🔒Amid push for diversity, training program readies community residents for nonprofit board seats

Sarah Sutherland is a medical assistant who’s currently studying for a qualification in healthcare administration. A lifelong Hartford resident, she’s always made the most of opportunities to get involved in public service, but felt like she had more to offer. “I had been trying to research how I could help,” she said. “I was just looking for a way to serve my community, but on a leadership level.” Earlier this year, Sutherland saw a social media post about a program called SEAT that offered to train her to become a nonprofit board member. That’s how she became part of the first cohort of Hartford community members to go through the 10-week training course. “I went in not knowing anything,” she said. “I came out knowing about governance, the way the organization works, fiduciary responsibilities, strategic planning. Every week was something new.” Across the country, nonprofit boards suffer from a diversity problem. According to research by BoardSource, 77% of nonprofit board chairs identify as white, and 63% of board members overall identify as white. Meanwhile, 60% of board members are 55 or older. With many boards looking for a significant financial contribution from their members, most are also wealthy. “SEAT started as a result of my personal experience serving as a double minority, a black female, on nonprofit boards,” said Kim Bianca Burgess. She’s a longtime entrepreneur based in Bridgeport. Her company, VCL Consulting Group, provides performance improvement training to residents of underserved Black and Latino communities and to human service organizations working in those areas. “I found it difficult to have a support system, as well as to find training that would help me continue my process in board service,” Burgess said. She also serves as an adjunct professor at CT State Community College, and so she decided to put that expertise to work to develop the training curriculum herself. The program she developed, SEAT, ran its first board training in 2021 for community members in Bridgeport. Since then, the program has delivered 11 cohorts with 64 participants, branching out into Norwalk, Waterbury, New Haven and Hartford. Its second Hartford cohort will meet in September, funded by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, and after that it will add Danbury.

So far, 43 of its graduates have been seated on nonprofit boards around Connecticut. Sutherland will join the board of Hartford’s Interval House in September. “We need more people in our community to understand what’s happening behind the scenes,” Sutherland said. “I wanted to know what was happening — to be a part of the decision-making, to better help serve (the people) that live here.”

A lot to offer

That community involvement is a blind spot for many organizations, according to Rebecca Cordero, director of the Fairfield Community Foundation’s Center for Nonprofit Excellence. “We know that our boards are not representative of the communities that they’re serving,” Cordero said. “They’re the people who are helping guide us and making these really big strategic decisions. It’s really important that the board be representative of the people that they’re serving so that the story that they’re hearing and telling is one of community.” Board matching programs are a longstanding tradition, Cordero said, but SEAT takes a very different approach. Most programs are set up to help match corporate executives with nonprofits. “So, they’ll connect with an organization that wants to help their C-level executives step onto board programs,” she said. The Foundation has now funded two of SEAT’s Norwalk cohorts, and a third is in the works. Cordero says the program is solving a key problem for boards that want to become more representative. “For so many boards or organizations who have not gotten there yet in terms of diversity, it can be kind of a challenge,” she said. “How do you find people who are interested in the cause and represent the community?” Burgess specializes in finding those candidates. She says they can look very non-traditional, but they have a lot to offer. “That single mom who has four kids and they’re all going in different directions, they have great time-management skills. They have great planning skills,” she said. “That father who wanted to support their son in sports and who then became a coach — they have access to resources regarding public recreation centers, or even partnerships with the city just as a result of volunteering.” Burgess started this effort at a time — just a few years ago — when DEI initiatives were in vogue. The pendulum has swung in the opposite direction now, with pressure from the Trump administration to abandon diversity programs. But she says she hasn’t experienced any fall off in interest from nonprofits. “In fact, we are in more demand now than we were in 2021,” she said. “The organizations that we work with are already committed to diversifying their boards. And while we focus on racial diversity, the other capital that our residents bring is the lived experience, which is hugely absent from nonprofit boards.” Her success is now being recognized beyond state borders. Burgess recently launched a SEAT cohort in Philadelphia in partnership with the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations.