Serious about diversity? The first step is introspection.

Posted April 7, 2019 by Melanie Goodman

In the last year, I’ve spent a great deal of time — perhaps a third of all my work hours — facilitating planning processes with six nonprofits in Vermont. This planning has mostly been about setting new strategic directions, and a lot of that has been about diversity. For nonprofits, diversity usually means adding board and staff members with identities, backgrounds and skill sets not currently represented, including those with lived experience as service recipients. For youth-serving organizations, it also means adding young people to governing bodies and processes as valued voices of insight and experience.

One highly visible community-based organization located in the heart of Burlington wants a more expansive board that reflects the growing entrepreneurial community around it. Another organization, whose mission is to end homelessness among people with complex mental health challenges, already hires individuals with lived experience, but wants them represented on the board as well. In a state that is still predominately white but has a growing population of color, it also wants more racial diversity on its board. In our strategic planning session, one of the state’s United Ways said it aspired to support “healthier young people,” and wants youth in the community to help figure out what this really means and how to get there.

If the drive toward diversity makes so much sense, why is actually achieving diversity so hard?

If this intentional drive toward diversity makes so much sense — and it surely does — then why is actually achieving diversity so hard?Let’s consider the example of bringing young people onto a board. Right at the start, the biggest obstacle to their retention is what they encounter when they first get there, which is the expectation that, once oriented, these young newbies will inject passion and authenticity into already existing processes.

But that won’t happen, and here’s why. To successfully incorporate young people — and I’d expand this to any new person who has been recruited for their “difference”– it’s the current members who need to be oriented and make adjustments, both to their processes and to their individual attitudes, which may in fact be less welcoming than they realize.

Board members typically need to examine their underlying assumptions about the value of diversity; discover unconscious bias, if it exists, and come to terms with it; learn new ways to communicate; and on a practical level, prepare to be inconvenienced. The current board meeting schedule is often the first to go. And let’s not underestimate the challenge paid staffers at these organizations encounter; they have nurtured their boards carefully and aren’t necessarily eager to disrupt the way they function. And asking board members to stretch can be disruptive indeed.

So really — did everybody sign up for this? Maybe, but maybe not.

While seeking diversity to enlarge the breadth of any oranization is commendable, indeed critical to its overall health and future, these are some of the unanticipated complications they’ll face. Pre-training is one obvious solution, and there are others.

But mostly, if the standing board openly and continually discusses these issues and how they connect to their values in support of diversity, success will likely follow. So it’s a process, in the truest, most organic sense of the word, and it rests entirely on the open and honest intentions of the people doing the work.

I think my clients are up for it. In fact, I know they are. That’s why I can look forward to learning about how far they’ve come toward accomplishing their goals when we benchmark their progress a year from now.