To Create Equitable Institutions, We All Need to Shed Our Deeply Embedded Biases

When I walked into my first interview with the search committee recruiting a new chief executive at the Consumer Health Foundation, I was taken aback.

The four people seated around the table were African-Americans. I remember starting with a loud “um” that probably indicated how unsettled I was.

A white leader was retiring from the organization, which is dedicated to giving people of all races and ethnicities an equal opportunity to be healthy, and the people making the choice of a successor all shared my ancestry. Was something wrong in this organization?

Reflecting on that moment later, I have come to realize how deeply embedded implicit biases are for me—and likely everyone else—even though I eschew racism and discrimination. Until we overcome these biases, we will fall short of creating equitable social institutions and structures.

That lesson was driven home to me by the work of john powell (who renders his name in all lowercase), director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California at Berkeley, who points out that our social behavior is driven by stereotypes that operate automatically—and therefore unconsciously—when we interact with other people.

One good example of implicit bias is Nelson Mandela admitting to his fear of flying with a black African pilot because he had internalized black African to mean “incompetent.” He said he realized moments later that he had fallen into the apartheid mind-set.

I am embarrassed to admit that was part of my own experience the day I was in the interview chair at the foundation questioning the viability of the organization because of the racial background of those “in charge.” However, I am sharing this story publicly because I believe that by talking about these experiences, we begin to have power over bias and can then begin the hard work of taking action.

I needed no data (although there are plenty) to know that a foundation board search committee made up of African-Americans was atypical.

According to a Council on Foundations survey of more than 500 foundations, 85 percent of foundation board members are white and 62 percent are men. But the percentages are mostly higher than that because the foundations that responded to the survey are larger and more diverse. [Editor’s note: The previous sentence has been clarified to correct an inaccuracy.]

Given these numbers, we can only expect that governance of foundation boards would be viewed as a white man’s domain, thus partially explaining my response to the situation with which I was presented.

When I moved on to the next round of interviews, which included the full board, I walked into the room only to find that fully two-thirds of this board’s members were African-American, Latino, and Asian-American—and 50 percent were women.

Unlike token diversity measures that seek to fill quotas, I was experiencing game-changing diversity. This was diversity aimed at ensuring that there were people on the board who come from the communities served by the nonprofits we support. This was diversity that would necessarily change our priorities and enhance our work because diverse perspectives create better ideas.

The phenomenon of governance structures that lack diversity is true for many kinds of boards, not just those at foundations.

A 2010 Urban Institute report found that people of color are underrepresented on nonprofit boards in the Baltimore-Washington area, given their share in the region’s population. The report found that 77 percent of nonprofit board members in the area are white, and some boards—24 percent of them—are completely made up of white people.

To support our grantees in changing this dynamic, last year we made available a Webinar and tool kit called Diversity in Action from the nonprofit group BoardSource.

Creating more diverse and inclusive organizations is often something that nonprofits set aside until everybody has more time. But something else is also at work: Leaders often fear that involving people typically underrepresented in nonprofit governance could make it harder to raise money. After all, white men have long had the most power and resources in our society.

But today African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, and others also have power and resources through vastly different networks. Take for example the networks that were activated during the presidential campaigns President Obama ran.

Many members of minority groups have the skills needed to be effective fundraisers and to ensure that nonprofits are governed well. They are ready and willing to serve for the very reasons whites are: They are passionate about the mission of the organization. Attracting them to board service requires nonprofits to adopt recruitment practices and policies that embrace diversity. It also requires nonprofits to create inclusive environments that value the skills and contributions of everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity.

Given the high likelihood that we have all been affected by implicit biases, people in the nonprofit world will need to flex some new muscles to change things. The work of the D5 Coalition, a five-year effort to improve diversity in foundation grant making and leadership practices, is an example.

Across the United States, our communities are growing more diverse every day. To build the organizations of the future and ensure they are ready to serve their communities, it’s time to take aggressive steps to make sure that charity and foundation boards reflect America’s population.