you what was happening at that time we had already started to advocate for lgbtq rights we had already done equal pay as well as high potential development programs for women and really we saw in the summer that year of a lot of officer involved shootings of unarmed black people in the united states and we started to hear that people of color were coming to the workplace hurt and not knowing how to deal with that and how to talk about that and i talk about my own personal journey when there was a police night club shooting and you saw lgbtq folks being killed for no reason then we come to work and i would say to my lgbtq employee how are you your community is impacted your community might be impacted how do you feel about that so marc started going on this listening tour with his employees and he literally called me up on a sunday and we had at the time of about 30000 employees i dont know marc personally and he said what your experience working is as salesforces women of power tell me about your challenges tell me about your journey and with that we started this conversation and of that the office of equality was born and that was june 2016 and i was supposed to take this as a 6 months project let us just see what we find let us do an audit let us come up with a couple of recommendations and one of the first things that we did was set out to do an executive search meaning how do we have someone at the helm who owns it who is responsible for it we started this search for our chief equality officer tony prophet and really we said again we had already done lgbtq rights womens advocacy but what was most important who owns it and how do we make it proactive that is what was missing we were reacting to issues and marc was saying i dont know the issues that are going to impact every community but i want you the employees to be the voice of that so we hired tony in 2016 around septemberoctober and we started to form the office of equality and we said okay how do we financially empower our employee resource groups most big companies have employee resource groups but we believe at salesforce we have something special they are financially empowered to be on the frontlines of their community we have salesforce womens network and then we have a gent force 5 generations in the workforce and in the us we have south asia force we have asia pac force we have boldforce and boldforce is an acronym for black employees and we have windforce and really the function of an employee resource group for us is these 3 things inclusion our employees get 56 hours a year to be out volunteering we call it vto volunteer