A FEW YEARS before corporate America declared it was serious about racial equity, WeWork quietly made a serious commitment in Boston to what we casually call “diversity and inclusion” and got results that ought to capture the attention of the entire business community.

In 2018, the company’s local leadership asked the two of us to make sure its growing footprint in Boston and Cambridge would be a place where Black and Latinx people felt they belonged. In other words, they posed a question: was it possible to make the flexible office space provider known then for its creative leasing and appealing design not feel like everyone expects Boston to feel?

We were certainly not tasked with, nor did we deliver, anything approaching racial justice or equity. What WeWork achieved in 2018 and 2019 says a great deal about what is possible when you center inclusion and belonging in any venture and when you approach the work with the precision, rigor, and resourcefulness it deserves and requires. WeWork is now known better for its grandiosity and streaming docudramas than for its innovative, popular, and impeccably delivered service. With WeWork back in the news due to a bankruptcy filing, this is a success story worth telling to spark renewed interest in the kind of work where we found meaningful success.

At the heart of our work was a collaboration with the region’s Black and Latinx entrepreneurs and civic organizations that was truly ahead of its time and delivered lasting results far ahead of the change curve. In 2019, Boston was WeWork’s most successful division outside of New York, occupying more square footage than any single landlord or tenant in the city. It was an emerging force in the business community and a highly desirable partner whose brand signaled creativity, edge, and innovation to the region’s business, cultural, and civic institutions. And if it merely went through the motions, the dazzling and inviting spaces would have surely looked and felt the way Boston is described in every feature about its current culture. In a word, white.

The reasons for Boston’s climate around race are well documented, as is the general feeling that the downtown neighborhoods are not hospitable to people of color. A December 2017 Boston Globe story reported survey data indicating 54 percent of poll respondents found Boston “unwelcoming” to people of color while Chicago earned a 34 percent response and New York City scored 28 percent.

WeWork’s Boston’s management team had a moral commitment to inclusion and understood the business case for diversity; but was also deeply anchored in a simple and pragmatic proposition: the business could grow the most if it was able to serve the entire market effectively. They asked us to ensure that in Boston and Cambridge WeWork would have a diverse management staff inclusive of Black and Latinx representation because, simply put, the staff did not reflect the diversity of the labor market at the time. And they challenged us to help foster a distinctive environment in WeWork spaces that modeled inclusion, belonging, and excellence.

We put together an outside advisory board made up of advocates and influencers to help set goals and shape a strategy while also giving candid advice and feedback. That group was made up of straight talkers, and five years later its members have become fixtures in the power structure of a changing city and most of them regularly appear on the most prestigious influencer lists in the region. They gave input and spent time in the WeWork spaces around the city. They made observations that reflected their lived experience and their desire to see Boston’s downtown transformed. When we moved too slowly or without clear enough commitment, the advisory group held us accountable. The blueprint that emerged from our conversation was designed around three key elements:

First, WeWork would commit to building diverse candidate pools for every open position. Management also agreed to track the number of Black and Latinx hires on the management team to see if this method resulted in meaningful change. By the end of 2019, a quarter of regional management roles were held by Black and Latinx employees. This was up nearly 10 percentage points from the previous year and 15 percent over two years.

Second, given the company’s then-proud policy of never charging for use of WeWork’s spaces to host gatherings of the business and civic communities, we proposed to pro-actively reach out to offer organizations that primarily served and supported Black and Latinx entrepreneurs and professionals the opportunity for space to host events and build relationships.

It may be hard to imagine now but Black and Latinx entrepreneurs and the organizations that served these communities were not universally aware then that WeWork even existed; and they were certainly not aware of the free event space policy. In 18-months, 260 events were held in WeWork spaces expressly targeting a Black and/or Latinx audience and hosted by Black and/or Latinx entrepreneurs and organizations. As a result of these efforts, it was not unusual to see a who’s who of Black and Brown Boston at a WeWork location in the city on any given day or night.

