In collaboration with We Need Diverse Books, Penguin Random House presented our Creative Writing Award winners with a week of professional development programming, offering practical knowledge and insight into the book world. Our six $10,000 scholarship recipients gained direct access to publishing professionals through a series of virtual events designed and hosted by the Penguin Random House Corporate Communications Team.
Since 1993, this program has awarded more than $2.9 million to public high school students for original poetry, memoir/personal essay, fiction/drama, and spoken word compositions. To learn more about the Creative Writing Awards, click here.
Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe was the main sponsor of the first reception of the Queer Media Society at the 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair.
Rebecca Prager, Head of Corporate Communications at Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, spoke at the reception on behalf of Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe and be.queer, the network for LGBTIQ employees and allies at Bertelsmann, emphasizing the importance of the network for togetherness and mutual support as well as for visibility and awareness in the workplace.
Surpassing our 2023 total, Penguin Random House raised $2,777 for Share Lunch Fight Hunger in 2024, enough to help feed over 6,450 kids in NYC for one day. In a time of great need, with 1 in 4 children facing food insecurity, City Harvest raised enough through this year’s campaign to feed more than 11,000 NYC kids and their families for the entire summer. Learn more about Share Lunch Fight Hunger here.
In May, Penguin Random House donated over 150 LGBTQ+ books across eleven divisions for a student-led Pride event at the New College of Florida. The school has been in the news recently as a site where partisan politics and educational freedom are clashing in a way that’s not unrelated to the wave of book banning we’ve been seeing throughout the nation. As a result of the recent appointments by Gov. DeSantis to the New College Board of Trustees in support of his views, students have been restricted in the kinds of activities they can do with school funds—including DEI and LGBTQ events like Pride.
At Penguin Random House, we work to incorporate DEI into the DNA of every aspect of our company culture. Our DEI Values guide us as we continue our efforts to build a more inclusive and equitable culture for our employees, creators and partners. In this report, we reflect on our work throughout the past two years, while also looking ahead to all that’s yet to come.
In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May 2021, we announced the launch of Uplift AAPI Stories. Expanding on last year’s #ReadAsianAuthors initiative, we’re inviting readers to uplift AAPI stories and #ReadAsianAuthors. This initiative aims to celebrate and uplift the stories of our AAPI authors, and we partnered with AAPI influencers across social media platforms to reach as many diverse readers as possible.
To continue our support of the AAPI community, we donated 15% of net proceeds from PRH.com sales in the month of May to Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, an organization “fighting for civil rights and empowering Asian Americans to create a more just America for all.” We have previously worked with AAJC, as well as Stop AAPI Hate, with donations made to both organizations earlier this year. We also partnered with non-profit writing organization Kundiman by sponsoring an eight-week creative writing workshop, giving twelve AAPI writers the opportunity to attend free of charge. Internally, we hosted a bystander intervention training with Hollaback! for employees, in addition to a Q&A featuring the President & Executive Director of AAJC, John Yang.
In Canada, we committed to a multi-year sponsorship of Simon Fraser University’s Greg Younging Scholarship for an Indigenous student in the Masters of Publishing program at SFU. The scholarship aims to help eliminate the barriers Indigenous people face to entering and flourishing in the Canadian publishing industry, work that is fundamental to our commitment to building racial equity.
Penguin Random House Audio spearheaded the new bi-annual Audio Narrator Mentorship program to discover a diverse range of new talent and help actors new to audiobook narration polish their craft and learn about the industry. The inclusive program was designed to reflect the diversity we see in the world daily in the audio space by giving actors in underrepresented communities an opportunity to break into the audiobook world.
From the 1,680 applications, the six month program welcomed its 15 mentees. The cohort actors from around the world, including the U.S. and U.K., Canada and Singapore, nine of whom have already been hired to narrate audiobooks for Penguin Random House Audio before the program has concluded.
In the U.S., we launched our first ever companywide DE&I training effort, Moving Toward Equity, in June 2022 in partnership with consulting and professional development firm True North EDI. The training is focused on incorporating equity, or the promotion of impartiality and fairness within PRH’s policies and procedures. Through the program, we aim to tackle inequity of all kinds through a structural lens as we continue our work to create a truly equitable workplace.
In December 2021 we launched the Next Editors Programme in the U.K., a new 18 month-long positive action traineeship that offers talent from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds the opportunity to develop key skills and expertise required for a role as a Commissioning Editor at a book publisher. We offered four traineeships, each of which takes place in one of four editorial teams within our publishing houses. Applicants needed three years’ work experience from any industry or role to apply. Our trainees are now in place and are following a bespoke training and development plan that includes workshops, mentoring, and on-the-job learning.
