Goose Island Brewery

How Women Unite! Got Connected

A long-time supporter and avid partner of Women Unite!, Goose Island Brewery made an additional commitment to the organization’s mission by hiring WU! to develop a tailored training on implicit bias for the company’s Chicago-based and regional staff.

About Goose Island

Goose Island Brewery is an industry-leading craft brewery headquartered in Chicago. Now part of the Anheuser-Busch company, it also has the Virtue Cider location in Michigan. Goose Island is committed to “enriching the cultural landscape of Chicago and supporting the inspirational organizations within [their] communities.” They’re also committed to increasing the number of women in beer brewing. For this year’s International Women’s Day, the women brewers of Goose Island created Women of the House, a guava wheat pale ale. Proceeds from sales of the beer were donated directly to Women Unite!

Goose Island’s Need

Goose Island aims to provide excellent service along with its craft beer and takes its position as a community member of Chicago seriously. As the negative impact of implicit bias became more apparent within the brewing industry, Goose Island wanted to address the issue proactively. The company understood that implicit bias can impact all aspects of the work--from interactions with co-workers and vendors to engaging with customers. To ensure a positive experience for everyone interacting with Goose Island, the company sought to provide staff with training on how to manage and counteract implicit bias.

Women Unite!’s Impact

To do this they turned to WU! to design training for front-of-house and sales staff in Chicago as well as staff at their Virtue Cider location. In total, WU! provided six, half-day trainings to approximately 145 staff, representing bartenders, servers, managers, and sales reps. WU! designed the training curriculum around interactive components, including exercises and facilitated conversations.

Feedback from the training was positive—participants felt that the WU! “helped make the topic more conversational and approachable.” In particular, the exercises and conversations about privilege helped them “to better understand what privilege is and how it affects their standing in the world.”

Key to the success of WU!’s implicit bias training is the practical framework that helps individuals address and reflect on their own bias. This approach helps ensure the impact of the training continues over time. With the framework WU! Trainers provided, participants learned what privilege is, who possesses it, and how to “check” privilege, but most importantly, how to approach conversations about bias from a place of listening and learning.

Mission Alignment

Working with Goose Island represented an opportunity for WU! to reach beyond the nonprofit sector into the private sector. Understanding these topics is critical for all organizations--public, private and nonprofit--and all industries. WU! believes that even as a nonprofit, good work can and must occur across all areas of society. With training on implicit bias and other topics, WU! is working to ensure that a wide range of people have access to these critical learnings in order to spread change across our society.