How This Queer Executive Is Ensuring LGBTQIA+ Employees Feel Supported and Empowered

For Lorraine Vargas Townsend, a queer mom and executive leader, moving back to her home state of Texas for a job wasn’t the easiest decision to make. 

“Right after I was offered the chief people officer position at A Cloud Guru, Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away,” Vargas Townsend said. “I woke up in the middle of the night and called ACG’s CEO to tell him, as a queer mom, I just didn’t know if I could make the commitment to moving back to Texas until I knew what was going to happen politically.” 

How CEO Sam Kroonenburg responded is what sealed her fate.

“He said, ‘Lorraine, your psychological and physical safety are more important to me than where you sit. You take care of your family and we will work it out when the time is right,’” she explained. 

Vargas Townsend officially joined the company in October 2020 and hasn’t looked back since. Read on to learn more about how ACG and Vargas Townsend support and empower their LGBTQIA+ employees.

Lorraine Vargas Townsend

Chief People Officer • Pluralsight

With a mission to “teach the world to cloud,” A Cloud Guru offers hands-on courses for consumers and companies to teach people the skills they need to work with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and more.

Internally, what does A Cloud Guru do to support LGBTQIA+ employees? 

The main thing we offer is an environment that focuses on inclusion and belonging from the executive level all the way down to the associate level. As a queer executive and ACG’s chief people officer, I’m committed to working tirelessly until just practices are widespread. My team is set up to review all of our internal practices for equality and inclusion and rally on areas where we can do better. We’re focusing on diversity but also focusing on what happens after you work here: Do you feel invited? Do you have fair pay? And do all people get promoted without bias? 

Additionally, we offer benefits like $10,000 for eligible adoption expenses and similar to our gender-neutral parental leave policy, adopters can take 12 weeks off to spend time with their new family.

How do you work with LGBTQIA+ employees to ensure they feel supported in the workplace?

Representation matters. I hope that our employees see me out and proud as an advocate for them. I know that I would have loved to see that in my career.  

Our employees self-organized to create an amazing resource group called A Proud Guru. LGBTQIA+ employees and allies joined forces to raise money, educate each other on wins in their community and genuinely celebrate each other. It’s interesting being a part of a global community, because each country is facing its own unique challenges.

Representation matters. I hope that our employees see me out and proud, and as an advocate for them.”

In June, we celebrated World Pride Month by throwing our own virtual Pride week. We had a Pride virtual overhaul by adding our pronouns to Slack, launching awesome Zoom backgrounds, and even asked the families to join in by coloring pieces of art to share their love and show support. Later on in the year, to celebrate our value “keep it fun,” we hosted Sangria-making with drag queens in Portugal. We danced, cheered, made delicious drinks and had a genuinely fun time.

I truly believe A Cloud Guru can be the most diverse and inclusive tech company on the planet. I’m proud to have a part in writing that story.