The YMCA Gives New Power to Its Diversity Leader

When Bank of America acquired LaSalle Bank, in Chicago, late last year, it announced plans to lay off or eliminate the jobs of 2,500 employees in Illinois. David Thomas, then group senior vice president and head of diversity and inclusion at LaSalle Bank/ABN AMRO Bank North America, was among them. But for about five years, Mr. Thomas had been mulling a move to a nonprofit organization. In May, he became vice president for diversity and inclusion at YMCA of the USA, in Chicago.

“The question always was, if I did make the transition, it would have to be an organization where I felt an alignment of my personal values and the organizational mission to make a difference,” Mr. Thomas says.

The YMCA had recently decided to “upgrade” the job of director of diversity and inclusion to the level of vice president, a leadership role, says Kent Johnson, senior vice president and chief operations officer for the charity.

“We have asked for this position to really take a much more strategic approach to working with our member associations around the country,” says Mr. Johnson. “So we want David to spend time with the CEO’s of our member associations and to help them think through some of the challenges and some of the opportunities in this arena, rather than just come into town and do a training or do a workshop.”

Mr. Johnson says the position was elevated to keep pace with shifting demographics, such as the increasing Hispanic population in the United States.

“If you take a look at the demographic statistics and how our world — especially our country, but certainly our world — has changed over the last number of years and how it is projected to change in the future, it only makes good sense to begin to work even more aggressively as those changes occur,” he says.

Mr. Thomas, who would not reveal his salary but did say it was “six figures,” will work both at YMCA’s headquarters and with the group’s more than 2,600 member associations and branches to increase diversity and inclusion within the organization, and in the charity’s communications and marketing efforts.

In an interview, he discussed his new position.

Why are you making the switch from the corporate world to a nonprofit organization?

My passion is to help organizations create inclusive work environments that are attractive to the best and brightest of all kind, and to create a work environment where best work and best effort is expected from everybody every day. And I’ve had the pleasure and the good fortune to be able to do that with two organizations, Sprint and LaSalle Bank.

As I was in transition, I was looking for an opportunity where I could leverage my human-resource management; my corporate-philanthropy, volunteerism, and governance experiences; and my diversity and inclusion expertise. The Y opportunity offered the best opportunity to leverage all three in a way that would be meaningful for the organization.

How will you take a more strategic approach to diversity and inclusion?

We’re in almost 3,000 communities across the country, and all of those are becoming more and more diverse, so we’ve got a growing diversity population out there that we need to make sure we’re responding to and embracing.

From a membership and growth perspective, the emerging ethnic market is very important for the Y’s survival and outreach effort. So what we’re trying to do is ensure that it’s not just [human resources], but it’s also membership development, program value, it’s about collaboration with external partners, it’s about supply-chain issues and opportunities to demonstrate our commitment to helping to create wealth in the minority community, to doing business with women and minority-owned businesses. That’s different than just thinking in terms of training. We’re now taking the next step.

Why do you think the YMCA and other big nonprofit groups are adding or upgrading positions such as yours?

Nonprofits are facing the same kind of challenges that for-profit companies are. They still have to make payroll, they still have to respond to cultural-competency issues, they still are challenged by winning the war for talent, winning the war for customers, improving organizational performance, and they’re probably getting challenged and pushed by their boards.

You’ve got funders that want to make sure nonprofits are responding to these emerging markets and are getting outside their own comfort zones, so I think you have a lot of those issues that are causing the Y and the [American] Cancer Society, United Way, and some others to say that this is an important and strategic position.

We need a leader, we need a quarterback to help define the business case and help put the right kind of metrics in place, knowing that if you measure it, you manage it; if you manage it, you improve it.

How will you measure your success?

I’m determined to have a scorecard. We’ll probably create an inclusion and diversity index that would be coming off of an employee-attitude survey, so that we can measure the temperature of the organization. What a lot of organizations have missed the mark on but are now waking up to is that they’ve tried a lot of diversity stuff, which tends to be very tactical, and haven’t really focused on the inclusion piece, which is about culture and leadership. And to be successful you can’t do one over the other.

What is the difference between diversity and inclusion?

The real simple difference is that diversity is the mix; inclusion is getting the mix to work well together. You can have a diverse organization that’s not inclusive, and you can have an inclusive organization that’s not diverse. So what I’ve seen is a lot of companies have really tried to work on the diversity piece and wonder why people don’t stay, or don’t come, because they’re not inclusive. You really have to do both, and I think that’s the breakthrough for those organizations that are considered best in class. And that’s the shift that we’re making here, too.

What will be your biggest challenges in the next few years?

To figure out how to make change happen within this federated system. We have almost 1,000 CEO’s and 1,000 independent 501(c)(3)’s, all under the same brand but they have a fair amount of autonomy. My interest is to figure out how do we respect that, but at the same time have a movement within the movement.

At a Sprint or LaSalle Bank, the CEO speaks, people will listen and are more responsive. Here, it’s a different kind of issue.