34 years of Growth

Internally, how do you intentionally build the diversity of your team and your board, and what is the benefit of this for you and for your organization?

This has been a journey that I believe started when I arrived at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. 34 odd years ago when I joined the foundation, there weren't many people of color at the foundation at that time. We had a very passionate leader who had determined that he wanted the Kellogg Foundation to reflect the communities that it served, but we weren't there yet, we were just at the beginning of the journey. So, as a very young African-American woman joining the foundation, I was also afforded the opportunity to lead some of the efforts around diversity and inclusion, and the one premise that I had and we had at the foundation was that we were going to practice anything that we espoused in the space, so if we were going to say that we were in communities working on diversity and inclusion, we had to do that from a real space of experience which meant that we had to be what we were asking communities to be, and so we sought to become the community, and in doing that, we looked inward, we called it our inside out game, but internally, we had to change our board and we looked at our board, and it was not very diverse and had not been diverse.

Was it mostly white? When you say that, was it mostly white?

Mostly white male, I mean, we had a wall in the Kellogg Foundation where we hang the picture of every retired trustee, and for many decades, the wall, with the exception of one white woman, was all white men for decades, and then in the 80s, again, as I was coming on board and a little before, we began to understand that we needed to reflect our communities, and the good news is that we started with our board and we brought on our first members of color in the 80s, and now if you look at our board, it's over 50% people of color and that's been a very intentional journey, and what we understand Ð

Proof that it can be done, right? So many organizations say, "Well, the pipeline is so limited." You are proof that it can be done.

Not only can it be done, it can be done well, and that means that it's not just one or two people who feel marginalized on the board but it's a fluid fabric of diversity on the board where those perspectives are uplifted constantly as we're thinking about the governance of the organization, and what we learned by doing that and starting with our board is that that creates what we call the authorizing environment that allows the rest of the organization to flourish, and that's very key because if you're not getting that tone from the very, very top of the organization, you send mixed signals to your staff.