This is Ren Navarro. She's our friend, collaborator and a champion of inclusion in the brewing industry. For years, she's been working to create a richer, more welcoming and representative Canadian beer scene. In the face of grave and institutionalized racism and injustice, we are prouder and more determined to support Ren and her mission than ever.
Black lives matter, today and everyday. Words are important, but action must be the order of the moment.
Today, Dominion City is proud to announce we've provided seed funding to establish the Canadian Brewery Inclusion Toolkit. This will be a resource of licensed materials and training, created by Ren and her organization Beer.Diversity., to empower breweries with the tools, tactics and resources to institutionalize and cultivate stronger, more diverse, equitable and inclusive businesses. The toolkit will help breweries put words to action when it comes to creating truly welcoming spaces and hiring the best people, especially those presently underrepresented in the beer industry.
This toolkit builds on the work we started together in 2019 with the establishment of the Dominion City Beer.Diversity. Scholarship. This annual bursary and paid internship provides talented and promising brewing students from the Niagara College Brewmasters Program presently underrepresented in Ontario's craft beer industry with valuable first-hand experience to jump-start a successful career.
Now more than ever, we feel the weight of that most persistent and urgent question, 'What are you doing for others?'. We share Ren's conviction that breweries like ours need to do more to make room at the table for everyone. We may not solve everything with a beer, but from where we sit it's a hell of a good place to start.
