‘Start With Culture Change': The Work Boards Must Do Before Launching Diversity Efforts
Nonprofit leaders, trustees, and consultants discuss what can go wrong when organizations focus on board diversity without first creating an inclusive board culture.
In 2017, the board of Caritas of Austin, a nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness in Austin, Tex., noticed something. Trustees had never looked much like the people the organization served, who are disproportionately Black men. “Historically, our board had been either exclusively or majority white,” says Jo Kathryn Quinn, chief executive of the group.
That needed to change, trustees decided.
Ahead of implementing new recruitment goals, Quinn, who is white, embarked on a listening tour. She asked previous trustees of color about their experience. “Consistently, they felt like they didn’t belong,” Quinn says. Some even felt other trustees acted aggressively toward them because of their race.
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In 2017, the board of Caritas of Austin, a nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness in Austin, Tex., noticed something. Trustees had never looked much like the people the organization served, who are disproportionately Black men. “Historically, our board had been either exclusively or majority white,” says Jo Kathryn Quinn, chief executive of the group.
That needed to change, trustees decided.
Ahead of implementing new recruitment goals, Quinn, who is white, embarked on a listening tour. She asked previous trustees of color about their experience. “Consistently, they felt like they didn’t belong,” Quinn says. Some even felt other trustees acted aggressively toward them because of their race.
Hearing that made Quinn sad and angry. She hadn’t noticed this friction, and she says the trustees hadn’t mentioned it to her during their board terms. “It just went over my head,” Quinn says.
If the board was going to attract more trustees of color, it needed to do a better job making them feel welcomed and valued.
Caritas of Austin is far from the only nonprofit in this position. Many nonprofits lack diverse governing bodies: 78 percent of board members and 83 percent of board chairs are white, according to 2021 data — the most recent available — from BoardSource, a nonprofit that researches and trains boards.
“In a lot of the stories we’re hearing right now, [boards] feel really stuck. People are having a lot of challenges with this journey,” says Monika Kalra Varma, president of BoardSource. Trustees, Varma says, must be willing to participate in uncomfortable conversations about racial equity and stay focused on why a more diverse board will better advance the nonprofit’s mission.
Diversity is critical to a board’s ability to represent the community it serves, generate new ideas, and solve problems creatively. But achieving a diverse board doesn’t just mean inviting people of color to serve on it, according to diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants and nonprofit leaders the Chronicle spoke to. Such an approach can backfire — and cause harm. Instead, nonprofits that want to create a governing body that is inclusive of people with different backgrounds and perspectives must first take a hard look at their cultures. And then they need to take a measured, thoughtful approach to cultivate lasting change.
When Diversity Efforts Fail: A Case Study
The dissolution last year of the board of the Greater Toronto chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals — the largest society of fundraisers worldwide — demonstrates what can be a stake when nonprofits fail to take a thoughtful approach to board diversity.
Longtime fundraisers, chapter members, and committee volunteers Olumide Akerewusi, Nneka Allen, and Múthoní Karíukí were recruited to join the board when its outgoing board president was inviting more trustees of color into the boardroom.
All of them had reservations about joining. “AFP has a history — a long history — of being known to be cliquish,” Karíukí says. Even so, they thought of AFP Greater Toronto as the premier professional association for fundraisers in the area and an essential resource for networking and career advancement. What’s more, Akerewusi, Allen, and Karíukí had contributed hours of their time as volunteers for the chapter and had a vested interest in its success.
The three trustees, who are Black, say they felt unwelcome from the start and never felt included in governance or permitted to dissent or advocate for new approaches.
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“I always had the sense of being tolerated and not necessarily welcomed,” Akerewusi said on an episode of his podcast, Giving Black Podcast.
Karíukí says board diversity was no more than “window dressing” at the chapter. The three trustees say they experienced anti-Black racism while serving on the board. Fellow trustees, they say, treated them with paternalism, suspicion, and disdain.
