Eric Tadsen
Ananda Mirilli was one of five people of color last year who joined the board of Forward Community Investments, in background. It had been an all-white board.
Four years ago, members of the Forward Community Investments board of directors had a collective moment of clarity.
The Madison-based, statewide nonprofit lender had just merged with the Wisconsin Community Fund — a small grantmaking organization with a strong record of working for social justice. The acquisition inspired FCI to reexamine and refocus its own mission statement and establish a commitment to addressing racial and socioeconomic disparities, says Salli Martyniak, president of FCI.
“When our board adopted that, we looked around the table and said: ‘We’re all white,” Martyniak recalls. “How could we live that vision if we remained a board where everyone looks alike, where everyone has similar backgrounds?”
The realization prompted Martyniak to propose an aggressive goal — recruit a diverse cohort of new board members to help guide the organization in its quest to support minority communities. Last January, FCI welcomed to its leadership five people of color from diverse backgrounds and later in the year added one more. The 12-member board is now nearly 50% non-white, and Martyniak hopes to recruit even more people of color to leadership positions.
It was a deliberate effort that Martyniak says was easy — there was no science to it, no real format beyond reaching out to qualified, interested individuals who had a passion for the organizations that FCI supports.
And for FCI, which connects investors with community-based initiatives in need of funding, the new board members have brought welcome perspectives that have already led to positive changes within the organization and the people it supports. The effort has brought new people into the organization, both as lenders and as funding recipients.
“Prior to bringing on our [new] board members...the people who came to our meetings and events looked a lot like me,” says Martyniak. “Today we have that diversity around the table that is representative of our community.”
Ananda Mirilli, who moved to Madison from Brazil, has long been involved with local grassroots organizations in Madison. Many of the boards on which she served — the Latino Education Council, Communities United, the Dane County Poverty Commission — have had strong minority leadership and a focus on social justice. But when Martyniak approached her about joining up with FCI, it was a unique opportunity.
“Being able to sit on the board of a mainstream organization [like FCI] and have that feeling that it was very diverse was refreshing to me in so many ways,” says Mirilli, who ran unsuccessfully for the Madison school board in 2013.
She and others appreciated coming on as a cohort because it helped them get to know each other and learn together about the world of community-based microlending.
“It was great not being the only person of color in the room,” board member Alia Stevenson says. “That’s a usual experience for a person of color in Dane County.”
Right away, the new board got to work, examining every aspect of FCI’s branding, organizational structure, strategic planning and business operations. At one meeting, members spent an entire hour debating whether the group’s new mission statement should include the word “inequities” or “disparities.” They eventually chose the latter when new members pointed out that people often confuse “equity” with “equality.”
The new board also closely examined the organizations receiving money from FCI to make sure that their work supports alleviating socioeconomic and racial disparities. Board members also went out in their communities as ambassadors, networking with potential lenders who might not have previously considered investing with FCI.
Stevenson, who grew up in Madison and graduated from West High School, says the heightened scrutiny of the area’s racial disparities has brought new urgency to groups seeking to improve conditions and provide opportunities for people of color.
“[Equity initiatives] are a great first effort,” she says. “As a community, we need to look at ways that we can collaborate and have more impact.”
Mirilli says the biggest challenge for organizations is moving equity efforts from being “task-oriented, line items on [a] workflow” to embedding them in the group’s strategic framework. For Mirilli, that has translated to her reaching out to nontraditional investors as well as explaining the new mission to current funders.
“Those are hard conversations to have in the financial world,” she says.
Torry Winn, a new board member and consultant on the Race to Equity project, which compiled baseline data on the extent of Dane County’s racial disparities, says FCI succeeded in its diversification because leadership took bold action instead of making an incremental change.
“They did something that most organizations fail to do,” Winn says. “When you see a change that needs to happen, you go at it directly.”
Erica Nelson, project director for the Race to Equity, says Madison and Dane County are “making progress” in improving the racial disparities that have long plagued the region. Last month, Nelson released a list of “racial equity initiatives” that have been implemented since the Race to Equity baseline report was published in 2013.
More than 125 initiatives from city and county government, nonprofits, schools, faith communities and media outlets have been put into place, but Nelson says there’s still “a long road to where we want to be.”
“We’re making good initial steps, but we’re still in our infancy,” Nelson says.
Many local grassroots organizations, such as Freedom Inc., are led by people of color, and established groups like the United Way of Dane County and YWCA Madison have long focused on racial justice and made efforts to increase diversity in leadership. But “there are still a fair amount of of nonprofits in the community that are white-led,” Nelson says.
FCI is not the only group, however, finding that diversification efforts net results.
Angela Russell was hired as diversity and inclusion manager for CUNA Mutual Group in May 2015 following the appointment of CEO Robert Trunzo. There had been a grassroots employee committee “working underground” to address diversity for about three years, but “it wasn’t until [Trunzo] became CEO that there was enough political will” to really tackle the issue head-on, Russell says.
Trunzo added “inclusion” to the company’s seven corporate values. The company has also taken a “holistic approach” to embed diversity, equity and inclusion into every part of the corporate strategy — building relationships to attract, retain and develop a diverse workforce; increasing awareness within the company through equity training and events; keeping tabs on the work environment and business processes to ensure that they are consistent with the diversity and inclusion framework.
Russell says sometimes diversification efforts raise the question: “Is it window dressing? Or is it a true commitment?” But she says a commitment to equity from top leadership combined with grassroots efforts from employees are the “right ingredients” to make positive, lasting change.
Says Russell: “That’s what’s going to move the organization forward.”
