Adriana Dawson on Driving Social Impact at Verizon

Work Forces

Adriana Dawson oversees Verizon’s Strategic and Social Impact programming across the eastern U.S. She leads and expands Verizon’s partnership network, community investments, and collaborates up and across the business supporting regional and national initiatives. She also serves as a Global Lead for SOMOS, an enterprise-wide Employee Resource Group (ERG) amplifying the voice of Verizon’s 6K+ Hispanic/Latinx employees. Adriana shares how her childhood and two decades of professional experience shaped her role as a cultural broker and practical steps that corporate leaders can take to bolster their approach to social impact.

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Transcript:

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Workforces, I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine. And we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Let's dive in.

Julian: Welcome to episode two of Work Forces. Thank you to all who listened to our first podcast. We've had over 100 downloads in our first week, which we're so excited about. We also appreciate the feedback we've received from our listeners and we'll continue to incorporate and refine the show to make this as useful to you as possible. On today's episode, we're speaking with Adriana Dawson, who oversees Verizon's strategic and social impact programming across the Eastern US. Adriana and I both live in Rhode Island. We first met over a decade ago when I was asked to assess Rhode Island's workforce development efforts. And today she leads and expands Verizon's partnership network, community investments, and collaborates up and across the business, supporting regional and national initiatives. In addition, Adriana serves as a global lead for SOMOS, an enterprise-wide employee resource group, or ERG, amplifying the voice of Verizon's 6,000 plus Hispanic and Latinx employees. Welcome, Adriana.

Adriana: Thank you so much. Super excited to join you and Kaitlin. I appreciate the opportunity.

Kaitlin: Adriana, we appreciate you. It's so good to be with you today. And we look forward to speaking with you more about your work and background and experiences. So, as we jump in on today's conversation, can you tell us a bit about your story, your background, and how it connects to the work that you do?

Adriana: Threads of my origin story really have influenced and informed the career decisions that I've made and the career that I decided to step into. So again, I'm very anchored in my origin story. My family is from Columbia. I am first generation. My parents were factory workers when they arrived in the early 70s. As you can imagine, the anchor institutions and the resources that exist for new arrivals today was not the case many, many years ago. So it was a very, very different transition for them. I am the only child. I spoke Spanish. While I was born in the U.S., Spanish was my first language for the first five years of my life. And so that really helped again, sort of shape my identity. And there were lots of challenges, growing up at that time, and I attended a small Catholic school and it wasn't very diverse. I was an only child, my parents only spoke Spanish. And at a very young age, I was activated as a navigator, as a translator for them, as a translator for my family and for many of the coworkers that they worked with in the factory. And what that looked like was, can you translate what this piece of mail says? Can you come with me to this doctor's appointment or to this appointment? And so very early on, as I was learning the English language and sort of growing up in that environment, navigating within the community, helping amplify their voice, helping them navigate systems, and being activated as a translator, was sort of a thing, but I didn't realize it was a thing. And then as I got older, again, just very mindful of the challenges that new arrivals and folks that are underestimated, overlooked, and sometimes made to feel less than have to deal with. And so as I stepped into my career and tried to navigate sort of my own pathway, my two plus decades of professional experience has really been anchored in amplifying community and being a cultural broker. And when I've engaged in a partnership with my employer partners, and notice how I say employer partners, it has always been at the intersection of allowing them to better understand communities and populations that they historically have not stepped into before. And so I have been a contributor across six different sectors. And I feel like I've been very honored in being that cultural broker and leveraging my cultural fluency to support both business and humanity.

Julian: Tell us about the work you're doing with Verizon and across Fortune 500 companies to amplify community, to be that cultural broker.

Adriana: Absolutely. Well, again, I have the distinct pleasure of being the director of community engagement for Verizon. And so what that means is we have what's called Citizen Verizon. And those are our three priority pillars that we fund around, where we have deep legacy. And so that is our commitment to society. That is how we have committed to show up for society and where we will be directing our investments to support programming and activity around those three pillars. And also where we will direct our human capital and our volunteer efforts. So I oversee and support the entire East region. And so in that role, I collaborate with the amazing talent and my colleagues that are anchored in those priority markets. And we build relationships. We engage with community partners to identify how best Verizon can weave ourselves very intentionally into the fabric of those communities and make investments to support the existing good work that's happening on the ground. Again, that aligns to our three priority pillars, which are digital equity and inclusion, climate protection, and human prosperity which has a deep focus on small businesses and workforce development.

