For the past year, Target’s work to advance racial equity has been guided by a clear mission: to create lasting, systemic change for our Black guests, team members and communities. With the support of CEO Brian Cornell, the leadership of our Racial Equity Action and Change (REACH) committee and the work of the entire Target team, we’re proud to share our significant progress.
We’ve focused on four key areas: how we can help our Black team members build meaningful careers and experience success at every level, what we can do to help Black guests feel more welcome and overtly represented at Target, the role we can play to support Black communities across the country and how we can use our voice to work with policymakers on key issues that impact Black Americans.
Take a look at our milestones so far:
- Last fall, we released our annual Workforce Diversity Report and pledged to increase representation of Black team members by 20% over the next three years. We also joined the OneTen coalition to continue to hire and nurture Black talent in the Twin Cities. Since then, we’ve continued to make progress, most notably by growing our number of Black senior leaders by nearly 40%.
- We committed to spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses, from vendors and construction companies to advertising agencies, by the end of 2025. We established Forward Founders to help Black entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses in mass retail. The Target team also logged nearly 8,000 pro bono hours to support Black businesses in the local community.
- We proudly launched the Target Scholars program, in partnership with the UNCF (United Negro College Fund), and will support students at more than a dozen Historically Black Colleges and Universities with scholarships.
- We’ve joined nonpartisan coalitions and conveyed our belief in the importance of equal access to voting to ensure everyone has a voice in our democracy.
- We are working to be a catalyst for action in civic engagement, focused on building greater trust, transparency and accountability and acting as a convener of partners to create change, including our voting rights principles to ensure everyone’s voice is heard. We’ve also joined organizations encouraging law enforcement reform, including the Business Roundtable, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and U.S. Conference of Mayors grant program.
While there is more work ahead, we remain steadfast in our commitment to driving this work and will continue to listen, learn and hold ourselves accountable to the goals we set.
