 So wanted to clue you guys in on this new series that I'm going to be working on over the next few weeks and months that's going to look at the ties between HBCUs and a lot of different industries. So we know that as we're still in the midst of a pandemic, one of the things that's going to be an outcome of a lot of the economic turmoil that we're going through is more people across the country and around the world going to college. We're going to have folks who started college but didn't complete. We're going to have high school graduates. We're going to have community college transfers, a lot of people descending on colleges and universities all over the country to earn degrees, particularly because there's significant job loss and what do you do when you don't have a job you go back to school and try to up your credentials. So wanted to look at the ties between industry and HBCUs and I figured I would start this series with three of the big companies that are likely is to be sustainable during and after the pandemic and likely to grow and that was big tech. So I reached out to representatives from Google, Twitter and Facebook and I asked them three basic questions, particularly the HBCUs. Can you give me the total number of HBCU graduates who are on your labor force roles? In other words, how many HBCU grads do you have working at your company? Can you tell me the amount of minorities that you have who self-report being an ethnic or racial minority in your company in terms of the raw numbers and the percentages on your roles? And then can you tell me the highest ranking person at your firm or your company who graduated from an HBCU? Now why did I do that? Why did I specifically ask those questions? One, because a lot of the tech companies, particularly in recent months and in recent years have made a lot of headway in terms of creating pipeline and training programs for HBCU students and faculty, right? So Google has partnerships with Howard University. We've seen companies like IBM reach out and say that we're going to invest a hundred millions of dollars in terms of training and development for HBCU students and faculty. We've seen Facebook invest in diversity. We've seen Twitter saying that they want to do more to be better at diversity and inclusion. And so the method behind this is to say, okay, fine, it's cool to set up training and cool to set up inclusion efforts with HBCUs, but are those turning into real career opportunities for HBCUs? Are these programs, are these companies being intentional about not just training a potential workforce, but actually creating the workforce directly from the HBCUs? And so far, with these being the first three companies that I reached out to for this series, two of them have gotten back to me, one from Facebook, one from Google, both of them provided their diversity and inclusion reports, which I'm going to be writing about in the next few days. But none of them offered any insight into how many HBCU graduates work at their companies now. To be fair, it is to say that a lot of companies don't have an Excel spreadsheet sitting around that lists who went to an Ivy League, who went to a state school, who went to an HBCU, who went to a community college. To be fair, that's not typical data that you would keep. However, it would suggest that if these companies are creating pipelines and lifting up HBCUs for partnerships, that this was something they would be aggressive about, that not only do they want to say, we're spending money to help train folks from HBCUs, but here are the folks we're hiring from HBCUs. And it's even more of an important question because it's so easy to tap HBCUs and say, here's what we're going to do to improve the conditions and improve the lives of Black folks across the country. And we want to stamp out racism and we want to do a lot better and we promise to do a lot better. But the better stops at training. It's almost like that glass ceiling we hear about with minorities with women, there's only but so far you can go before there's a stoppage on your excellence or a stoppage on your opportunity. And what we have to be careful about when we're working not only with big tech, but a lot of other countries, hospitality, law, social justice and criminal justice, environmental environment, hospitality management, these are things that we have to be sure that if you're going to be partnering with HBCUs, that you're doing the things that contribute to HBCU graduates having opportunities to become executives, to become mid managers and to therefore reach back and bring more people with them. So this is going to be a series that I'm going to be developing over the next few weeks and months. I'm going to be reporting on the data and statistics I'm able to get. And hopefully it's something you'll be tracking along with me because I think it's going to be an important storyline in the weeks and months to come.