$1M grant to boost number of Black executives
A 2-year-old effort to increase the number of Black professionals in Pittsburgh’s executive suites aims to expand its programs and impact in the region and nationwide through a $1 million grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation.
Officials with The Advanced Leadership Initiative said the funds will help it become a standalone nonprofit to be known as The Advanced Leadership Institute and scheduled to launch by summer 2021.
The initiative’s efforts to date have focused on an executive academy based at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business that provides midcareer African American professionals with training, coaching and mentoring to help them navigate unconscious bias and racial issues in the workplace.
As it evolves into an institute, the goal is to develop more programs for its alumni network and possibly for young, emerging Black leaders who aren’t quite ready for the executive academy, said Evan Frazier, founding director of the initiative and senior vice president of community affairs for Highmark Health.
The vision also calls for adapting its programs so that Pittsburgh-based employers could tap into them for workers based elsewhere, or groups in other cities could replicate them, said Mr. Frazier.
“We see Pittsburgh as the flagship and demonstration model,” he said.
A total of 51 individuals have graduated from two academy
cohorts the initiative offered in 2019 and 2020, with some already benefiting from promotionsand new executive-level jobs at Pittsburgh organizations, said Mr. Frazier.
Less than 1% of C-suite positions at Pittsburgh’s top public companies are held by Black executives, according to the initiative’s research.
Nationwide, only four Black chief executives are among the Fortune 500 — a list of the largest companies in the U.S. ranked by revenue.
Only 18 Black chief executives have appeared on the Fortune 500 since 1999.
The local initiative is currently compiling data about its actual impact in terms of participants moving up the career ladder, said Mr. Frazier.
But it counts several moves as successes.
For example, a member of the 2019 cohort, Michael Thomas, this year landed a promotion to executive vice president, PNC Real Estate.
Andrea Stanford, a member of the 2020 cohort, earlier this year moved from assistant county manager for Allegheny County to vice president and Pittsburgh regional manager for BNY Mellon.
Lance Hyde, from the 2019 cohort, this year was named director of global inclusion and diversity at Koppers.
“There’s lots of anecdotal evidence that people feel more confident and connected and … they’re getting more visibility,” said Mr. Frazier. “That’s a start, but there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to continue to see noticeable change within our region.”
The initiative will continue to be housed under the fiscal sponsorship of Downtown-based Poise Foundation, a Black-led philanthropy, until it spins out as an independent nonprofit institute.
The $1 million grant will also allow it to add staff; it currently employs only a managing director, Robert Young.
Sam Reiman, director of the Richard King Mellon Foundation, which along with the Heinz Endowments funded the initiative’s launch in 2018, said its recent $1 million investment evolved from a series of conversations the philanthropy’s staff held with Black leaders in Pittsburgh in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd — a Black man who died while in the custody of police officers in Minneapolis — to determine how it could support the Black community.
Mr. Reiman personally spoke with Mr. Frazier, who told him after two years of a successful pilot, the initiative, with more capital, “could be scaled nationally and disseminated to different cities … to create more opportunities for Black leaders.”
“We couldn’t be more supportive of the mission the initiative and Evan are trying to accomplish,” said Mr. Reiman. “Having greater diversity really drove our decision-making.”
Marsha Jones, co-chair of the initiative’s advisory board and executive vice president and chief diversity officer at PNC Financial Services Group, said the initiative has boosted support for Black professionals in Pittsburgh who sometimes feel they have to assume different identities to “fit into the experiences of corporate America.”
“Often they are the only Black in the conference room or a meeting,” she said. “So there are individuals there who can’t understand their perspective.
“But when they come together as a cohort, it enables them to validate the value they bring to their respective organizations … and provides psychological support we believe will help them create even stronger networks.”