Most people might envision the exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy as a privileged boarding school, perhaps even a white, male-privileged boarding school. But when it comes to its board of directors, white men account for less than 10% of membership.
A dozen of Phillips Exeter’s 21 board members are from the BIPOC population and a dozen are women. (The reason that doesn’t add up to 21 is that some of the women are also among the BIPOC members.) The school’s leadership team is also one of the most diverse in New Hampshire — three-quarters are female (including the chief financial officer) and three are Black.
In fact, Phillips Exeter is the most diverse of the 13 largest, transparent, nonprofit organizations examined by NH Business Review. On the whole, the state’s nonprofits are more diverse than both private and publicly traded businesses. The percentage of women in leadership roles, however, is still below their share of the population. Women make up 40% of the membership of nonprofit boards and 37% of leadership teams.
As for BIPOC board members, they account for 17.3% of membership. Less than 11% of leadership teams are BIPOC.
Nationwide, some 22% of nonprofit board members are not white, according to BoardSource, a national firm that keeps track of nonprofit boards. That’s up from 16% in 2017.
Among the 13 nonprofits NH Business Review examined, only two organizations were not led by white men and only two — a different two — didn’t have a white male CFO.
‘Changing profile of residents’
Though it serves one of the most diverse areas in the state, Nashua-based St. Joseph’s Hospital is perhaps the least diverse of the largest nonprofits. Its 11-member board is all white and has three women. Its leadership team is also all-white, with four women in the 10 top jobs. The hospital did not dispute the figures, but said that it was committed to improve.
“We are a community hospital and understand that our mission of service and our leadership must reflect the changing profile of the residents of greater Nashua,” wrote John A. Jurczyk, the hospital’s president, in response to NH Business Review inquiries.
He said that, as a member of Covenant Health — a sixstate regional Catholic hospital network — St. Joseph’s has established a DEI Council and is “actively recruiting and interviewing new prospective board members with a specific focus on diversity.”
The board of Southern New Hampshire Health — which also focuses on the greater Nashua area — includes one member who is Black as well as seven women. But its leadership team is also all-white and there are two women on its eight-member board.
But the hospital says it is also trying to improve its DEI efforts, launching a steering committee with the help of Dr. Trinidad Tellez, adjunct instructor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice. One of the first steps the initiative will take is to collect data, said Dawn Fernald, a hospital spokesperson.
“We are working to understand our workforce and our community to gain awareness of the types of diversity within our own organization and within the greater communities that we serve,” she said.
Similarly, Catholic Medical Center in Manchester serves a much more diverse community compared to the rest of the state, but, emphasized spokesperson Lauren Collins-Cline, “we don’t just take care of Manchester. We draw from the overall population.” Both its 23-member leadership team and its 13-member board is all white.
The hospital has increased its number of BIPOC employees thanks to training and inclusion programs, but so far, the gains have been mainly at the mid-level. “When you look at the senior roles, there hasn’t been a whole lot of turnover,” said Collins-Cline.
‘Not the flavor of the month’
As for educational institutions, there is also quite a variety in how they address diversity.
For instance, St. Anselm College’s 39-member board includes only three BIPOC members and a quarter are women. They will be adding more members in the fall, said President Joseph A. Favazza, but the college’s charter requires nine board members to be monks, and “you aren’t going to get any women there,” he said.
The college does have a cultural diversity officer, Ande Diaz. In an email to NH Business Review, she took issue with the focus on numbers.
“Diversity is about breadth of differences, inclusion is about the active and intentional engagement with diversity,” she said, adding, “oftentimes organizations focus on compositional (otherwise termed ‘representational’). And composition diversity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient.”
On the other extreme is Phillips Exeter. All its trustees are alumni, according to Bill Rawson, the school principal, “and we have a large body of diverse alumni.” But, he said, to attract a strong, diversified group of trustees, “we work at it. It is just something we are very deliberate about.”
Delta Dental is neither a hospital nor a school, but it too has been working on diversity for a long time. Its 42-member tri-state board is nearly 50% female and about a fifth are BIPOC, though its leadership team is all white.
“We were doing this before it was a popular thing to do,” said CEO Tom Raffio, before “things hit the fan in 2020, before the whole Black Lives Matter movement” and the increased focused on racial diversity.
The board has even set up a DEI subcommittee that is working on recruiting more minority board members “because we take this thing very seriously,” said Raffio. ”It’s authentic. It’s not the flavor of the month.”
As for top leadership, Delta Dental, like so many other successful organizations, has a “strong senior leadership team,” but there will be some retirements soon, and then, Raffio said, when it comes to diversity in upper management, “the proof will be in the pudding.”
— BOB SANDERS
