SER Jobs for Progress National, Inc.

Equity Statement

For more than a half a century, SER National has served communities of color, with a focus on Hispanics. The second largest group served by SER National is the Black community. A majority of participants across all programs are female.

SER National was founded by two of the oldest national Hispanic organizations, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the American GI Forum (AGIF), the latter being the nation's largest Hispanic veterans group. To this day, LULAC and AGIF maintain a majority of the seats on our Board of Directors to ensure that the organization continues to meet its mission. Accordingly, 100 percent of the Board's composition is Hispanic, more than half of whom are female.

We analyze the needs of people of color as part of programming assessment, planning, and implementation, leading to our program designs. A good example is SER MUJER entrepreneurship training. Some of the barriers that women of color face include limited access to capital and mentors. Women entrepreneurs get offered smaller loans across every product, from the same groups. Small business owners of color are more likely to be denied credit and tend to pay higher interest rates.

In response, SER MUJER targets women of color so that our participants would represent the most-in-need. The inclusion of web content as well as a mobile app was critical to helping women with busy schedules access content at any time, at their own convenience and pace. By empowering women with information and solutions, along with support, our participants succeed.

New this year is SER Talks, an activity initiated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since our staff and participants cannot gather in-person, we are bringing content to them via live webinars broadcast using Webex. Dr. Michelle Tovar presented on "Diversity and Inclusion in Children's Literature." Dr. Tovar is the Associate Director of Education - Latino Initiatives at the Holocaust Museum in Houston. Additional topics related to diversity will be included as we make SER Talks a permanent part of our programming and racial equity training.

Moving forward, SER National will contract with HACR (Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility) to provide diversity equity training. SER National's President and CEO, Ignacio Salazar, is on the HACR Board. HACR currently collaborates with nearly 80 Fortunate 500 companies on issues of diversity equity, inclusion, and leadership development, among others.