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MELANIN MOMENTS

MELANIN MOMENTS

planning, marketing and mentorship as well as board positions including secretary, assistant secretary and treasurer.

The group meets on IGS Energy’s virtual work platforms for formal meetings and informal chats. They share information about job opportunities and plan lunchand-learns about topics from financial planning to mental and physical health. They plan to get together in person at a companywide gathering in July.

Melanin Moments gives team members visibility they might not otherwise feel they have, Abbott says.

“Yes, you are a part of a great company, but sometimes you may not have felt seen,” she says. “(The group) also gives you the opportunity to share, because being a person of color, just the journey from home to the office when you’re driving, or going to the grocery store, you have experiences that others don’t have. (The group is) a safe space where other people know what I’m going through. It’s a connectedness.”

She commends IGS leadership and especially CEO Scott White for championing the DEBI initiative for employees.

“It gives those of us in Melanin Moments the chance to facilitate and encourage those hard conversations,” she says. “It takes a lot of courage for you to walk into those conversations and to engage in them.”

Chef Educates and Inspires for Juneteenth

For Juneteenth 2022, Melanin Moments wanted to bring attention to the importance of the historic day through a lunchand-learn for all IGS Energy employees. Carol King, a member of the IGS Juneteenth Planning Committee, recruited nationally known chef Michael W. Twitty to deliver a talk on the impact of Juneteenth on the lives of African Americans.

It was a resounding success: The event drew 116 employees who shared overwhelmingly positive feedback about the experience.

Michael W. Twitty is an African American and Jewish chef, a noteworthy author and the winner of the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award for The Cooking Gene. His blog, Afroculinaria, explores the history of African American food culture. Twitty also founded the Southern Discomfort Tour, which raises awareness about the impact of racism on Southern cuisine by taking participants through the experiences of enslaved people picking cotton, chopping wood, working in fields and cooking in plantation kitchens. Twitty also gave a TED talk called “Gastronomy and the social justice reality of food.” His second book, Kosher Soul, published in 2022.

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