discrimination. She lost the case but it is seen as a proxy trial of gender bias in the tech industry. Other Project Include founders include Bethanye McKinney Blount, Erica Baker, Freada Kapor Klein, Laura I. Gómez, Susan Wu, Tracy Chou and Y-Vonne Hutchinson.

From Medium. Story by Project Include.

In fact, Brown was more than qualified to take a seat at the table. Having been involved in tech industry philanthropy for nearly 20 years and, as one of the earliest employees of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, he’d helped enable a vibrant, vocal approach to diversity and inclusion to emerge. It’s all a long way from where he started.

Originally from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he trained as an educator and worked in schools. His family background and identity as a Black gay man shaped his passion for helping people gain social mobility. But after arriving in California for graduate school at Stanford, he started to see that there were many ways to achieve the same goal.

Eventually he ended up shepherding more than $70 million of investments in people, communities and companies, and seeing what a difference businesses can make in changing lives and attitudes. And while he says it may not always feel like progress is being made — particularly when short term politics actually seem to be going backward — he says that it is there. Sometimes it’s difficult to see, because there is no fix-all, permanent answer.

“I mean, it’s like the tide,” he says. “During the course of a day, during the course of any time period, you can ebb and flow. And that’s where we are.”

“There are conversations that can happen now because folks are more aware of the challenges, the barriers. It gives the issue a level of credibility and visibility that it didn’t have before — perhaps not enough, but it’s still something it didn’t have five years ago.”

Like any startup entrepreneur, he says that the real answer is to keep forging ahead, keep changing — rather than waiting for everyone to catch up, for agreement. It’s a style of activism that one of his friends dubbed “the Harriet Tubman approach.”

“Harriet Tubman didn’t stay around trying to convince people,” he explains. “She said, ‘If y’all ready to go, we’re going.’ And then she came back for others, when they were ready. I think Project Include has a bit of Harriet Tubman approach to it: We’re