Key play­ers in the lo­cal busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty have reaf­firmed a com­mit­ment to cre­at­ing safe work en­vi­ron­ments for their LGBTQ+ em­ploy­ees, and to em­brace more ful­ly the prin­ci­ples of Di­ver­si­ty, Eq­ui­ty and In­clu­sion.

The af­fir­ma­tions were made on Tues­day 17 May 2022, when a co­hort of busi­ness lead­ers—in­clud­ing the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try & Com­merce (TTCIC), the Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce TT (AM­CHAM), the ANSA McAL Group, the HAD­CO Group, and Sco­tia­bank Caribbean, and EY Caribbean—joined PrideTT to com­mem­o­rate In­ter­na­tion­al Day Against Ho­mo­pho­bia, Bi­pho­bia and Trans­pho­bia (IDA­HO­BIT) 2022, as part of the launch of PrideTT’s 5th An­niver­sary.

A re­lease from PrideTT re­ports that the busi­ness lead­ers par­tic­i­pat­ed in a busi­ness pan­el as part of the 1st An­nu­al Di­ver­si­ty, Eq­ui­ty, and In­clu­sion (DEI) Con­fer­ence in Trinidad and To­ba­go, held at the Hy­att, Trinidad. Speak­ing open­ly, each shared with oth­er pri­vate and pub­lic sec­tor or­gan­i­sa­tions in at­ten­dance, why DEI poli­cies—in­clud­ing those pro­tect­ing the in­ter­ests of queer em­ploy­ees, cus­tomers, and per­sons in gen­er­al—are sim­ply the right thing to do.

ANSA McAL al­ready has com­menced a full-scale DEI in­te­gra­tion process, while last year both Sco­tia­bank and HAD­CO ex­tend­ed in­sur­ance ben­e­fits to same-sex part­ners of their gay em­ploy­ees. The TTCIC and AM­CHAM have made sev­er­al calls over the years for more pro­gres­sive and in­clu­sive poli­cies from not on­ly its mem­bers, but gov­ern­ment in gen­er­al. EY Caribbean is part of a glob­al com­mu­ni­ty that has been able to im­ple­ment glob­al DEI pol­i­cy across its broad foot­print.

The dis­cus­sion was mod­er­at­ed by Rudolph Hanamji, Se­nior Man­ag­er Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment, EY Caribbean who is part­ly re­spon­si­ble for EY’s roll­out of its En­vi­ron­men­tal, So­cial and Gov­er­nance (ESG) ser­vice lines –with DEI be­ing a main com­po­nent in the So­cial pil­lar.  EY Caribbean has had a head start in this area, giv­en its glob­al of­fices DEI po­lices and com­mit­ment to the LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty.

Pan­el­list, Tere­sa White, Chief Shared Ser­vices Of­fi­cer, ANSA re­mind­ed at­ten­dees that this ‘is not a sim­ple jour­ney’, while Ni­rad Tewarie, CEO AM­CHAM en­cour­aged non-LGBTQ per­sons to ‘show-up’ as al­lies. Sco­tia­bank’s Rhon­da O’Neil, Se­nior Man­ag­er Lead­er­ship, Learn­ing and De­vel­op­ment Caribbean South & East, high­light­ed the need for ‘psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly safe en­vi­ron­ments’ at the work­place.

An­oth­er pan­el­list, Mar­sha Naidoo-Choo Chai, Group Hu­man Re­sources Man­ag­er, HAD­CO un­der­scored the im­por­tance of ‘lead­er­ship with­in the com­pa­ny’ to dri­ve an in­clu­sive cul­ture. And Jonathan Cum­ber­batch, a Di­rec­tor at T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try & Com­merce, ac­knowl­edged that ‘sym­bol­ism’ is crit­i­cal for pro­gress­ing a more di­verse, eq­ui­table and in­clu­sive so­ci­ety.

Oth­er mem­bers of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty in at­ten­dance—such as RBL, An­gos­tu­ra, Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um—com­mit­ted to join­ing their col­leagues in the DEI jour­ney.

This ac­tiv­i­ty was aligned with the PrideTT’s theme for this year, RE­JU­VE­NA­TION, which was un­veiled lat­er that evening.

“As this is the 60th year of In­de­pen­dence, PrideTT has aligned its pro­gram­ming around help­ing build a bet­ter T&T, by mo­bil­is­ing the queer com­mu­ni­ty whose mem­bers ex­ist in all as­pects of life. They will be called up­on to con­tribute to ef­forts on em­pow­er­ing all vul­ner­a­ble and mar­gin­alised per­sons across T&T—who share in­ter­sec­tion­al chal­lenges with queer per­sons,” the PrideTT re­lease re­vealed.

Hanamji, who is al­so the out­go­ing Co-Chair of PrideTT, hav­ing served since its in­cep­tion, ad­vised that mov­ing for­ward, a new or­gan­i­sa­tion, called QueerTT, will be op­er­a­tional­ized to work more close­ly with the pri­vate sec­tor in de­vel­op­ing pro­grammes to sup­port queer per­sons. Thus, PrideTT will fo­cus specif­i­cal­ly on the month-long pride cel­e­bra­tions, held every last week­end of June to the last week­end of Ju­ly.