Attracting Minorities to Fund Raising Takes Education and Mentors

As charities seek to diversify their fund-raising offices, they run up against a couple of challenges. For starters, say several recruiters, too few minority candidates are in the pipeline.

“I don’t know that there’s been enough exposure to opportunities for people of color,” says Marian Alexander DeBerry, director of talent management at Campbell & Company, a recruiter in Chicago that focuses mainly on fund-raising jobs.

This state of affairs plays out against the backdrop of a changing America: By 2032, most American children will be minorities, the Census Bureau projects. By 2042, the Census estimates, whites will be in the minority in the United States.

A new Chronicle survey of top fund-raising posts at the Philanthropy 400, the newspaper’s ranking of America’s biggest charities by fund-raising revenue, found that only 7 percent of those jobs are held by minorities.

If opportunities for professional development aren’t provided, says Ms. DeBerry, “you may have a majority-minority population, but you’re still going to have a pool that is not going to be people of color. It’s going to be a little bit of a disconnect.”

The solution, she says, is to start recruitment early.

“The professional associations, if they’re serious, they have to reach all the way back to high school,” Ms. DeBerry says. Young people, she adds, “don’t know it’s even a possibility as a job, that you can be a fund raiser.”

‘A Pipeline Problem’

Paulette V. Maehara, president of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, seconds this notion but says exposure to the profession needs to start even sooner and needs to be aimed at a larger audience than just young minority students.

“We have a pipeline problem, period,” Ms. Maehara says.

To help fill that pipeline, the Association of Fundraising Professionals, in Arlington, Va., has just started a program called Making a World of Good, a high-school curriculum aimed at teaching young people about the profession.

The pilot effort began in July through five association chapters in Arizona, Kansas, New Jersey, Oregon, and Texas, says Michael Nilsen, senior director of public affairs for the organization. If all goes well with the pilot program when students begin participating this fall, he says, the association hopes to expand the effort early next year.

Five years ago, the association also started founding collegiate chapters that are allied with its local, professional chapters.

But filling the pipeline with young people isn’t the only issue, says Rob Henry, executive director of emerging constituencies at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, in Washington.

He believes that too much focus has been placed on people at the beginning of their careers, through internship programs and entry-level positions, and not nearly enough on people in the middle of their working lives.

“We’re more comfortable bringing someone of a diverse background in at entry level,” he says, “but less comfortable with someone at a senior level.”

One solution, he says, is to develop mentor programs that groom middle managers to take on more senior roles. For the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, he oversees the Minority Advancement Institute, which for five years has offered leadership training to 20 middle managers annually from college and university fund-raising offices.

Career Frustrations

Finding a mentor on the job can make a huge difference in any fund raiser’s career prospects, but it can be especially important for minorities, says Mr. Henry.

“For people of color, what often happens is, you stay at the same level for a longer time,” he says. Many become frustrated with the organization’s lack of attention to their professional development and may leave their job or even the field itself.

But for those who secure support at the office, he says, “we find that those who stay in the business actually will have a higher [career] trajectory at the end than those of people who came in with them who are Caucasian.”

To compete for those top fund-raising jobs, though, candidates themselves will need to bolster their résumés, he says. Master’s degrees, he believes, will “become a cutting point in the future,” especially for higher-education development jobs within the next 10 to 15 years.

“If I’m hiring for a position, I will easily get 200 to 300 résumés. If you don’t have an undergrad degree, you’re immediately cut,” he says. “And, sadly, it becomes the easy cut.”