Wilma Wallace, Chief Diversity & Social Impact Officer, REI Co-Op: The Changemaker Interview
Trained and experienced as a top corporate lawyer, Wilma Wallace stepped away from her duties as REI Co-op’s general counsel in 2021 to lead the outdoor retailer’s diversity and social impact efforts. It’s a big job and we recently touched base to discuss her work and how it is going.
David Hessekiel: Before we jump into your current work, please tell me about the personal and professional journey that led to your post as REI Co-op’s chief diversity and social impact officer.
Wilma Wallace: My passion for racial equity, diversity and inclusion is informed by my lived experience as an African American woman. I was raised in the 1960s and 70s in a small New England dairy town. My parents had strong Black Southern roots and came of age during a system of Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. I am just three generations removed from being enslaved myself, and that truth feeds my experience.
I chose to pursue a career in law because I believed the rule of law and legal frameworks to be instruments of change for systems, structures, policies, practices, and ultimately culture. After serving in law firms, I joined Gap, Inc. as I believe that corporations also have the ability to make change. I was at Gap for more than 20 years leading legal, compliance and ultimately environmental sustainability and social impact before joining the co-op’s leadership team in 2017.
By 2019, I was one of the executive leaders overseeing the co-op’s social impact efforts – including racial equity, diversity and inclusion. In 2021, I was officially appointment to be the co-op’s first chief diversity and social impact officer as we accelerated our racial equity, diversity and inclusion efforts and committed to becoming a fully inclusive, anti-racist, multicultural organization. Today, I also serve several nonprofit organizations – including serving as the board chair of the REI Cooperative Action Fund.
Wilma Wallace has served as the REI Co-Op’s chief diversity and social impact officer since 2021
REI
David Hessekiel: You’ve said that as a co-op REI works to a quadruple bottom line instead of “just” a triple bottom line. What do you mean and what strengths and challenges does REI’s cooperative structure bring to your work?
Wilma Wallace: We’re a cooperative so we are a little different from other companies. Instead of shareholders or investors, we represent a community of 21 million members, all united by our shared belief in the power and importance of time outside. We measure our success not just by how we do as a business, but also how we make a positive impact on employees, members, and society. Each year, we give most of our profits back to the outdoor community. And the better we do as a business, the more we can invest in impact – and fulfill our mission.
A membership to the co-op is for life. Instead of focusing on quarterly returns, we can take a longer-term approach to our work. From a business standpoint, this means we can make bold decisions like closing our doors on the busiest shopping day of the year. From an impact standpoint, this means we are uniquely positioned to tackle some of the most challenging issues facing our business and society like climate change and systemic inequities.
REI Co-op is working on many fronts to advance in the fields of social impact and diversity.
REI
David Hessekiel: REI created a separate nonprofit organization to help achieve its goals of harnessing the collective power of the co-op’s members in the fight for a more equitable and inclusive outdoor community. Why and what has the REI Cooperative Action Fund focused on in the last year?
Wilma Wallace: REI has a long history of giving back to the outdoor community. As the co-op has grown, we have continually looked for ways to scale our impact and create opportunities for the broader community to participate. The REI Cooperative Action Fund does exactly that. It’s a community-supported, public charity where anyone can contribute, including our 21 million members. Imagine the collective power to have an impact.
We know that time outside can inspire, empower, and heal people. We also know that millions of Americans lack access to outdoor spaces, and even if they have access, many people do not feel a sense of safety or belonging outdoors. The Fund was created to help build a more equitable, accessible, and inclusive outdoor culture.
The Fund supports a nationwide network of nonprofits, some of which are longtime partners of REI Co-op, but many of which are new. In 2022, the Fund contributed over $3.4 million to nonprofits. As the Fund continues to grow, so will our impact and our ability to reach even more organizations.
David Hessekiel: REI has a largely white employee and customer base in a largely white outdoors industry. What are examples of efforts the company has taken to create a culture and atmosphere that will create what BIPOC people consider a more welcoming environment?
Wilma Wallace: We have committed to becoming a fully inclusive, anti-racist, multicultural organization. If we want to truly live up to this commitment, then we must first ensure that everyone feels a sense of belonging at the co-op.
Much of that work starts from within. We’ve started with education and setting the expectation that every employee has a role to play in progressing this commitment. To support employees in their personal learning journeys, we’ve created a robust internal hub with self-paced, facilitator-led, and online learning content that is available to the entire workforce and leadership training. We’ve also increased a sense of belonging in recognizing a wider range of cultural moments at the co-op that represent the diversity of our employees and community. And we’ve created employee resource groups – or as we call them, inclusion networks—to provide mentorship and community for employees from historically underrepresented communities. It may sound simple, but we’ve set the expectation that aside from these enterprise efforts, each leader will incorporate aspects of equity and inclusion into their plans and ways of operating.
This commitment also extends to the way we do business. One example is our partnership with Outdoor Afro, where we co-created a collection of hiking apparel to help solve unmet needs in outdoor apparel. Together, we worked closely with members of the Black community to understand their outdoor product needs to develop a collection that would inspire and ignite more Black joy in nature. This collection brings more inclusive design to the forefront – including fit options that consider a wider range of body types, shapes, and sizes. When we take an inclusive design approach, it results in better products for everyone.
An item from the REI’s Outdoor Afro collection
REI
David Hessekiel: Creating such big changes is a massive undertaking. What are some of the early results that give you hope for the future? What kind of time horizon do you use when thinking about how long it will take to bring about big impacts?
Wilma Wallace: As I shared earlier, we are in a unique position to take a longer-term approach. We were founded in 1938, and our responsibility is to steward the co-op to ensure it continues to thrive for the next 80+ years. While we have several goals around increasing diverse representation within our workforce, our membership, and our supplier base, this is a continual journey and practice. No matter how much progress we make, there will always be more we can and should do.
Some early progress that we’re proud of includes efforts around hiring and diversifying our workforce. One of the immediate steps we took in 2020 was to examine our hiring practices and piloting changes in specific markets. These changes yielded encouraging results, and we’ve begun to roll out changes to our hiring practices more broadly. And today, our workforce is more diverse than it was when we started this work.
I’m also really proud of the progress we’re making across the industry. I mentioned that a critical part of this journey included taking took a closer look at all parts of our business. When we looked at our supplier base and where we were sourcing products for our stores, we found that only an estimated 1% of founders in the outdoor industry identify as people of color. After months of listening and learning about where we could provide unique value, we created Path Ahead Ventures – an organization and investment fund that partners with founders of color to accelerate their businesses in the outdoor industry. In its first year, Path Ahead Ventures had 27 participants in its Embark program for founders who are just starting their businesses. And our Navigate program—for founders looking to grow their existing businesses—included six companies. Our goal is to ultimately partner with 300 founders.
