Philly’s new Center for Leadership Equity wants to support Black nonprofit executives – here’s how

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About 30 years ago, Kelly Woodland was the executive director of a community development nonprofit in Philadelphia’s Point Breeze neighborhood.

Woodland remembers what it was like to lead a small organization with nearly a dozen employees on a razor-thin budget in the 1990s.

It’s not uncommon for Black nonprofit leaders to do philanthropic work inspired by injustice experienced in their own lives, which makes the work very personal, Woodland said.

“We don’t come to this work because we just figured, we just wanted to do this once we were in undergrad or graduate school,” he said. “These were things we personally experienced and then when we got to a certain point [in our careers] we said we wanted to do something about it.”

Now decades later, armed with extensive experience in the philanthropic, education and social investment worlds, Woodland said he wants to lift up his fellow leaders as the managing director of leadership equity at the United Way of Greater Philadelphia, and Southern New Jersey.

He’s assembling the new Center for Leadership Equity in Philadelphia, a new organization informed by a local affinity group, Black Nonprofit Chief Executives of Philadelphia with 300 members.

Woodland said the key to the center’s success right now is that membership to the affinity group and the center is free for local Black nonprofit leaders.

“Programming is throughout the year and it’s free because primarily we’re interested in building relationships, not transactions,” he said.

The Center for Leadership Equity will be run inside the local United Way in Philadelphia.

Its launch is supported by The William Penn Foundation, Comcast Corporation, The Hamilton Family Foundation, Philadelphia Health Partnership, The Patricia Kind Family Foundation, and Thomas Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation.

But the goal is to keep raising money to expand the center’s scope, Woodland said. Which would take about $1 million in operational costs, he estimated.

Black nonprofit leaders “walk in a few different worlds,” Woodland said.

And that reality became apparent during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and after the murder of George Floyd by police that sparked a racial reckoning nationwide. That is why the affinity group was created four years ago.

“The Black community has been identified as one of the more vulnerable communities. We’ve had to struggle with deficits for so long. It’s important that the folks who have been most vulnerable are responsible for creating strategies and solutions,” he said. “We were impacted as individuals, but we were also leading organizations that were serving people who look like us who were also impacted [by the racial reckoning of 2020].

The level of expertise and education obtained by leaders has changed since Woodland joined the nonprofit world.

“What you’re seeing now is the type of leader who is very financially astute, very strategic and very thoughtful about how to reach outcomes. But they need more funding support so they can be more effective for their communities,” he said.

The center will offer customized professional development, access to funding resources and tools to improve advocacy work. It will have leadership training, executive coaching, mentorship, conferences, events and wellness retreats. These are things that affinity group members told him they needed to become more successful in the nonprofit space. For example, Black-led nonprofits are more likely to rely on government contracts that run on a reimbursement system and require strict accounting and record keeping, he said. However, nonprofits tend to be so focused on the mission of serving the community that administrative tasks can fall through the cracks, he said. And when there is an issue, there’s not often a broad support group available to lean on.

“Leadership is isolating, but when you’re a Black nonprofit leader it’s especially isolating because the experiences you have — you’re feeling it on a couple of different levels. The success is incredibly high and the struggles are very low because it’s personal,” he said. “For a long time, nonprofits have had to do more with less, especially Black nonprofits. [But] funders support innovation. It’s very difficult to be innovative when you’re trying to be resourceful.”