My thought for the day revolves around the subject of historical lack of diversity on nonprofit boards. By now almost everyone in the sector is aware of the HUGE disproportionate lack of representation by people of color on nonprofit boards. Huge!
We also have become aware that one of the contributing factors to this situation is that those who are on boards and recruit new members work within their networks. Clearly, folks who are white have networks more composed of those who are white than people of color. This appears to be as true now as it must have been in the early days of nonprofits AND equally interesting, is true for organizations that are developed by people of color as much as those developed by white people. It's all about network limitations. Now, as I am not a social scientist I can not speak informed enough about why networks are so race or ethnically limited in their diversity. I can guess. The Hungarian Club is made up of Hungarians and like other ethnic clubs (Irish or Polish or Russian) tends not to be inclusive of other ethnicities but possibly races except through possibly marriage.
Now there is an equally and perhaps more important consequence of this lack of diversity on boards and one which also interestingly harks back to the early history of nonprofit boards. The early boards, as I understand it, were largely comprised of the "richer" community folks who saw a "problem that needed fixing". These folks got their other "friends" together to address the problems they saw and most certainly, these problems were likely the issues concerning the have nots. (Of course I could comment that the have nots were borne of an economic reality largely created by the, most often, spouses of these good problem solvers. And the problem: rarely if at all did the problem solvers actually ask their beneficiaries what they needed or wanted to be better off. And thus the cycle begins.
So while it is simpler to speak to the visible disproportionate composition of boards, what is equally at the surface of problematic composition is a failure to have those who are to benefit from a nonprofit's offerings at the table to cite needs, wants and solutions. Let us be aware then that diversity is about having all involved at the table - not just those who think they have the solutions and come from one lens.