Out for Undergraduate Business Conference Inc

Identify high achieving LGBTQ+ and otherwise undergraduates in four major industry sectors and directly recommend them to 172 of the world’s leading corporations for internship and job opportunities. O4U’s rigorously curated resume book is considered a source of the best LGBTQ+ talent.

Model the highest levels of inclusive policy and practice for major employers including asking them to participate in critical inquiry into their own unconscious bias or systemic racism that may contribute to their inability to recruit and retain our students.

Train corporate mentors in inclusive practices. Introduce them to benchmarks like the GDEIB and ask them to begin and sustain self-evaluation.

Encourage all of our students and volunteers to live their lives authentically and with integration of what matters most to them in life and work.

Extend our current model of conferences to year-round engagement with students, mentors and recruiters. In 2920 we launched early networking, extended mentoring, a job board and virtual career fairs. We hosted our conferences virtually. We had the largest and most diverse student cohort in our history and broke all historical records for sponsorship. We want to persist in the hybridization of our conferences so we can serve more students.

Outreach

We have increased our outreach to students via our virtual Ambassador program on 262 campuses, signed a partnership agreement with HIVE Diversity and WayUp to publish our opportunity through all of the campus recruiting centers. We have partnered with campus based diversity centers and reached out to Higher Ed associations for HBCUs, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Tribal and Women’s colleges. Our social strategy has been moved almost exclusively to Instagram and Linked In since these are the places our students and sponsors engage. A major social influencer in the LGBTQ+ community has joined our PR/Comm team to help establish thought leadership for O4U amongst Millennials and GenZ who do not want to work where there are artificially constructed barriers to their success. We are working on an early identification program to expand the talent pipeline.

Content
We are rapidly adapting all of our curriculum for digital delivery. The biggest barrier is the internal approval process at our sponsors. They are helping us because they don’t want to lose the benefit of being in front of students and delivering their message. We are adding content to support mental health, resiliency and flexibility.

We have very gifted and diverse volunteers who are employees at many of our sponsoring firms. They devote significant time to our work and encourage their firms to expand their support. Our diverse board includes leaders from Facebook, Google and leading finance and consulting firms. We have a good financial reserve, low operating costs and excellent tech partners. Our Executive Director is a long tenured senior executive from both public and private sector corporations including The Toro Company (NYSE:TTC). Our Chief of Staff is a tenured senior executive from higher education. Together they bring the best practices required to interface the corporate sector with our students.

Since 2004, we have identified 10,000+ high achieving LGBTQ+ and otherwise diverse undergraduates, introduced 5,033 of them to the world’s leading corporations and 70% of them received a first offer.

We have immersed all of them in our curriculum—living with authenticity, integrity in leadership, achieving voice and agency, self-advocacy, advocating for others and discerning what matters most in life and work. The most frequent assessment of students is that O4U changed their lives—for the better.