Third, we proposed to identify vendor opportunities in categories such as food, supplies, maintenance, and remodeling, so that increased portions of the company’s spending would be with Black and Latinx owned businesses. We reviewed recent spending and found that a negligible amount of dollars was going to vendor companies owned by people of color; and we set an initial and somewhat arbitrary goal to reach $1 million of spending with Black and Latinx owned businesses in the first year. We reached and surpassed this goal without even getting deep into the construction budgets that we knew we would be aiming for in the future.

At the center of our initiative was a cohort of 50 Black and Latinx entrepreneurs and connectors who were given free memberships and encouraged to make use of the WeWork spaces throughout Boston and Cambridge. The individuals in this cohort were not made part of a promotional campaign or asked to pose for corporate photos either; they were welcomed to make the same use of the inviting WeWork spaces that everyone else was already making at the time. For most of our cohort, WeWork became a place to get work done, build their businesses and organizations, meet new people, and engage with both civic and commercial networks of their peers.

The proliferation of events hosted by the myriad diverse organizations we were reaching out to was both incredibly ordinary and at the same time remarkable. Organizations like the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA); The Business Equity Initiative (Now Mill Cities); Smarter in the City (Now Entrepreneurship for All); Amplify Latinx; local chapters of the National Society of Black Engineers; and ALPFA, the Latinx accounting society; all hosted multiple events in WeWork spaces. Many of the organizations even decided to move their offices into WeWork. These and 85 other Black and Latinx organizations across Boston were gathering regularly in the heart of the city for conversation and connecting.

We could not have anticipated how each leg of our strategy advanced the success of the others. Our intention to make local Black and Latinx businesses a significant part of WeWork’s spending is a good example. It started small and lurched forward when we took advantage of emerging opportunities. Instead of ordering the wine for a typical after-work event from the usual vendor through a smart phone app, we encouraged management to consider a more deliberate plan, one that included a local minority-owned business. Within minutes, a large purchase had been placed with Dorchester’s Fernandez Brothers Liquors, which had not previously delivered large orders to downtown corporate customers. Shortly afterward, Urban Grape, a Black-owned South End wine shop, became a regular part of the rotation. Catering for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and special events started every day and night from places such as ZaZ, Fresh Food Generation, Sweet Teez Bakery, Corny Bread Company, Las Palmas, Darryl’s, Slade’s, Vejigantes, and Savvor.

Before long, Latino-owned remodeling firm One Way Development landed a six-figure contract to renovate the WeWork space that occupied an entire floor of a Back Bay office building. And Black-owned architecture firm Dream Collaborative won a $600,000-plus contract, becoming the first Black architects in the country to design a new WeWork location.

Local WeWork leadership never wavered in its commitment to success, without any desire to brag or boast, or even to blog about it. This was ultimately the vision and the victory of General Manager Dave McLaughlin, his chief deputy, Alexis Miller, and a transformed management team across 11 WeWork locations that represented the kind of diversity and excellence you might have associated with Austin or Atlanta, but never with Boston.

Still, the primary factor in the energy and engagement we saw was the extraordinary level of talent, ingenuity, generosity, and resilience in the Black and Latinx business community of Greater Boston. The program was ripe for investment and expansion. Its success was in the combination of these strategies, a team that embraced the concept, and the authenticity, resilience, intensity, and trust that this approach generated. Things were not always smooth and it was never easy; but it was never just a technical exercise either. This project required deep cultural commitment from everyone involved. From the beginning it was about relationships and results and not reputation.

Late in 2019, a long-whispered story started to circulate more widely about the weakness of this highly leveraged company’s business plan. The shadow of a scandal ensured that nobody wanted to hear a good news story about WeWork. As things got complicated for the company, there were emergent priorities and personnel changes. Our project stalled, but not before the new CEO Sandeep Mathrani declared the initiative a success in a June 2020 presentation to the members of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable in Boston. He endorsed our approach to the leaders of some of our city’s most successful companies and promoted it as a best practice to WeWork teams around the country.

When Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd and activists captured the country’s attention about the urgency of racial justice, the climate around diversity and inclusion initiatives in corporate America changed dramatically. In the business community, there were  pledges to remove barriers to inclusion and belonging; and promises to place greater emphasis on engagement of Black and Latinx employees and the diverse communities around them.

In the rush to discover Black- and Latinx-owned companies that could serve as vendors and suppliers, the Boston business community found many willing and capable options, many of whom by that time had been doing business with WeWork regularly over the previous 18 months. Some of the ideas discussed around the tables of our Back Bay and downtown spaces began to get increased traction and some of the fledgling companies and projects attracted capital, found the right partnerships, and matured into growing businesses.

From the cohort assembled at WeWork in 2018 and 2019, some of the most influential businesses, organizations, and leaders in the city have emerged. All credit for these stories goes to the visionary individual entrepreneurs behind them. Still, some of the best evidence of the value of proximity, serendipity, purpose, and hospitality on which WeWork built its name can be found in these stories of Black and Latinx success. What we added was deliberate, intentional, and relational inclusion.

There are many things we did not achieve and many more we did not even attempt. The commercial real estate industry itself and commercial office culture in Boston’s downtown remains startlingly homogenous and White. Initiatives to boost purchasing from Black- and Latinx-owned businesses are generally underperforming and have less impact without the culture of action around them that we saw developing organically at Boston and Cambridge WeWork locations. And quite a few of the entrepreneurs of color we saw soaring with new connections and increased confidence have moved away. It’s easy to blame the pandemic but there are things about this region that still drive some people to leave when there is no calculated effort to mitigate the sting of the way things tend to be.

The status quo in Boston and Cambridge is not dramatically different than it was before the pandemic, and some of the bold statements about investing in racial equity that big players made in 2020 have been slow to materialize. But there are huge pockets of progress and a whole new cast of leaders and achievers pushing for change in Boston today. Lots of those leaders we know because they were regulars at WeWork.

Three truths we learned are still true five years after we started this project are important to highlight:

First, most companies still won’t make intentional, creative use of diverse vendors, won’t do the work to build diverse candidate pools and won’t seek out ways to include and engage communities of color within their business or in their stakeholder communities unless they are prompted or engaged by advocates or guided by policy, training, systems, and the expectations of stakeholders and champions.

Second, without creative public policy around topics as diverse as affordable housing, public transportation, the cost of higher education, and immigration, the future of Boston as a hub for diverse people pursuing entrepreneurship and building business communities is tenuous no matter what efforts we make in the business community. We learned this and more at the hundreds of gatherings our partners hosted in those years. There simply has to be a public-private partnership for sustainable inclusive community to work.

And third, whatever hard thing we are trying to achieve in this region, there is no substitute for the combination of clear-eyed leadership and meaningful stakeholder engagement. Indeed, this combination is the reason for whatever success we had in the WeWork project.

WeWork made headlines for many things during our time working to center inclusion and belonging in its Boston and Cambridge spaces. We wish that just one of the stories you heard was about the remarkable change that was made possible by effective leaders working in powerful partnerships to open our city and connect people in our still very robust innovation economy.

The combined forces of a willing company and a whole community of Black and Latinx entrepreneurs and professionals showed that a path toward success opens when we see the value in trying new things and we make the effort. Boston’s future undoubtedly depends on fostering more of that spirit even if our story was only getting started. Our questions now are which business and leaders are writing a new chapter and what might they learn from things we know really worked well?

Izzy Jacques was a community lead and then the diversity, equity, and inclusion manager for WeWork in Boston and Cambridge from 2018 to 2020. Andy Tarsy was the team’s consultant for public affairs and community engagement during the same period. Together with two other partners, they went on to found Conscious Customers, a consultancy focused on supplier and vendor diversity solutions for companies and organizations. Tarsy is now a managing director with Koya Partners/Diversified Search Group.