A Diversity Frontier in Staffing Procurement

All of these companies are corporate supporting members of the NGLCC (National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce), an entity to support and advocate for diversity and inclusion for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) owned businesses. Just as women and minority owned, or disabled-veteran owned businesses get a percentage of the total procurement volume of the above companies, LGBT businesses will also be getting a fixed or minimum percentage volume of their procurement dollars. In the beginning, commitments to work with LGBT owned businesses were totally voluntary, but now states are passing legislation requiring it for certain business entities such as utility companies. See bill AB1678 in the CA legislature as one example.

A woman called up Flexible Funding looking for payroll funding for her temporary staffing company driven by new contracts provided by her Certified LGBT status. She says, “I am the only owner of a woman-owned company, which is a minority-owned company and is additionally an LGBT-owned company. But I don’t want to compete with the advantage of being designated a woman-owned company because there are something like 50,000 woman-owned companies on the woman-owned list that companies use for procurement. I would prefer to only have the LGBT designation because as a Certified LGBT company I am on a procurement list that has only 500 LGBT companies–so my chances are much better for getting contracts. LGBT is a valuable point of differentiation between my business and my competitors.”

The NGLCC provides opportunities to it’s members by all of the following:

• An LGBT owned business can get Certified and maintain their status.
• Corporations seeking to do business with LGBT owned companies can search for such companies through the supplier database.
• Corporations seeking to do business with LGBT owned companies can meet face to face with suppliers at networking events.
• NGLCC takes an active part of discussions with legislators and agencies at federal and state levels to ensure the implementation of pro-business LGBT inclusive policies.
• Educational offerings, trainings, webinars, video conferencing, and shared workspace for growing companies.

The bottom line is that the NGLCC National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce enhances the visibility of LGBT businesses to corporate America and opens doors. NGLCC showcases that LGBT people are business owners, employers, taxpayers, providers of healthcare–and are a vibrant, essential part of the business engine that makes the U.S. economy run and therefore deserve a place at the equality table.