groundbreaking for her. It just... It ultimately made her feel so much more comfortable, and it really has changed her perspective on sharing information about herself and her life with others and definitely want to encourage people to do that. And that's why all of these initiatives are incredibly important. It's part of our overall DE&I strategy at Aramark.
All right. Well, thank you for sharing that. I'm going to come back to you, Patti, and ask what's coming up in the future. What's next for PRIDE?
Oh, there's a lot. There's a lot. Well, at least a lot that we want to do. And it's always a challenge to limit it down to what we know we're going to be able to deliver. But if I highlight it in four key categories, we're going to focus on that whole self. So partnering with the other ERGs so that we're acknowledging we're not just PRIDE, we're PRIDE and Amplify or PRIDE and LEAD.
So working together to bring each of the ERGs and different components of our lives together in our initiatives and building community partnerships. We have some really strong ones, like our Nashville hub and their presence at Nashville Pride and Franklin Pride, but we're going to look to build that out at more of our hubs and really work to see what we can do to help bring talent into the organization that's part of the community and grow, not just the ERG, but grow the diversity of our team is where we're going to be focusing over the next year.
Okay. And now I'm going to turn to Chris to wrap us up. We've heard over and over again why this is important to Aramark, to our employees. Do you have anything to add to that? Bring us home, Chris. Give us the succinct wrap-up. With you having been here since the beginning to now, what makes PRIDE so special here?
Well, for me, Heather, the themes of authenticity and safety and validation are principles important to PRIDE in its membership, but to the Aramark Enterprise and all Aramark employees, the entire Aramark family, and our Aramark clients and their employees.
And I think it's important for us to be leaders within PRIDE and beyond it to show all of those constituencies that this is a great, safe, and validating and authentic place to work. And certainly, I pride myself in walking that talk.
And I think as you look back over the 15-year history of PRIDE and what we have been able to achieve within the ERG and beyond it as part of the Aramark company and brand, we can all be really, really proud of those accomplishments and those milestones.
Want to know more about today's episode? Visit our newsroom on aramark.com to access more information. Chris, Patti, Bris, thank you for joining us today. And also, as always, much appreciation to our listeners for being part of our conversation here at Mark This.
