Businesswoman, Novelist, Donor: a Wealth of Role Models for Girls

When Pamela Thomas-Graham, a 36-year-old executive vice-president at NBC, was growing up in Detroit,

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her heroes were people like Thurgood Marshall, the civil-rights lawyer who became the first black Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

None of the girls in her middle-class neighborhood, she says, would have thought to choose a business executive as a role model.

“All the business leaders that we knew about were older white men, and it was just really hard for us to identify with them,” she says.

But times have changed, and now Ms. Thomas-Graham hopes that her career success will inspire many young girls to take business seriously. She is working hard to make sure that happens by giving to and volunteering at Girls Incorporated (No. 175 on the Philanthropy 400 list), a 52-year-old charity that encourages young women — especially those from low-income or minority families — to pursue professional careers.

The first black female partner at McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s largest management-consulting companies, Ms. Thomas-Graham in September was appointed president of CNBC.com, the Internet arm of the network’s business-oriented cable channel.

Ms. Thomas-Graham is more than just a business mogul, however. She is the author of two much-praised mystery novels featuring a young black heroine: A Darker Shade of Crimson and Blue Blood. The novels’ heroine is an economics professor at Harvard University, where Ms. Thomas-Graham herself earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, as well as both a master’s in business administration and a law degree.

Ms. Thomas-Graham says she got involved with Girls Incorporated in the hope that she could do more than just provide cash (she has donated about $20,000) and business expertise.

“I thought it would be helpful for the girls to have someone involved in their organization who looked like them — someone who grew up in Detroit and who didn’t have a lot of the advantages that they might perceive are necessary to be successful,” she says.

Isabel Carter Stewart, national executive director of Girls Incorporated, says Ms. Thomas-Graham represents a “new breed of donor” — one who, like many women her age, wants to get heavily involved in a charity’s work. Adds Ms. Stewart: “She exemplifies what I would hope many of our girls would aspire to: a non-traditional career, a superb education, and a sense of herself that allows her to give back to others.”

Ms. Thomas-Graham is one of 4,400 donors — mostly women — who allocated gifts to the national office of Girls Incorporated in 1998. Donations of $1,000 or more accounted for 67 per cent of the $3.2-million that the group raised from private sources last year. Nationwide, Girls Incorporated and its chapters raised almost $58-million last year.

Ms. Thomas-Graham got involved with Girls Incorporated after she attended the organization’s annual fund-raising luncheon in New York. She says she was moved by the stories of the young girls the charity serves — about 60 per cent of whom are minorities and 70 per cent from families that earn less than $25,000 a year.

She joined the board of Girls Incorporated in 1996, when the organization was in the middle of developing a five-year strategic plan. The charity says Ms. Thomas-Graham’s experience at McKinsey — plus her ability to get her colleagues involved in contributing ideas — helped greatly in shaping the plan.

One of the goals enumerated in the new plan calls for Girls Incorporated to help young women learn to achieve economic independence.

To carry out that agenda, the charity two years ago started the Economic Literacy Initiative, which Ms. Thomas-Graham says is one of her favorite efforts.

As part of the program, girls are asked to find out how their mothers and other significant women in their lives manage their finances. In May, affiliates in 26 cities also held mother-daughter workshops, paid for by the SnackWell’s division of Nabisco.

The workshops encouraged mothers and daughters to discuss their future goals and money. Girls Incorporated also published “Money Matters: An Economic Literacy Action Kit for Girls,” which contains games and other activities that show girls how to create a budget, put together a business plan, and otherwise learn about finances.

“It is important that girls be able to manage their own money,” says Ms. Thomas-Graham. “They should think of themselves as being independent economically and not be intimidated by numbers.”

Another important way to reach young girls, says Ms. Thomas-Graham, is through one of their formative experiences: playing with dolls.

That’s why Ms. Thomas-Graham says she is so enthusiastic about one of Girls Incorporated’s new efforts: a collaboration with Mattel and Working Woman magazine to create the Working Woman Barbie.

The Barbie comes dressed in a gray business suit and has her own laptop computer and cellular phone. In the package with the doll is a CD-ROM that youngsters can use while playing. On the disk are activities drawn from many of the charity’s economic-literacy materials.

The Barbie arrangement is one that Ms. Thomas-Graham hopes can become a model for the future. Mattel will provide Girls Incorporated with more than $1.5-million over three years. In return, the charity will provide data about girls that it collects at its research center in Indianapolis.

The company is free to use the data in developing products and advertisements aimed at girls, while Girls Incorporated has a chance to get its message to the millions of young girls who each year receive Barbie dolls.

Ms. Thomas-Graham and Girls Incorporated officials acknowledge that the organization feared that the approach would be seen as a “sell-out,” especially by feminists who worry that Barbie’s hourglass figure and flawless features could harm the self-images of girls who look different.

But Ms. Thomas-Graham says it’s probably better to work with the producers of Barbie dolls than to protest the doll. “I don’t think that anyone would naively say that the partnership is going to transform everything that Mattel is doing,” she says. “But I think it’s going to contribute to meaningful new ideas of how they are thinking about their business.

“And it certainly helps us in getting the name out in front of parents and in front of girls.”

Ms. Thomas-Graham is concerned not only about teaching girls to become economically independent. She also thinks that charities deserve a measure of independence from restrictions placed on them by donors.

That’s why Ms. Thomas-Graham says she has never earmarked her donations — which started with a $550 gift in 1996 and grew to $7,500 this year — for specific purposes.

“As a general rule, with all the groups that I’m involved with, I know that what they need more than anything is unrestricted gifts,” says Ms. Thomas-Graham, who is also a board member of the New York City Opera, the American Red Cross of Greater New York, and the Inner-City Scholarship Fund. “I prefer to give an unrestricted gift — but then I’m involved in the organization, so I know what their priorities are and that I’m in line with them.”

Getting into the habit of giving is important to her. “I’m not a person of unlimited resources, but I give what I can,” she says. “A lot of my friends at this life stage say, ‘Well, I can’t do it right now because I have a little kid, I have a mortgage, I’ll give it later.’”

“My philosophy,” she says, “is that I want to be doing it all the time. I want it to be part of how I live my life. And I want it to not just be a financial contribution that I make — I want to understand and contribute to what these groups are doing.”