Karíukí was appointed chair of the inclusion, diversity, equity, and access committee, and believed she would be leading it alone; she says all other committees had just one chair. However, Karíukí says she was later told the previous committee chair, a white woman, would stay on as co-chair. “That in itself made me feel I don’t really belong on this board because I’m not being seen that I can do the work like the rest of the board members,” she said on Akerewusi’s podcast.
Allen says that the new board president treated her with disdain after Allen informed her that a fundraiser she mentored had experienced racism as an employee at the nonprofit where the board president worked. Allen said she was disappointed the board president’s response was animosity rather than listening and working on the issues. “I was really quite serious about AFP taking some responsibility and some leadership around influencing nonprofit organizations, at least for member organizations, to treat their Black staff and staff of color more equitably,” Allen says.
In 2019, the president changed the board’s travel reimbursement policy — a move Allen felt was designed to make it costly for her to participate in board business, as she traveled the furthest to attend board meetings.
After these and other incidents, Akerewusi, Allen, and Karíukí resigned in protest.
In the years that followed, the former trustees gathered support from some members of AFP Greater Toronto and other fundraisers, encouraged members to withdraw from AFP Greater Toronto, pressed it to respond to their allegations, and pushed AFP Global to revoke the Toronto chapter’s Ten Star Gold Award. The pressure on the AFP Greater Toronto board became so intense that it collapsed in 2023, when all the board members resigned.
‘This Takes Time’
What happened on the AFP Greater Toronto board is not isolated; instances of racist behavior in the boardroom have come to light at other nonprofits.
“The reality is that white-supremacy culture has to be dismantled in these white spaces if they want to create environments of belonging for Black people, brown people, indigenous people,” Allen says. “There’s a responsibility on the part of people who are in power to change — because our experience was: They wanted representation but forced assimilation, which is the harmful part.”
The New Philanthropists
Paulina Artieda, left, is executive director of the New Philanthropists, a Texas nonprofit that helps charities in Austin and Houston build diverse boards.
It’s important that nonprofits stay committed to forming a governing body that looks like the people it serves, even when it’s hard, says Paulina Artieda, executive director of the New Philanthropists, a Texas nonprofit that helps charities in Austin and Houston build diverse boards. “Ourbiggest impact in making sure that boards are representative is that communities will be served best.”
When nonprofits try to sprint through this process, Artieda says, they risk inviting people of color into an environment that can be unwelcoming and even harmful to them.
“That’s been the hardest barrier for some of these nonprofits to understand: that this takes time,” Artieda says. “It can’t just happen overnight.”
Now, AFP Greater Toronto is under new board leadership and focused on long-term culture change. Tasked with appointing stop-gap governance for the chapter, Birgit Smith Burton, chair of the AFP Global board, asked Akerewusi to return as president of the interim board in June 2023. Despite the harm he experienced as a trustee, Akerewusi accepted the offer.
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“I am not backing away from my demand for justice,” Akerewusi said in a statement published by the chapter. “If anything, as interim chair, I am doubling up on my expectation for AFP to do better, be better and set powerful examples of equity to the local and global fundraising community.”
Akerewusi has unveiled a new set of values to guide the chapter. The values — which include being purpose-driven, reconciliatory, and member-focused — are a rubric against which chapter staff, trustees, members, volunteers, and sponsors are expected to check their decisions and actions.
Culture change should be the first step in any effort to increase board diversity. This is advice that Allison Orr, founder of the performing arts nonprofit Forklift Danceworks, gives fellow white nonprofit leaders. Since 2019, Orr’s nonprofit has worked with consultants to overhaul its organizational culture and operations.
“If you’re a fellow white leader of an organization and your board is predominantly white, I would start with culture change. I would not start with changing the board,” Orr says. “People will not stay on the board if the culture itself doesn’t represent inclusivity in a really authentic and meaningful way.”
Ways to Change Culture
To build that culture of change, the nonprofit leaders and consultants who spoke to the Chronicle offered some tips:
Reach Out. Quinn, the CEO who learned her board members of color felt they didn’t belong, says she now takes responsibility for promoting an inclusive board culture.
