LGBTQIA+ Inclusion at Caribou 

Caribou is continuing our journey toward a more inclusive, equitable, and diverse workplace. We are Caribou team members who are also part of the LGBTQIA+ community: Carlotta Maucher (she/her), a cisgender lesbian woman, and Jesús Tabares (he/him), a cisgender gay man. This Pride Month, we’ve launched a discussion around LGBTQIA+ issues and inclusion, which we explore in this blog post. 

At Caribou, we believe that meaningful impact starts with listening, both to each other and to the communities we work with. This Pride Month, we’re taking a more intentional step in our journey to understanding how LGBTQIA+ issues intersect with our work and values. We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re committed to listening, learning, and taking meaningful action. 

While some of these conversations are new for us as individuals and a team, many of the values they reflect—equity, respect, openness—have long shaped our culture at Caribou. This month is an opportunity to articulate those values more clearly and to act on them more deliberately.

This year, Caribou launched a refreshed brand and visual identity, including a new logo. As part of that relaunch, and as a visual expression of our commitment to inclusion, we reimagined our logo in Pride colors. This is not merely a branding exercise. It’s a visual expression of our commitment to inclusion. We adapted the Progress Pride Flag’s 11-stripe spectrum, prioritizing the elements representing communities of color (black and brown) and the trans community (white, pink, and light blue), as a deliberate commitment to intersectionality and visibility. 

This design came from a longer internal exploration about how to represent Pride in a way that felt meaningful to us: balancing visibility, intentionality, and coherence with our new brand identity. It places visibility and inclusion at the heart of our design.

We know this is a small gesture. But it’s an intentional one and part of a broader process of embedding equity and authenticity into how we show up. We’ve chosen to display the Pride version of our logo from June 25 to June 30, aligning with the anniversary of the Stonewall riots on June 28. This moment of visibility honors Pride while anchoring it in historical significance.

This June, we hosted a company-wide internal session on LGBTQIA+ inclusion within Caribou and across the development and digital sectors in which we work. The session centered on a discussion with two brilliant external speakers: Bryn Gregg (she/her), an LGBTQIA+ advocate and queer and trans GIS technician at Louisville Water, and Olly Parsons (he/him), a cis gay man and independent consultant, with experience at UNHCR and GSMA, working across global development, humanitarian tech, and innovation funding.

In the session, we spoke about privilege, power, parenting, and the politics of visibility. We explored how queer identities intersect with other forms of marginalization and what inclusive design might look like—not just in theory, but in hiring practices, funding flows, tech safeguards, and everyday language.

The session went beyond raising awareness for awareness’s sake; it was about listening, learning, and laying foundations for more intentional action at Caribou. From inclusive research design to organizational culture, from allyship in remote settings to engaging with LGBTQIA+ funding ecosystems, this conversation helped shape where we go next.

Here are just a few things we heard that stayed with us:

Growing companies like ours thrive when they engage intentionally to support LGBTQIA+ people and their allies. This engagement and support is fundamental, across employees, consultants, partners, and clients.

We’re committed to building momentum around our LGBTQIA+ efforts. Some of our next steps include:

We intend to approach this with care, creativity, and openness.

This blog is an open invitation. If you’ve navigated similar questions at your organization, or you’re part of LGBTQIA+ communities working at the intersection of digital, data, and development, we’d love to hear from you.

While we’ve always cared about equity in our work, this Pride Month marks a deliberate effort to more deeply reflect on LGBTQIA+ inclusion, both in how we work internally and how we engage externally. We’re committing to going further, with more intention, visibility, and care.

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