Our culture, diversity and inclusion ecosystem

How our clients and suppliers contribute to our culture of diversity and inclusion

One of the ways we instill confidence in a world of change is by cultivating and supporting diverse and disadvantaged business owners and expanding their scope to higher-margin professional services.

Diverse professional organizations

We work with key diverse professional organizations, societies and associations to support inclusion and professional development and to enrich our workforce. Nationally, we have made substantial investments in the National Association of Black Accountants (NABA), the Association of Latino Professionals For America (ALPFA), Ascend (a Pan-Asian organization for business professionals), Out & Equal (an organization that works on LGBTQ+ workplace equality), the Global Leadership Summit (faith-based leadership training), the AICPA Women’s Global Leadership Summit, Student Veterans of America (SVA) and Disability: IN, as well as accounting-focused colleges, universities and students. We also have active relationships with organizations focused on supporting veterans and their families. In addition to firmwide investments, we cover the cost of membership and participation of our people in these organizations.

Supplier and business diversity

We are committed to supplier diversity and small business programs that support clients' needs and requirements while supplementing our capabilities and community impact. We embrace small, disadvantaged business (SDB) initiatives that encourage and enable our connection to SDB partners and diverse vendors. And we invest in processes and tools that support our commitment and advance our supplier objectives.

Our small business plan, for example, helps us meet or exceed socioeconomic targets as a percent of the total contract value for government engagements.

Our support of small and diverse businesses also includes women-, veteran-, LGBTQ+- and disability-owned entities. We are evaluating vendor spending among these communities and are building a national supplier diversity program to encourage intentional procurement from small and diverse businesses.

In 2022, we heightened our focus on business/supplier diversity by naming Tanya Coker-Fergusson a director of business/supplier diversity. She is now developing the firm’s go-forward strategy to expand our inclusion of small, diverse and disadvantaged suppliers within our traditional supply-chain and professional services.