There is a general acknowledgment that systemic racism has yet to be properly addressed. A cultural shift in how we address race is overdue.

Institutions across the country are making public statements to do better, but we need to move the conversation Beyond Words.

Join us on Friday, July 31st at 11:30am, for a “town hall” style discussion with Jeff Sandquist, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft to engage and contribute to actionable change.

The Guest Speaker:

The July 31st event is Jeff Sandquist, Corporate Vice President of Developer Relations at Microsoft. Jeff’s team includes people from Microsoft’s full corpus of technical online content (Azure.com, docs.microsoft.com, and Microsoft.com/Learn), a full-stack engineering team that builds and operates the infrastructure Microsoft’s online content, an international team that localizes Microsoft’s products and content in 64 languages, and a developer advocacy team.

Jeff will answer questions from the community as well as discuss steps Microsoft is taking or planning to take to address racial injustice and inequity of Blacks and African Americans.

We're leveraging public statements made by each for our discussion questions: Check out the of Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella’s email to Microsoft for your reference. 

Upon registering for the event, you will be given the opportunity to submit your own question and indicate whether you would like to ask your question yourself or remain anonymous and have the moderator to ask your question for you.

How the town hall works:

• Event attendees will be able to submit questions for the speaker at registration.
• 30 minutes before the event starts (11:30am), event attendees can join for music or poetry, socializing and to vote on the first 10 unique questions submitted at registration by attendees.
• During the event, speaker will be asked 5 questions - 2 from the YP Media events team and 3 from the questions voted on by participants - by either the moderator or the attendee who submitted the question.
• We encourage any additional comments or questions during the event. But please do so in the chat, as we will deliver them to the speaker after the event.
• Speaker is committing to a follow up response to the chat commentary (within a week) to ensure the voice of the community is heard.