Diversity Initiative is aimed at nonprofits

Yawu Miller

Few businesses or nonprofits operating in Boston would deny that diversity is a good thing. More than half of the city’s population is made up of people of color and one-in-four residents was born in another country.

But there are diverse organizations and then there are diverse organizations.

Take the Codman Square Health Center. With a workforce that was 70 percent people of color, Executive Director Bill Walczak still questioned to what extent the organization served the needs of its clients and employees.

Armed with a grant from Third Sector New England, the health center polled its staff and clientele to determine whether people felt welcome at the Dorchester health center.

“One of the areas it was very clear we needed to work on was with providers,” he says. “The provider staff was predominantly white.”

Walczak’s pursuit of diversity was made possible by a grant from Third Sector New England, through its Diversity Initiative, a program aimed at diversifying the staffs and boards of area nonprofits.

Initiated in 1990, the Diversity Initiative usually works with ten organizations every other year, helping them to create effective strategies for diversifying their staff and boards.

While the program started off working with social justice organizations, it now works with a range of organizations including large human service providers and arts organizations. The Diversity Initiative has distributed $1.3 million in technical assistance grants to 90 organizations in its 15 years of operating.

“Nonprofits are generally doing a good job,” says Denise Moorehead, communications director for TSNE. “But the staffs and boards aren’t always reflective of the communities they serve.”

Most non-profits in Boston include people of color on their staffs. But Moorehead says it’s even more important that people of color be integrated at every level of an organization, including in decision-making roles.

“There was a time when diversity simply meant hiring people from different cultures,” she says. “That’s not diversity. Diversity is really changing the culture of an organization. You can’t just say ‘this is the dominant culture and you all have to fit into it.’”

At Codman Square, that meant instituting new programs to aggressively recruit and retain physicians of color, boosting the diversity on their provider staff. The health center also began programs to help educate the staff members about the diversity represented in the health center.

“The big trick is to figure out ways in which we can all work together and live together,” Walczak says. “Part of it is having a staff that reflects your clientele. But it also has to be a comfortable place to work.”

The Diversity Initiative focuses on developing what in the non-profit world is called a community of practice — an often informal network of people who meet to collaboratively work to find solutions to challenges — to develop diversity strategies.

TSNE also provides assistance on organization assessments, diversity plan development, staff and board trainings and revisions of bylaws and personnel policies.

The organization hosts forums and trainings, like their Nov. 22 workshop, “Tools for Change,” which introduced local nonprofits to the concept of the bystander.

That forum, which TSNE held jointly with the Simmons School of Management, taught skills for people who witness acts of racism, sexism or homophobia in an organization to intervene.

“The bottom line is if someone says something that’s sexist or racist, you’re perfectly within your right to respond,” says Tyra Sidberry, director of the Diversity Initiative.

While many people focus on the dynamics between victims and villains in instances of workplace harassment, the bystanders have as much agency as anyone else, if not more.

“People look at the role of the manager in bringing about change,” Maureen Scully, a faculty affiliate at the Simmons Center for Gender Organizations, told the audience at Simmons. “What’s often missing is the role of the bystander.”

Scully cited psychological experiments looking at how the actions or inactions of bystanders can help guide group behavior.

Sidberry says reactions to offensive behavior can be as simple as saying “ouch” when witnessing an act of intolerance and still be effective.

The workshop, which utilized strategies and instructional videos developed at MIT’s Sloan School of management, reflects the TSNE’s comprehensive approach to diversity, according to Sidberry.

“It’s not about counting numbers,” she says. “It’s about doing the work. It’s about working together to improve conditions. All nonprofits have a mission and a vision, which is the value they add to a community. You can’t add value to a community unless you add the voices of all your constituents.”