Encouraging small baby steps I've seen are small businesses in executive recruiting by minority women owners (yay GenuisMesh). Not only do they broadcast opportunities to everyone (but personally bias to underserved like them), they provide coaching seminars to grow and support resilient leaders...

I just saw a baby step in this maybe in that a job opening listed "Spanish language abilities preferred. " by the source (yay Trevor Project). Sadly all other reposts somehow took out this line that I as a candidate respected and deferred so my latinx peers can be seen.

Lisette, you have raised an important question.

We have been taking the following three steps:

1. Engaging companies and communicating expectations
2. Establishing proxy voting policies that correspond to the expectations (including support for shareholder proposals concerning racial equity audits and civil rights audits, with a very limited set of exceptions)
3. Supporting broad racial justice efforts by companies

We have engaged companies on the broader question of women (the Thirty Percent Coalition leads on women) on boards and people of color, more generally. You can see some of our work with the Racial Justice Investing (RJI) group and with the Midwest Investor Diversity Initiative (MIDI). Lisette, I will raise your concern in the next meeting for both MIDI and RJI.

MIDI has many large funds, including unions and state treasurer's offices. It is a bit slower moving, but very effective. The MIDI website has some excellent resources including a company toolkit. We have engaged Midwest companies that are laggards. Most voluntarily take steps. Those who don't might be subject to a resolution from a member of the group.

RJI pushes the edges more. From RJI, we recently sent a letter to the S & P 100 (where we have higher expectations than say the Russell 3000) communicating expectations for each company to put forward a slate of directors that consists of at least 30% people of color, with particular attention to historically marginalized groups; disclose the race and ethnicity of individual board members in the 2022 proxy statement; indicates likelihood of support for appropriate shareholder proposals calling for improved transparency and the advancement of racial justice; and encourages broad racial justice initiatives within the company. I should be able to report what we saw in the 2022 proxies before long as well as any company responses.

If anyone desires more information, please, feel free to follow up with me.

What about a https://boardmemberinstitute.com specifically for minority populations? An exclusive community of board members and board members to be? This can serve as a pipeline for board recruitment on one hand and as a talent development mechanism on the other. How do we prepare underrepresented populations to assume board roles to which they (by definition) have less exposure? More importantly, how can this community not only serve as functional board members but also as effective board advocates for ESG/DEI?

Again, I think the question should really be: How do we make people care about issues that don't impact them directly but indirectly are very detrimental to them and to the whole?