In celebration of Pride Month, we with skincare brand Aesop to transform four of their retail locations in the United States and Canada into Queer Libraries. For a week in June, Aesop stores in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto cleared the products from their shelves and replaced them with books that uplift the underrepresented voices and experiences of queer communities around the world, with a particular emphasis on BIPOC and trans authors.

Designed to spotlight LGBTQIA+ authors and to promote access to their works, the campaign invited all guests to take home a complimentary book of their choice, with no purchase required. As part of the initiative, Penguin Random House donated 2,350 titles to the collection. In solidarity with independent queer bookstores, Aesop also purchased more than 3,000 volumes from Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto and Women & Children First in Chicago.

As Penguin Random House, we hold a collective belief that a diverse range of voices need to be elevated and heard. Externally, we are committed to using our platform to amplify an even broader range of voices aligning even further with our mission to “create books for everyone.” Internally, we are working to build an inclusive and psychologically safe work environment for all employees.

We are guided by five core pillars that shape our DEI efforts across the business.

Leadership Investment: Effective leadership is at the core of systemic change. We hold leaders accountable for implementing PRH’s DEI vision, setting goals, achieving results, and being role models.

Diversity & Representation: We aim to ensure that PRH attracts, sources, and recruits candidates who will help achieve our mission to “create books for everyone” responsibly and with authenticity.

Professional Development: We are committed to supporting the development of all employees to ensure they are well prepared to advocate for themselves as they progress on their career paths. We aim to integrate DEI principles into talent development and retention efforts.

Psychological Safety & Belonging: We seek to create a more psychologically safe, inclusive environment that allows employees to bring their full selves to work and voice their ideas and opinions openly.

Content & Marketplace: We strive to demonstrate a measurable companywide increase in content we’re acquiring, publishing, and promoting from the widest range of contributors with the ultimate goal of publishing books that reflect the world we live in.

While these pillars have advanced our progress in establishing more inclusive business practices, there is still much more important work to do. Together with our Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Councils, Employee Resource Groups, and leadership teams, we will continue our ongoing and evolving plan for action to achieve our aspiration of creating an inclusive corporate environment and publishing community.

U.S. (2024)

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.

FRANKFURT (2024)

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.

NEW YORK, NY (2024)

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. 

Dinner on the House is an annual employee volunteer experience designed to serve those who may need a helping hand during the holiday season. For the past twelve years, Penguin Random House volunteers have joined City Harvest at their Food Rescue Center to help repack food items into family-sized portions for distribution to New Yorkers in need. 

SARASOTA, FL (2023)

In 2023, 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.

CANADA (2022)

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. 

In the U.K., we founded Lit in Colour, a program created in partnership with think tank The Runnymede Trust, that supports schools in diversifying their English literature curriculum. In June 2021, the campaign released ground-breaking research showing that less than 1% of young people in England study a book by a writer of color, and just 7% study a book by a woman. Through the program pilot, nearly 12,000 students at 90 different schools started studying a book by a writer of color at either GCSE or A Level for the first time. We will be running a second year of the program in September 2022. 

U.S. (2021)

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.