CHLA January February 2021

4 CALIFORNIA LODGING NEWS www.calodging.com Hospitality Financial Leadership Diversity in Hospitality By David Lund, Hotel Financial Coach I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT this topic for some time. Especially after 2020 with the social unrest in this country and elsewhere in our world I think it’s time to speak up. For me, that means offering what I think is a path to an improvement in the way we look at and see each other. It comes from my experience in hotels, from the culture I grew up in, inside the hotel world, and at home. I consider myself to be extremely fortunate for many things, but the number one thing is my parents. We were decidedly middle class. My father was an automobile mechanic turned community college instructor and my mom was a homemaker to me, my two brothers, and sister. We were not well off, but we had a home and everything we needed, especially two loving and level-headed parents. We grew up in a small coastal town in Atlantic Canada. Diversity did not exist. Everyone was Caucasian. I mean everyone. There were no black, brown, or even yellow people. The closest thing to diversity of race was a family