The Numbers Don’t Lie“We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.” The desktop background on my computer is almost always a photo of one - or some - of our grandchildren. Seeing the photo always prompts me to smile, and sometimes even to phone one of their parents (a province away). Seeing their picture definitely prompts me to take action! The photo is about excitement and all the promise that lies before them in their very young lives. As someone who has titled herself the Manager of Excitement at Vantage Point, I believe it is critical we capture that excitement of young people in our organizations. In my previous work in not-for-profit organizations in other cities, I learned that one of the greatest educational experiences I could have was working with young people. With that understanding, in organizations where I worked, we began to recruit people other than “the usual suspects” to paid roles in the sector. Doing so proved quite invigorating. Now we are seeing many young people who actually decide to find full time employment in community organizations. How cool is that! But regretfully, recruiting young people to boards is not usually considered. Usually when someone mentions diversity on a board, we think only of a place of culture, rather than diversity in all its many and varied forms. Rosetta Thurman writes one of the blogs we read regularly at Vantage Point. She wrote a recent piece that really questions this lack of diversity. Rosetta quotes the last BoardSource nonprofit governance index that tells us only 2% of board members are under the age of 30, while 62 % are over the age of 50. If we only consider the size of the population younger than 30 years of age, that really can be the first step to encourage us to seriously consider this demographic. Then, if we also take into account the technological savvy of this group and the way they have experienced a new global reality, it makes even more sense for us to have them on the boards of our organizations, particularly if we really want to ensure we are meeting our mission in the world around us. More than ten years ago, we discussed the possibility of young people on our board, and we proceeded to recruit a young woman named Miranda who was nineteen and entering law school. One of the uncertainties we lived with during that process of recruitment was whether she would attend law school at the U of T or UBC. We were very fortunate UBC was her first choice! Miranda joined our board, spoke up frequently, and then was absent from the table for good parts of a couple years while she studied very hard. (We gave her an informal leave of absence.) Miranda eventually returned to the table to ultimately take the role of Chair and exert her quiet confident influence on the group, while achieving her stated goal of learning by listening. One of our board members who had preceded Miranda’s time on the board described her, during one of his last meetings, as “a breath of fresh air.” Miranda is the same age as my younger daughter, and I had an opportunity to learn so much from her. Our organization benefited significantly from her modeling teaching and learning as parts of the same continuum. Over the years, we have kept an eye on the diversity of age at our board table, though sometimes in this particular area we lose sight of that age – as age does not stay constant as other types of diversity do. For example, our gender diversity remains the same – men stay men and women stay women. Those who have a background in business or academia always have that background. However, the 28-year-old becomes an over-30–year-old very quickly! So we must remain ever vigilant, as sometimes in the light of examining everything else, we overlook the importance of the perspective of the young person. Our mission at Vantage Point is to inspire and build leadership in the voluntary sector, and we have been particularly interested in ensuring that young people have leadership opportunities. Melissa Sines, in this blog post, clearly states how, as a young person, she has had an opportunity to learn much about being a leader from her role on a board. Serious board involvement can provide excellent leadership opportunities and learning. Like the very young people who are my grandchildren and inspire me to smile, laugh and imagine possibilities, let us also begin to think of the young people who can bring great diversity of thought and action to our boards of directors. There is tremendous value in diversity that dictates a new way of visioning the future of our community.
Colleen Kelly is the Executive Director of Vantage Point About Vantage PointThe mission of Vantage Point is to inspire & build leadership in the voluntary sector. This publication is intended to be a medium of communication and information for the many organizations active in the volunteer and not-for-profit sector. The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect official policy of the Board of Directors of Vantage Point. Vantage Point |
