Michael Perera, General Manager of IBM’s Technology Lifecycle Services, joined Claudia Romo Edelman, the founder and CEO of We Are All Human, to talk about the Hispanic Promise 2.0 during the 2022 Hispanic Leadership Summit. 

The original Hispanic Promise was launched in 2019 at the World Economic Forum and was a “national pledge to hire, promote, retain and celebrate Hispanics in the workplace.” It was backed by over 30 corporate organizations and signed by over 300 companies. 

Romo Edelman explained that 76% of Latinos feel like they can’t be themselves at work.

“That means that if you're Jorge, you have to pretend to be George when you come to work and you leave yourself at home, and you come to work with someone you don't even know. And then you're probably going to be disenfranchised and completely out because you're suppressing your Latinidad, that you're suppressing yourself,” she said.

The Promise was inspired by this data point and by the Hispanic-Sustainable Development Goals. The four specific goals were Good Health and Wellbeing, Education, Gender Equality, and Economic Growth. 

The revision of the Promise was done in three stages. From December 2021 to March 2022, feedback was gathered from the Hispanic Promise Ecosystem & Core team. In May 2022, the three-day Design Think Workshop was held with representatives of different companies and organizations to determine actionable goals. From June to December 2022, the framework was finalized. 

The six pillars of the Hispanic Promise 2.0 are prepare, hire, promote, retain, celebrate, and buy/invest. 

These are how the six pillars are broken down: 

Prepare: “Support the future workforce to ensure they are equipped with relevant skills and knowledge that fuels their sustainable long-term success and are prepared for the future of work.”

Hire: “Create pipelines of Hispanic talent at all career levels and facilitate transition from higher education into corporate America.”

Promote: “Ensure career pathways and advancement opportunities are available and given to Hispanics to grow within companies.”

Retain: “Provide development support & opportunities for retention at all levels.”

Celebrate: “Elevate the contributions of Hispanics to increase their visibility, recognize their contributions and celebrate their successes year-round.”

Buy: “Build a sustainable supply chain and embed supplier diversity standards by contracting with Hispanic-owned and operated businesses. Deepen Hispanic societal impact through economic opportunity development and empowerment.”

Each pillar contains three levels of activities — Good, Better and Best — that gives companies an idea of how well they’re meeting that pillar’s goal. The presentation gave the levels for celebrate as an example. One of the goals under good was, identify measures of success. At the next level this goal was, establish goals and track measures of success. At the final level, the goal was to meet measures of success. 

“Now you're setting goals, you're measuring against those goals, and you're achieving those goals, which is the base premise of any company's success. We just happened to be applying it to Hispanics and the Hispanic Promise,” explained Perera. 

"And this is when you go to the website, this is where you will see the detail and for every single one of the six pillars, you get this level of detail, split out between activities and outcomes. And between those two, you start on your own journey wherever you are today. But it also gives you a clear path forward of how to continue to progress, what best practices look like, and then your ability to ultimately measure self report and be celebrated for the achievements and the progress that you're making," he added.

The organization will be launching a tech platform for the Hispanic Promise in the second quarter of 2023. Parts of the platform will include a self-scoring methodology and a place to submit companies for the Hispanic Promise Awards. These awards will be given out at next year’s Hispanic Leadership Summit.