In 2021, after four years as a board member of the Philadelphia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (PICC), I was asked to serve as its president.

Coming into the role, I knew we needed to make some changes. Like other nonprofit organizations, the PICC was changing because of the pandemic. It was more difficult to bring the community together, harder to determine services of value to offer. We couldn’t host gala events, or take missions to Israel, and companies were pulling back on their spending with nonprofits and chambers of commerce across the board.

We needed to be more nimble than we used to be. The organization is 30 years old. For much of that 30 years, pre-pandemic, we’ve been operating the same way. Wash, rinse, repeat. It worked.

It was time for change. Having been on the board, one of my observations was that it had become comfortable, with people who thought similarly. The result was disengagement. Decisions and operations were left to only a few. It was really important to me to get more and different perspectives in the room.

The PICC’s executive director, Vered Nohi, agreed. Over the past few years, she had started the process of introducing diversity onto the board. Historically, the nonprofit’s nominating committee formed the board for the incoming president. Given my perspectives, and my background in building teams, she invited me to work on it with her, to magnify her impact, and together we presented nominees to the committee.

Why diversity matters

For some of us, the reason to increase diversity may be as simple as it feeling like the right thing to do.

Of course, when we’re operating an organization, we usually need a more compelling reason to make big changes. Fortunately, when something’s the right thing to do, it’s often also the smart thing to do.

Research shows plenty of upsides to diverse workplaces — more innovation, more successful decision making, better ability to connect with a wider variety of stakeholders.

I saw it in action when Tiffany McKever began connecting with PICC. Tiffany is the Founder and CEO of Consensus Healthcare Consultants Inc. She’s also an African-American woman from Northern New Jersey, not historically PICC’s traditional demographic.

She met Vered in July 2019, immediately benefited from that connection, and joined us on a mission to Israel in September of that same year. She worked with the executive director to set up meetings with a significant healthcare system in Israel, which helped her make decisions about differentiating her startup in the market.

“Having traveled globally for business in the past, I must say Israel’s economic and innovation capabilities became very evident to me during the mission,” says Tiffany. “Candidly, I’d felt like I hit a creative ceiling in the US before meeting with innovators in Israel. That mission ultimately expanded my perspective on what’s possible because it catapulted me out of my US industry segmentation mindset and into a sea of possibilities.”

Tiffany is now Executive VP on PICC’s board, and her perspective continues to help us innovate, to reimagine our future so we can provide more value to more members.

See: How Coaching Helped Me Come Out

Increasing diversity on a nonprofit board

PICC’s mission is to connect our regional companies in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware with the innovation and technological advances happening in Israel. Historically, the board has been relatively white, male, and Jewish — not because the PICC is religious (it’s not) but because those were the business people who tended to have an affiliation with Israel.

With the end of terms and some board member turnover, we were going to have about 10 seats opening up when I became board president. The executive director and I agreed we wanted more women and more people of color on the board.

We faced two main challenges. First, we needed to create a target list of people who would see value in joining the board and who would be aligned with our mission.

Second, we needed to find people who could meet the expectations of board membership. Typically, nonprofit boards are filled with people who can write big checks or who represent companies who can write checks or have lots of friends who can write checks. That expectation can create a barrier for people whose contributions lie in other areas.

Let’s talk about that second challenge first. By having this expectation of major financial contributions, we were limiting who might see themselves as having access to our board. How did we address the problem?

We removed the expectation.

I heard Keith Leaphart, the founder of Philanthropi, say once at a Satell Institute conference that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” He was talking about the value of mentoring. I think it applies in this context as well. People couldn’t see their place on our board because there wasn’t anyone like them on it — including members without the ability to write big checks.

Addressing the second challenge opened up our options for the first challenge. Now we had the opportunity to talk to more diverse candidates, and we were looking for both inherent and acquired diversity. We wanted to target people who wouldn’t think like everyone we had on the board already. As I always say, if you have 10 people around a table and they all agree, nine of them are unnecessary.

We’re on the cusp of the tri-state region of Delaware, New Jersey, and Southeastern Pennsylvania. We wanted representation from all those areas. We had certain industries we wanted represented.

We already had a fair number of women on the board. I set a goal for us to increase the female representation to 50%. And we wanted more people of color.

We built our list of leads, worked our networks.

Now we had to be really good at sales. Not everyone has the time to get involved in a board. Not everyone sees how the PICC might align with their mission. So we had to sell it.

Selling busy people to donate their time is way more difficult than selling to get their money. After all, we know that people can find ways to get more money, but not more time given it’s a limited resource.

What happens after you increase diversity?

The PICC has 24 board of directors seats. We now have 11 of those filled by women and four seats filled by people of color. Tiffany McKever now sits on the executive committee, where she moved up from a role on the advisory board. We added more people from NJ and Delaware, and from more industries (having been heavy in life sciences).

Of course, removing the expectation of major financial donations from board members created a new challenge — how do we find alternative ways of funding the organization?

The good news is that our current board is highly engaged in a process of transformation. We know that what worked for us pre-pandemic isn’t going to work anymore. We’re finding strategies to meet the new economy and the new culture of work in commerce.

Board members are more active than before, and they’re asking to be of service. There are more opinions on the board now, which means we’re more likely to find innovative solutions. And the leadership has become skilled at building consensus.

For the first time ever, we’ve formed operating committees and asked everyone to participate in at least one committee. We started roundtables, a members-only benefit where a board member brings people in similar industries together to meet, collaborate, support, and learn together.

We’ve created opportunities for the board members to help operate the organization. The only paid staff member is the executive director. Since it’s a community-driven organization, we’ve increased how we put the operation of the organization in the community’s hands.

See: Business Leadership and Anti-racism

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum

In late 2021, in the course of finalizing the board nominees, the executive director commented to me that we had done well to increase diversity. She was disappointed that we hadn’t involved anyone openly representing LGTBQ+.

I wasn’t out about my own orientation at the time, so I listened to her feedback while biting my tongue.

Several months later, as I was coming out more publicly, I was able to let her know that we did indeed have such representation on the board and at the executive committee.

Not that we’re in this to check boxes — it’s not performative.

See: How Much Authenticity? When to Make Your Mess Your Message

Final thoughts

We wanted to create a more diverse PICC board because diversity fosters resilience. Nonprofits especially need that combination of toughness and agility to thrive during difficult times.

After almost a half year of serving as the PICC board president, I can start to see the fruits of our efforts. Before our focus on diversity, we had a much more homogenous, passive board. We struggled to move beyond the way things had always been done. (The PICC was founded in 1987.

When we worked to find people who would bring their own, new perspectives to PICC’s mission, of course they wanted to be more engaged. They have novel ideas, and we spend a lot more time strategizing about an inclusive future for our organization and the communities and stakeholders we serve.