September 23, 1999 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Non-profit leaders have long urged employers to hire a diverse work force.
ALSO SEE:
Results of the Chronicle’s survey of salaries of top executives a non-profit organizations and foundations presented in a series of charts, and links to related articles
The faces inside the executive offices of many of the nation’s largest charities, however, remain overwhelmingly white.
As part of The Chronicle’s annual salary survey, non-profit organizations were asked to provide the race, ethnicity, and gender of their five highest-paid officials. Those executives, and their salaries, must be listed on the informational tax returns, called Forms 990, that charities file with the Internal Revenue Service.
At the 154 organizations that provided such information, 92 per cent of top employees are white. Blacks accounted for 5.5 per cent, and Hispanics 1.7 per cent. A little more than one-fourth are female.
More than one-third of black and Hispanic executives in the survey worked at the 14 United Ways that provided data, lowering even further the percentage of blacks and Hispanics among top officials at the 140 other non-profit organizations. Not counting the United Ways, fewer than 5 per cent of executives were black or Hispanic.
Gordon A. Raley, president of the National Assembly of Health and Human Services Organizations, said lack of diversity has been of much concern to his membership. Nine months ago his group set up a committee to examine a range of diversity issues, including ways to increase the number of minorities in leadership positions.
“It’s important because we very often try to take a leadership role toward other segments of society on this issue,” he said. “Many of us in the human-services and health fields by definition are serving people who are more diverse. We could be doing a better job of serving those communities if we were better in tune with those communities.”
Frances K. Moseley, who was the first black board member at the Boys & Girls Club of Boston and who later served as its executive director, attributed the lack of minority leadership to “predominantly white boards of directors who don’t have the understanding of the talents that people of color bring to the table.”
Ms. Moseley, now a senior vice-president at State Street Global Advisors, a Boston investment-management firm, added that “many of those boards lack interaction with people of color, and they view us as not having what it takes to manage an organization, particularly when it comes to bringing in money.”
Businesses have not necessarily had much more success than non-profit groups in attracting diverse leadership to the top ranks.
David A. Thomas, author of Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America, said his research on the largest companies in the country found that blacks account for just 2.3 per cent of all corporate officers. Hispanics account for 2 per cent.
Non-profit groups do have a better record than businesses when it comes to putting women in leadership positions. A 1998 study by Catalyst, a research organization that studies the progress of women in corporate America, found that females accounted for 11 per cent of officers at companies included on Fortune magazine’s list of the 500 largest companies. Nearly 12 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies had at least one woman among the five highest-paid employees. Among the 154 non-profit groups surveyed, women accounted for 27.6 per cent of the five highest-paid officials.
Getting similarly ahead of the business world in the percentage of minority executives involves an active effort, say United Way officials.
Bill Mills, diversity leader at United Way of America, says one reason the organization has relatively more minority executives is that it runs a special leadership-development program that offers management training to minority professionals at local United Ways. In addition, he said, an alliance of minority executives at local United Ways serve as mentors for others in line to become managers.
Such steps are particularly important for other non-profit groups to take if they expect to continue to be exempt from taxes and get other special privileges, said Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group in Washington.
“We exist to the extent that public policy allows us to exist,” he said. “We lose the right to exist when we don’t do right by people.”
Demographic trends also offer a reason for the non-profit world to improve its record on diversity, he said, noting that experts predict that non-whites will make up a majority of the American population by 2050. “It’s not only morally reprehensible to see these numbers, but it demonstrates a lack of market relevance. We are going to be the donors; we are going to be the employees; we are already the clients,” Mr. Yzaguirre said.
Ms. Moseley agreed that the growing number of non-whites was important for non-profit organizations to consider. “Cultural and arts organizations, for example, are missing out on the opportunity to cultivate the audience of tomorrow. Those operations that do not have diverse senior management teams are not going to be the ones looking down the pike and seeing the issues that will matter in the future. And it’s going to come back and hit them right in the pocketbooks.”
