Photo courtesy of Foot Locker.
Patrick Walsh is the Vice President of Commercial Growth and Transformation at Foot Locker and has pledged $200 million to the Black community in the company’s name.
Walsh is managing the company’s LEED initiative (Leading Education & Economic Development). The LEED initiative pledges to give back to the Black community over the next five years.
Black buying power helped the sneaker business turn into a $70 billion industry, and now Walsh wants Foot Locker to give back to the community by empowering Black entrepreneurs.
“A little more than a year and a half ago, back in June of last year, we made the announcement that we were going to commit $200 million over a five-year period, to the Black community,” Walsh said. “It is a focus on education and economic empowerment. Now, it’s gonna be both internally within our company and our employees to support them, but also externally globally, in the communities that we serve.”
Walsh said that Foot Locker collaborates with shoe designers in local communities, which features the designers’ products in retail stores and online. The program is called “Homegrown” and is part of Foot Locker’s LEED initiative.
The VP noted that Foot Locker already gave scholarships to students and had a long-standing relationship with the United Negro College Fund. However, Walsh said that the company could help the Black community with more intention.
“We were already involved in scholarships, but now we can be even more intentional,” he said. “We already had a deep relationship with the United Negro College Fund. Now we could add more into that and think about how we can make it bigger. We can be a lot more intentional around making sure that we have even more inclusion in our overall scholarship program with the African American community.”
Walsh said that he chose education and economics to invest in the community because he thought the company could make the most impact in those areas of inequity.