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May 5, 2005

Effort aimed at fostering diversity in Hub CDCs

Jeremy Schwab

Community development corporations and private development companies that build affordable housing in neighborhoods of color more often than not are headed by whites. As in many fields, diversity tends to be found more in lower-level positions than in upper management.

Two area groups, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations, aim to correct this disparity. For two years, the groups have built a network of CDC administrators, employees of government agencies and other community development professionals to discuss how to open avenues for advancement of employees of color.

The MACDC and LISC call their partnership The Alliance — Advancing Community Development by Confronting Racism. The coalition has established a mentoring program for staff members of color and a diversity training program for community development organizations.

Pam Jones, program officer at LISC, came up with the idea while looking for topics for her master’s thesis. While LISC and MACDC had worked for a decade to increase diversity in hiring at CDCs through internships and other initiatives, Jones realized that work needed to be done to facilitate the advancement of staff of color into the middle and upper management levels.

“We have as a field an obligation perhaps more so than other industries to really confront the problem of racism,” said Jones. “We are not saying racism is any worse or better in the community development field than any other. But we are in the United States of America, and racism permeates our country.”

The MACDC and LISC won grants from Third Sector New England to develop and implement their diversity training program. The training consists of meetings with members of an organization, facilitated by staff at MACDC or LISC, to discuss staff members’ racial attitudes, the perceptions of racism on the part of staff of color and strategies for making the workplace an environment where diversity is understood and accepted.

People of color in the community development field often feel they have to disprove the assumption that they were hired because of their race, and are passed over for advancement sometimes because whites in positions of authority tend to promote who they know and associate with, according to Jones.

There are also other barriers to advancement.

“Our field has become very professional,” said Karla Tolbert, assistant director of the Fenway Community Development Corporation, a coalition member. “A lot of people have degrees in urban planning. How do people step into that when they don’t have that kind of understanding? How do we bring them up the ranks, not just in CDCs but in community development as a whole?”

The coalition’s mentoring program is aimed at bridging some of these social and experiential divides. It pairs promising middle and upper-level employees of color with upper-level staff so mentees can learn what it takes to run an organization and gain valuable networking experience.

Mentors are from different organizations from their mentees. Currently, there are 11 mentor/mentee pairs, but coalition members aim to expand this number.

“We decided to start small, and have the infrastructure necessary before we expand,” said Jones.

Coalition members hope to raise enough money to help smaller nonprofits in the coalition to fund the continuing education of staff members of color. Coalition leaders urge member organizations to sign a diversity compact, through which they promise to take steps to make their organization more welcoming to people of color and assess their progress on an annual basis. So far, 12 organizations have signed.

Joe Kriesberg, president of MACDC, compared the coalition’s efforts to change the culture of organizations working in community development with the efforts of MACDC and LISC prior to the creation of the coalition.

“Our prior efforts were focused on bringing new people into the field, specifically strategies to bring in individuals and interns to CDCs,” he said. “Due to budget cuts, there are not a lot of new opportunities, [so] we are focusing on existing staff. We are working on how to change the field so it is a place people of color want to work and stay.”

 

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