Kaitlin: So what are some of the successes you've seen and experienced in your work? And in the other direction, what are some of the ongoing challenges you've experienced as well?

Adriana: So across my career, which I mentioned, I don't like to date myself, Kaitlin, but over two decades there have been instances throughout that career trajectory where my employer partners in the past perhaps haven't necessarily gotten it right–where they perhaps haven't centered community or have not involved the community to help inform and influence the strategy. And it can feel very transactional. And so not putting community first and not pulling in the right stakeholders and just being led by all the things that perhaps should not lead community-centered engagement. Where I have seen it right is again, where we bring community in on the front end. We ask questions. It doesn't feel intrusive. Where the partnership feels very complimentary when we're not sort of taking the lead, but we allow the community to take the lead and to help inform where we belong and how we should step in and what that looks like. And doing it in a very culturally contextualized way, where we're honoring the historical context and the cultural context of the communities we're stepping into. And we're recognizing the flavor, all of the flavor and those nuances that are going to look different in one market versus another market. We're not homogeneous communities of color and we all have sort of varying degrees of needs, expectations, flavors, trauma. And so what that means for us in the private sector is we need to be better informed. We need to educate ourselves in terms of the communities we're stepping into, what they've experienced before with private sector partners. Have they been strip-mined previously of information of assets? And it was parachuting in and then parachuting out and then they never saw those private sector partners again. And so where it's done right is where there's a mindfulness around partnerships and relationships and cultivation and pouring into that relationship and what that means. So it's not one dimensional, but it truly becomes magical when all of our assets kind of coalesce and the impact is really community-focused and intended.

Kaitlin: Is there an example that comes to mind of a time when that worked really well? And like, what made it work well? What brought all those pieces together, as you said, to really contextualize and make the experience personal for the community?

Adriana: I mean, not just because I work for Verizon, but I'll have to say it really is Verizon and the work I'm doing now. I am going on my fourth year work anniversary. And what I really appreciate is the openness to the evolution of the work. And as we've been stepping into different communities and as I personally have expanded my territory, it's the, I would say the openness and the support for my leadership to be better informed. Adriana, what are you seeing? What are you hearing? What can we do differently? What kind of resources do we need? So the fact that it's not just one person's responsibility. That as we're seeing and doing all of this good work and the needs, because there are other things that come up as you engage in these conversations with your partners about other needs that they have or other ways that we can show up that we perhaps hadn't identified, it's me feeling a level of comfort that information doesn't only have to live with me. That it is bubbled up, that it is encouraged, and that my leadership also truly wants to know how can we support this work that you're engaging in. And again, whether that's the financial investments or whether that's the human capital. And again, I'm feeling really, really good about the work. And I am thrilled about the way in which my employer partner has decided to partner with me to continue in this human impact work.

Julian: Based on your experiences, can you offer a practical step or three that social impact and business leaders can take to become forces? You know, you are a work force here on Work Forces. What step or three that they can take to become forces on these matters in their own organizations.

