Digging in and fighting for the change she wants to see
Dr. Cheryl Hall-Russell is on a mission. She wants her agency — BW3 — to become synonymous with how healthy change happens in Pittsburgh’s corporate and nonprofit spheres. Times being what they are, she’s usually contacted after a business or corporation realizes it is losing the struggle to diversify its leadership in terms of race and gender.
Ms. Hall-Russell is ready, willing and able to provide feedback and concrete strategies for challenging structures that make diversity difficult in some environments and has an expertise backed by a facility for crunching numbers and hard data.
“From day one I tell my potential clients that I bring my whole self into spaces,” she said. “My colly hair, my slight Midwestern/Southern twang, and my style that is a mixture of my education, my leadership experiences and my culture.”
While empathetic, the North Side resident is not interested in holding anybody’s hand and assuring those at the top that they’re not racist. She is interested in sparking substantive change in organizations, businesses and corporations that want to do better when it comes to DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion.
“BW3 had been an idea living in my head for quite a while,” Ms. Hall-Russell said, adding that her doctoral work at Point Park University focused on Black women leaders around the country. During her research interviews, she noticed recurring themes.
“The road to the top was strewn with trauma, racism, forced assimilation and cement ceilings. There was also a lot of pride and resilience, and a strong commitment to making it better for those who came behind us,” she said.
“I cobbled my experience, education and determination into BW3, determined to work with corporations and nonprofits interested in doing this work differently — allowing us to walk beside them as they reimagined their leadership models and their work leaders and communities of color.”
For Ms. Hall-Russell who “entered executive leadership more years ago than I want to share,” the negative impact of the
intersections of gender and race in the corporate world is something learned from personal experience. With insight born of research and life experience, she has put together an approach to diversity, equity and inclusion that challenges companies to be the best versions of themselves.
“We involve them in adopting practices that reveal the power of running diverse and inclusive companies,” she said, reiterating that organizations focusing on those values have stronger bottom lines, are more innovative, and manage to attract and retain staff at higher rates all while centering equity.
“I had to ensure that they understand that Black and Brown leaders aren’t broken and don’t need to be fixed by enrolling them into Assimilation Universities or pairing them with mentors determined to turn them into what they want them to be instead of appreciating who they are.”
BW3 is an acronym for Black Women Wise Women. “I knew I wanted to build a partnership with other Black women interested in DEI and I’ve always said it’s better to be wise than strong,” she said.
A self-proclaimed disrupter recruited to Pittsburgh from her native Indiana to be CEO of the nonprofit Hill House Association in 2011, Ms. Hall-Russell said it didn’t take long for the issues highlighted in last year’s Gender Equity Commission Reportto appear. She worked for six years to turnaround the financially troubled Hill House. She formed BW3 in 2017.
“I could not have paid for a better education on power structures and systemic racism,” she said. “It was a master class ... as I learned more about the city, what I loved and what I loathed, I adapted and put together a game plan that I’d been working on for a while.”
Asked to give an example of the kind of backward thinking she’s encountered in Pittsburgh, Ms. HallRussell was blunt: “We [women of color] aren’t valued,” she said. “I was on a municipal board here and when I challenged its strategy, the powers that be convened to discuss finding another more cooperative Black person to replace me like I was a black broken Lego.
“I wasn’t seen as a person who brought value and experience, although I clearly am confident I did; to them, I was a diversity appointment. That stung. But it was only one of 1,000 stings of microaggressions that we accumulate over a career. It was merely a microcosm of a much bigger problem here.”
The Gender Equity Commission Report compiled by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 was a surprise to some, but for Black women, a sobering reminder of their everyday reality. Titled “Pittsburgh’s Inequality Across Gender and Race,” the report revealed dramatic disparities between the races ranging from infant mortality and poverty rates to homicide, cancer and unemployment. It concluded Black women have it especially bad here.
“We are trailing in every statistic from health to our positions in the workforce. This didn’t just happen,” she said. “The systems that keep producing these inequities like mills working overtime, have to be broken and rebuilt to provide the opportunities we have earned.”
Having experienced the best and the worst the city has to offer Black women in particular, Ms. Hall-Russell aligned herself with those she believed were committed to permanently changing the daunting statistics. “I had a teenage [daughter] looking at me and I was determined to show her how to dig in and fight for the change you want to see.”
The leadership team of one of her national clients was divided on the need to launch an aggressive diversity, equity and inclusion program. “The initial meeting with the team was tense. By the end of the two days of working with them, the most resistant became a convert and I now cannot work fast enough to keep up with them.”
Ms. Hall-Russell also partners with 1Hood Media and the UrbanKind Institute to host a Facebook Live weekly program called “What Black Pittsburgh Needs to Know.” She’s the moderator and producer of the program that averages 30,000 views a week.
She’s launched her first podcast called “Equity Up Close” in which she interviews a variety of creative and business professionals who “creatively infuse equity into their work.”
COVID-19 hasn’t lightened the load. “My work has actually picked up over the last couple of months after an initial scary period of broken contracts because my clients were experiencing the impact of the initial quarantine,” she said.
“The ... murder of Mr. George Floyd by police began to center some companies and organizations as they realized ignoring the scope of institutional racism was no longer optional. I have taken on clients who lean in and are serious about DEI and antiracism work and who are willing to make long-term changes. It is the hardest emotional work I have ever done.”