Out & Equal

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Out & Equal Workplace Advocates (commonly known as "Out & Equal") is a United States non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Out & Equal educates and empowers organizations, human resources professionals, employee resource groups, and individual employees through programs and services that result in equal policies, opportunities, practices, and benefits in the workplace regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, expression or characteristics.

Out & Equal achieved 501(c)(3) status in 2004, after years as a program of the United Way of the Bay Area. UWBA hired Selisse Berry (Out & Equal’s founding executive director) in December 1996 as director of the Building Bridges training program.

In 1998, three LGBT workplace organizations merged in an effort to effectively collaborate on their common mission of creating safe and affirming workplaces for LGBT individuals. The alliance was named The Pride Collaborative and it included: Building Bridges, formed in 1990 to offer lesbian and gay sensitivity training to United Way-funded agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area; AGOG (A Group of Groups), formed in 1994 by employees from a dozen San Francisco Bay Area companies to provide joint networking opportunities for members of their respective LGBT employee associations, also known as Employee Resource Groups (ERGs); and Progress, formed in 1995 to provide leadership development resources including national leadership summits for ERG leaders.

In 1999 The Pride Collaborative merged with COLLEAGUES, a national organization that sponsored the annual Out & Equal Summit aimed at human resource professionals and LGBT employees, to form Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, and the current organizational structure was born. That same year, Progress’s Leadership Summit and COLLEAGUES’ Out & Equal Conference combined resources to produce the annual Out & Equal Workplace Summit, one of the keystone programs of the organization.