Adriana: What I would ultimately love to see more of are individuals and professionals that come from impacted communities be more deeply involved with social impact work. And so, and I'll say we, we have this lived experience. I have experienced poverty. I have been a recipient of career and job readiness programs as a youth. My family was a recipient of different resources. So I understand it. I get it. I understand the barriers. And I'm finding that there's such an opportunity to cultivate and develop a pipeline and introduce emerging professionals and other folks like me that perhaps aren't very familiar with what the social impact space is. What is corporate social responsibility? What does this work mean to introduce more of us with this lived experience, not only into the work, but to lead the work. There are many folks in this space leading this work that are extremely well-intentioned and are amazing professionals. And they're great at developing strategy, but perhaps again, don't come from these impacted communities. So I would challenge our leaders in this space, make space for others who can help cover your blind spots, that bring a lived perspective that perhaps you don't have. And that's where a lot of the magic happens. And in addition to that, I would also say, continue to be mindful of what I had mentioned earlier. As you're thinking about volunteer efforts, you're thinking about stepping into community to engage in conversations with stakeholders. How well informed are you as you're stepping in these communities? On the front end, there needs to be a level of education that we need to not only be mindful of, but I'll give you an example, for instance. And so one of my new markets is Philadelphia. And so what does that mean for me as I'm stepping into Philly? So I dug into neighborhoods. I dug into census data. I dug into the population, and the breakout of the demographics, because it was my responsibility to them to be informed as I stepped into these communities. And so those are just two examples. I'm happy to dig a little bit more deeply, but it's not the community's job to educate us consistently. It's taxing, it's draining. We need to own some of that as we're looking to continue to engage in this work.

Julian: You're doing work within Verizon, but also across Fortune 500 companies or with counterparts in other companies who are addressing the same issues. Can you speak a little bit to that work?

Adriana: Absolutely. And so, again, as a result of my role with SOMOS (which is Verizon's employee resource group that supports our 6,000 plus Hispanic and Latinx-identifying employees) I've taken it upon myself to connect with other leaders within ERG resource groups across other Fortune 500 companies. And it's all with the goal of... What are you doing to support your workforce? As an ERG, what are your tenets? What are your employees of color or just employees period? What are they gleaning on? How are they looking to continue to amplify within your workforce? How can we share resources? What are some professional development takeaways or things that you're hearing from your workforce or from your ERG community? And I'm also curious as I step into those conversations, what are you doing externally? How are you showing up? What are some best practices that we can glean from? And so it's really getting a large lay of the land in terms of how we're coalescing resources, how we're showing up together, how we're leveraging our assets. And so that's the role that I've been playing within my own ERG, but thinking about what are others doing in the same space that I'm in. Who are representatives across these larger entities? And then how can we identify best practices and continue to level up and show up both for our internal communities as well as external.

Kaitlin: Have you identified any best practices you'd wanna share? Have any nuggets or specific ideas kind of risen to the top?

Adriana: There are a few. And I think I would land on more internal for now because this has been a fairly new practice. But again, what we're finding is, you know, while ERG's are funded by our corporations, there's a lot of work that can still be done. And there isn't an endless amount of funding. And so we have found that there are experts within our particular spaces. Let's say there's an expert in LinkedIn, someone who is a marketing executive or leads a marketing department. So we're kind of figuring out and developing sort of this competency model and identifying who does what and activating each other across our respective spaces based on our needs. So if we've got a group at Hewlett Packard or another group within another tech company, another ERG who's identified, our community would really love to focus on personal branding. They really need help with that. They're looking to really amplify. Some of us have raised their hand to say, you know what, we're pretty active on LinkedIn, or, you know, not for nothing, but we've done pretty well in building our personal brand. We're happy to facilitate a session for you and your team. And so again, shared resources to meet our needs, but also to be mindful of our respective budgets across the board.

Julian: It's so wonderful to see, you know, we talk a lot about workforce development as this kind of multidisciplinary undertaking where, you have to have all these different actors: employers and educators and trainers and so on. It's just so great to see a corporation and you taking the lead on so much of this, because ultimately you're the ones with the jobs, and as hard as the public side of this tries, they have jobs but they don't have your jobs. And many of the very well-paying ones.

Adriana: No, absolutely. And the other thread that I would lift here, being a first-generation professional is real, and it's a thing. And so in many of the spaces that I'm in, I find that while people really appreciate the professional development modules and opportunities that they've been given, it doesn't necessarily speak to them. Because it has been facilitated and presented, again, either by a facilitator who's a non-impacted facilitator, who shares or leads the workshop or the training program through the lens of a level playing field. And it's just very challenging for someone who comes from a particular socioeconomic background or who has dealt with trauma or other hiccups along their career, to really glean on having the ability to see themselves kind of navigate through what's being shared. And so talking to other professionals about what is talent and development, what does professional development look like for a particular workforce, that is first-generation professional, looks and feels different. And it has to be culturally contextualized. It has to take into account our cultural norms, our history, our barriers. And so that's another thing that I'm also very passionate about, because we often talk about first generation college students. And what does that mean in terms of access and making sure that we help them with their transition? Well, the same applies. First generation college students become first generation professionals. And who has decoded the world of work? Who has helped demystify in addition to working hard, there's other things within sort of that secret sauce that no one has ever really shared with you. If you don't come from a household where that's been normalized for you, that can impact your ability to have your upward mobility supported because you don't know what you don't know.

