A Program Seeks to Smooth the Path for Diverse Foundation Managers

When Dale Anglin takes a hard look at her job experiences, she wonders whether she will ever be in a position to become a foundation chief executive. She spent seven years at the Congressional Research Service, ran a trade association for a public-policy group, and worked for a community-development corporation. Now, at age 46, Ms. Anglin, a program officer at the Victoria Foundation, in Glen Ridge, N.J., wonders what all those duties add up to.

“The problem is there aren’t all that many top foundation positions out there,” says Ms. Anglin. “When they do open up, you have to know somebody. And you have to fit.” She adds, “I have this concentration of skills. How far will they take me?”

That question about fit is perhaps most challenging for someone like Ms. Anglin, since she is a black woman and few of the top grant-making jobs in America are held by minorities, even though people of color are often recipients of services financed by philanthropic grants.

Only 7.6 percent of chief executive and chief giving officers are minority, according to the Council on Foundations, compared with about 36 percent of the population that is nonwhite, according to U.S. Census figures.

To help more minority executives learn the skills they need to climb the professional ladder, the Council on Foundations, a membership group for grant makers, unveiled a new leadership program this summer called Career Pathways. Ms. Anglin and 14 other people, all of whom currently hold grant-making jobs, met in July for the first session of the yearlong program at the council’s Arlington, Va., headquarters.

The program’s main charge is to help grant makers groom talented workers for leadership roles, with a focus on improving the career prospects of people from racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

“There’s a desire to find ways we can develop more leaders who are reflective, who understand themselves, and who can be strategic thinkers,” says Renée Branch, director of diversity and inclusive practices at the council.

Foundation Involvement

A secondary benefit, council officials hope, is that Career Pathways will get foundations involved in nurturing new leaders within their ranks. As a condition of joining the program, participants must regularly tell their employers what they learn during Career Pathways workshops and seminars. For their part, grant makers will pay travel expenses for four two-day program sessions during the year. “It’s important for them to be invested in this as well,” says Ms. Branch.

Council leaders say the program, financed by grants from the California Wellness Foundation, in Woodland Hills, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich., the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, in Flint, Mich., and the Weingart Foundation, in Los Angeles, is an improvement over fellowships that separate nonprofit workers from their jobs for an extended period.

Even though many foundations are currently struggling financially and the Foundation Center, a philanthropy research group in New York, projects only modest growth for grant makers in 2011, council leaders say they started Career Pathways to help prepare future philanthropy leaders for jobs that will become available as more baby boomers retire and start their own foundations.

“There’s a dramatic growth projected for philanthropyin the next year and beyond,” says Steve Gunderson, the council’s president. “The demographics cry out for programs like this. We need new and additional leaders to replace executives who are retiring and to fill jobs that will grow along with the sector.”

The Kellogg foundation made a three-year, $800,000 pledge to the program. Career Pathways “fosters leadership that reflects the cultural diversity of communities served by foundations,” says Kathy Reincke, a spokeswoman for Kellogg. “We want to help create this pipeline of diverse leaders.”

Even though minority groups have made gains in recent years in the foundation world, one participant says that the program’s focus on including as many types of people as possible makes it particularly valuable. “Diversity has increased in foundations, but a lot of that is slowing down during the recession,” says Valerie Raines, an African-American who serves as vice president for corporate philanthropy at the KeyBank Foundation, in Cleveland. The overwhelming majority of white leaders in philanthropy don’t “reflect the types of people being served by philanthropy,” she adds. “Given that, there’s really no downside to a program like this one.”

Time to Reflect

During the program’s first weekend session, held in July, participants shared their stories, talked with foundation and nonprofit executives about leadership and career management, took part in a “values exercise” to learn what is most important to them about running organizations, and undertaking a self-assessment that included a Myers-Briggs personality test. The program requires them to spend a total of nine days together during the year and includes sessions spent discussing public-policy issues in September, examining the nonprofit field in November, and wrapping up in Philadelphia in April. An evaluation process carried out at the participants’ offices will follow, through June.

The first session was surprising to some participants because it offered a more elastic notion of “diversity” than they were accustomed to.

“This isn’t about diversity in people as much as it is diversity in jobs,” says Ms. Anglin. “We have chief financial officers here who want to work on the program side and program people who want to be vice presidents and presidents.”

Besides expanding their concept of possible career paths, the program urges would-be leaders to examine their own motivations for choosing those paths.

“The great thing about the program is that it lets you know what you need to think about, like, Why am I doing what I’m doing now?” says Ms. Anglin. “We spend so much time working, we often don’t have the time to reflect like that.”

Other participants expressed hope that the program will allow for discussion of several types of barriers that hinder upward mobility.

Jeffrey P. Malloy, director of finance and administration at the James Irvine Foundation, in San Francisco, says the program’s first meeting didn’t include overt discussions about “ceilings” or discrimination against people who are minorities. But Mr. Malloy, who is gay, says the fact that the group is so diverse should allow for those discussions to happen in the future. “It’s an open, inclusive program,” he says.

Career Advancement

Beyond the issues diversity can present, neglect of leadership development can hinder people’s career advancement, Mr. Malloy adds.

“If I had focused on leadership skills earlier on, it would have been a shorter trip to where I am now,” he says. “We get so caught up in our daily jobs managing money and people that we don’t develop the necessary skills, like the willingness and ability to take strategic risks. That’s a real barrier. No one’s really helping you develop leadership skills.”

Career Pathways’ first group may not have learned all it can about leadership skills yet, but it has already forged a sense of camaraderie, says Ms. Raines. Upon arriving at the program in July, eight participants contacted each other by phone and decided to meet in the lobby of their hotel. After briefly getting acquainted, they marched off to their first session together.

“The council staff was kind of amazed to see us all show up as a group—you should have seen the looks on their faces,” Ms. Raines recalls with a laugh. “We must have looked like something out of The Mod Squad. It was a great way for us to begin.”