Arthur McCloud, sporting a black Afro wig and an impeccable butterfly collar, grinned as a co-worker approached his table outside the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria.
“Today I’m Don Cornelius,” McCloud said, laughing and inviting the woman to play “Soul Train Scrabble.”
McCloud, manning a booth for Blacks in Government, a networking group for African-American federal employees, was one of 11,000 Patent Office employees who spent part of the workday Thursday at the department’s annual Community Day, celebrating the agency’s racial and ethnic diversity.
Dotting the lawn outside the agency’s headquarters were food trucks, vendors and booths for employee organizations like McCloud’s. Across the park, employees waiting in line for lobster rolls listened to the beat of a drum circle while two women in saris gave out intricate henna tattoos.
Other government agencies — most notoriously the General Services Administration — have come under fire in recent months for hosting lavish employee appreciation events. But the Patent Office has been hosting Community Day for 15 years, and though agency officials refused to disclose the cost of the event, they touted it as an opportunity to celebrate being one of the federal government’s most diverse agencies. Patent Office officials said the agency is 27 percent Asian and 24 percent black.
Agency employees were given two hours off Thursday to mingle with co-workers outside, browse displays from employee organizations and watch a performance by a Navy drill team.
“It’s a huge campus — we don’t always get to see people,” patent examiner Karla Hawkins said while waiting in line for a lobster roll. “There’s a lot of diversity, and today we get to see it.”
Community Day is designed to allow workers to mingle, but it’s also a “strategy to engage the workforce” in organizations like Blacks in Government or Women in Science and Engineering, said Bismarck Myrick, the director of the agency’s Office of Equal Employment Opportunity and Diversity.
Myrick said other governmental agencies host similar events, but the Patent Office’s is unique.
“We don’t know of anyone in the federal government who does it quite like this,” he said, laughing.
