Johnson Center weighs in on boardroom diversification

Project aims to enlighten leadership to the benefits of different voices.
Tamela Spicer is part of the team behind the Ecosystem for Nonprofit Leadership Project, which seeks to teach nonprofits to diversify their leadership. Courtesy Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy

A project by the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy is seeking to help diversify the nonprofit boardroom, a place where it’s vital to hear from everyone.

A 2021 DEI report from Boardsource, an American nonprofit organization providing resources and data on nonprofit leadership, found that while nonprofit boards are slowly becoming more diverse, they still are far from representative of the communities they serve.

The report said that only 38% of executives felt their boards properly represented the communities they served, while 66% of executives expressed dissatisfaction with their boards’ racial and ethnic diversity.

According to Boardsource’s 2021 nonprofit leadership survey that informed this reporting, 87% of chief executive positions were filled by people of white or Caucasian identity. This is a stark contrast to only 5% chief executive positions being filled by people of Black or African American ethnicity, 3% of Hispanic or Latinx ethnicity and 2% Asian American or Pacific Islander. Less than 1% of chief executive positions in American nonprofits were filled by Native American or Indigenous persons, according to the report.

Additionally, 83% of board chair positions and 78% of board members are identified as white or Caucasian while less than 10% of either board positions are filled by Black, Hispanic, Asian American or Native American persons.

“The vast majority of boards are still white, over-55 males,” said Tamela Spicer, senior program manager at the Johnson Center, a Grand Rapids-based organization providing professional development, applied research, resources and tools for nonprofits and grantmakers. “We struggle to develop diversity in the boardroom.”

To help nonprofit leaders be informed of the importance of diversity, how to recruit diverse leaders and be aware of the need for diverse leadership voices, Spicer and the Johnson Center team created the Ecosystem for Nonprofit Leadership Project.

Currently in the fourth of five phases, the project focuses on helping elevate nonprofit leadership circles through diversification, helping create better and more sustainable nonprofit organizations, ensuring their leaders are directly connected to the communities and problems they are seeking to solve.

The Ecosystem for Nonprofit Leadership Project was created in 2018. The project focuses on educating nonprofit leaders and board members through a new curriculum, the Johnson Center’s Competency Model for Nonprofit Leaders.

As it is now in its roll-out phase, Spicer and the Johnson Center team are focused on refining the program and bringing it to a wider audience, hoping to reach nonprofit leaders nationwide.

Spicer said so far, response to the project has seemed to be positive, thanks, in part, to the philanthropic interest of the West Michigan community as well as an increased interest in creating more diverse and equitable leadership opportunities.

“In the last couple of years as we’ve looked at what’s happened across the country and in our own community, there is certainly more awareness around racial equity,” Spicer said. “There is certainly more awareness around power dynamics in communities (and) the same power dynamics and challenges that we see around racial equity in our community, we see in nonprofits as well. What happens in the community is reflected in nonprofit boardrooms. They’re not two separate things; they’re interconnected.”

One of the main difficulties in diversifying boardroom leadership is the innate fear of the inevitable conflict that follows the introduction of differing viewpoints.

“What typically happens when we focus on creating diversity in a boardroom in every sense of the word,” Spicer said, “we bring different lived experiences into the room, which often can lead to conflict. Research tells us that when we diversify any group, there is a higher likelihood of conflict being introduced into that group.”

However, that conflict, Spicer said, is one of the key aspects to creating more informed and healthy boardrooms.

“One of the things that we’ve built into our curriculum is recognizing that conflict can actually be a positive thing if it’s managed well,” she said. “If you look at the research around decision making, the research tells us that to make good decisions, we have to have differing opinions, which can lead to conflict. So how do we help boards deal with that in a boardroom? How do we normalize it? This is a normal thing that’s going to happen, and there are tools and resources to be able to navigate it when it does happen so that we’re actually coming out of the boardroom with better decision-making.”

Learning to navigate the conflicts that arise from differing opinions in leadership is an essential aspect of creating truly effective nonprofit boardrooms. As nonprofits often are on the forefront of societal change, they often are facing issues of social justice head-on, meaning leadership should be aware of biases that may inform decision-making.

“When we talk about creating shifts in the nonprofit sector and creating change in nonprofit boardrooms,” Spicer said, “we can’t forget that that sits within a broader system of racial injustice, systemic racism, all of these other issues that our society and our culture are trying to navigate. Every nonprofit organization sits within an ecosystem.”

The Johnson Center’s Ecosystem for Nonprofit Leadership Project hopes to teach leadership how to navigate internal discussions around topics like racial injustice to create nonprofits that are able to better help the communities they are involved in, starting at the very top.

“We’ve tried to look at it from a slightly different perspective and say, what if we started in board training?” Spicer said. “We need to bring into those boardrooms a skill to navigate difficult conversations so that we can have honest conversations about, how is our nonprofit organization being impacted by systemic racism and what can we do to change it, so that we can have honest conversations in the boardroom about there are weird power dynamics that happen in any community.”

Spicer said she thinks the West Michigan area has responded well to the Johnson Center’s project, and hopes to continue that growth.

“I think we’re fortunate that there are a lot of companies in West Michigan that are being intentional about being involved in the nonprofit sector,” she said. “And I would encourage corporations to continue to do that, to think about how they create access for their employees to be involved in nonprofit organizations, whether that is providing training for them, whether that is creating space in their workday to participate in nonprofit board meetings.

“I would encourage people to look at how being engaged in the nonprofit sector helps us see our work and our audience differently. It shapes the way that we see our community.”

This story can be found in the Oct. 31 issue of the Grand Rapids Business Journal. To get more stories like this delivered to your mailbox, subscribe here.