When Kimberly Brown moved to Kansas City from Saint Louis 10 years ago to start work at Hallmark, she felt lost, ungrounded and homesick in her new surroundings. So when, as vice chair of the Hallmark African American Leadership Council for 2010, she listened as six young African-American interns echoed those same feelings from her early Hallmark years, she knew something should be done to help new employees fit in.

Hallmark African American Leadership (HAAL) is a Hallmark employee resource group whose stated goal is “adding significant value to Hallmark’s culture and business health” by creating “an environment that recognizes, embraces and learns from our cultural differences.” Besides influencing product development, HAAL members actively support the commitment to diversity Hallmark has made. A guiding objective for HAAL in 2010 was making sure all groups of people are included in HAAL’s events and activities, Brown says.

As a member of the council that oversees the employee resource group, Brown says one of her goals is to help create a workplace where talented African-American employees want to work.

“We help create internal programs and training that recruit, develop, promote and retain talented African-American employees,” she explains. One of her interests in the coming year is helping create a brochure that introduces new employees to their new home—something she wishes she had when she first started at Hallmark.

“For people not from this area, it’s important to help show them what they can expect from this new city,” she says. “The interns we talked to said they’d have liked to know about the Jazz District, the soul food restaurants, the churches and what the different parts of town are like—just everyday things that makes a place feel more like home.”

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