Raquel Valdez Sanchez, chief operating officer at BCL of Texas, a housing nonprofit, says Quinn made her feel welcome on the Caritas of Austin board. Sanchez, who is Latina, describes her experience as mostly positive, despite a few sticking points. She is now in her second board term.
Although she didn’t feel an immediate warmth from her fellow trustees, Sanchez says she has built productive working relationships with her fellow trustees and has expanded her professional network through her board service. But there have been times, Sanchez says, when she’s wondered whether she belongs in the boardroom.
In those moments of doubt, Quinn pulled her back in. “She reached out to me in a very considerate way and told me, ‘I just want to let you know I value you being here,’” Sanchez says. Separately, a departing board member wrote Sanchez an email telling her how much she enjoyed working with her.
Sanchez says it helped her feel valued as an individual. Board leaders, she adds, should remember the impact this kind of outreach can have on new trustees. “It helps them be seen, it helps them be involved, and helps them commit to the work being done by that organization,” Sanchez says.
Broaden Your Network. When boards are searching for new members, they typically tap friends, colleagues, and associates of current trustees. If recruitment is based on who board members know, it’s likely those referrals will have similar backgrounds to the current trustees.
This inhibits diversity, Artieda says. Nonprofits have to recruit with more than just referrals. “You can’t expect people to come to you,” she says.
Invest in relationships with local affinity groups for professionals of color, other nonprofits with similar missions, and grassroots groups, Artieda says. Building ties with more organizations — and showing up to their events — can help forge trust with people who typically haven’t been involved with your organization.
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When initiating conversations with peers at other nonprofits, be honest.
“Be transparent about where you are in your board recruitment process,” Artieda says. “It could really be about a conversation about, ‘Hey, we haven’t been really good in this space when it comes to representation in the past, but we want to try and we’re looking for individuals that are willing to go on this journey with us.’”
By being clear about the work that is still left to do, nonprofit leaders can steer clear of tokenism and show peers that they want to learn from them, Artieda says. What’s more, they may meet some stellar board candidates along the way.
Be Transparent. As president of the interim board of AFP Greater Toronto, Akerewusi says he’s focused on instilling transparency and providing “service-leadership.”
Last July, he published the unabridged report from a 2021 audit by Nyanda Consulting, a third party, which looked into the actions that led him, Allen, and Karíukí to resign. Previously, only a summary of the audit’s findings had been made public. The full report, which the auditor and some fundraisers criticized Akerewusi for releasing publicly, identified examples of anti-Black racism, tokenism, bullying, and a reluctance to take action on inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility issues.
Regaining trust requires a commitment to transparency and unflinching apologies for past wrongs, consultants and nonprofit leaders say. Only by taking responsibility for their mistakes can organizations truly move forward, says Angelique Grant, who helps fundraisers address diversity, equity, and inclusion issues as a principal with the Inclusion Firm, a consultancy.
“Everyone’s experiences are their experiences, and you don’t want to negate that or cancel that,” she says. But the road to resolution is not an easy one, Grant says, and leaders can sometimes feel as if they’re “failing forward” — uncovering more issues from the past as they try to move on.
Create New Policies and Goals. To change the culture, a nonprofit first needs to understand it, Artieda says. Look back over the last decade of boards and dig into the data. How many board chairs of color has the board had? How many trustees of color? Taking the long view can help boards identify trends over time. “Pick up those patterns, because there are policies and practices that are keeping you from becoming more diverse,” Artieda says.
Next, boards need to set measurable goals and identify what policies they need to change, enforce, or adopt to make sure they reach that goal. Artieda gives the example of a board whose goal is to, in five years, have 70 percent of trustees represent the community the nonprofit serves. The goal should include steps along the way so trustees can monitor their progress toward achieving it. Some of those steps will likely be setting new policies, Artieda says. By changing board practices, nonprofits can deviate from entrenched norms.
“I am a firm believer that you’re not going to get there in one year,” Artieda says. “But I think you’re going to learn from every year and really build milestones towards a goal that you have in five years.”