Kaitlin: And there are all these unspoken norms and ways of being right that we have to be explicit about because otherwise not everyone knows they're there.

Adriana: Absolutely. And so, you know, in my case, just very quickly, what I knew was hard work. I knew grit. I knew how to make a dollar out of 15 cents. We just had to figure it out. You know, so I just kept my head down and I worked really hard with the hope that someone would tap me on the shoulder and be like, “hey, congratulations, you're working really hard. It's promotion time”. You know, that wasn't the case. So my career early on stalled and I saw my peers advancing and I internalized that. I was like, what am I doing wrong? But that's because I didn't understand that sort of the system really wasn't designed to support me. I had to work around the system, but I didn't know what that meant. Again, nobody had decoded or demystified for me and said, Adriana, you really need to start networking. And you know those kind of events that you really don't wanna go to, it's kind of important you go to that because it's face time. People need to see you. Oh, thanks for telling me. Oh, and by the way, mentors and sponsors, so all the things. I started learning slowly but surely, but again, early on in my career, it was very challenging. So that's another sort of practical kind of takeaway. An example I would share with folks, especially those leading HR talent development is, as you're thinking about onboarding for new employees or for existing employees, how are you capturing a segment of your workforce that are first generation professionals who might not raise their hand and ask questions, and you assume that they know the things? So not assuming and creating a baseline or further contextualizing it for them and getting back to real basics would be a game changer for some folks stepping into this corporate environment for the very first time with no blueprint or playbook.

Kaitlin: Well, thank you for sharing so much of yourself and your background, your work and these really practical, tangible steps that leaders and people really, everyone can take to create an inclusive, and as you're saying, explicitly built environment where everyone kind of understands, here are the rules of the road and here are the ways you can continue to position yourself or upskill. Because there are so many steps that, you're right, I think they just, they get glossed over and it's like, you know or you don't know. And as you were saying earlier about building almost like a set of competencies for the ERG work you're doing, right? These are all competencies and skills that if we're explicit, if we're clear and transparent about what they are, it helps everyone. So really appreciate you offering these practical steps toward the end of our discussion today, Adriana. How can listeners learn more about your work?

Adriana: LinkedIn has been an absolute gift. I am an extreme extrovert and when the pandemic hit and I, you know, we all were impacted by human connection, I really leveraged the power of that particular social media platform. And it allowed me to build community. So it was like Adriana had all this energy because I was so used to moving and shaking and meeting folks and attending events. And I still needed that and I got it in a different way. And so I have made myself available on LinkedIn. I invite people to connect with me there. I have taken our online connection offline. Schedule 15, 20 minutes with folks because I'm really curious. I'm very relational and I love to better understand who I'm connecting with and how we can be of service and a resource to each other. And so I would say LinkedIn would be a great way to take a look at my content. The stories that I've shared, the things that I find interesting, but also connecting with me personally, and would love the opportunity to do that.

Julian: Well, and Adriana, it's so great. We hadn't been in touch for a bit, and we reconnected on LinkedIn. So there you go. Absolutely. And it's such a pleasure to reconnect and have this conversation with you. Fantastic, amazing work you're doing. So look forward to continuing to track your story and to keep finding ways to work together. And really appreciate your taking the time.

Adriana: My absolute pleasure. I look forward to staying in touch and continuing to do the good work. Thank you both. Thank you so much.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. Work Forces is available on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Spotify. We hope you will subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends. If you have interest in sponsoring this podcast, please contact us through the podcast notes.