Commentary: Minority execs ready to step up and lead

• Story Highlights
• John Rice: President Obama is stressing need for national service
• He says there’s a huge need for leaders in the nonprofit world
• Rice: It’s crucial to train leaders from minority communities
• He says these leaders can help change communities in desperate need

By John Rice
Special to CNN

Editor’s note: John Rice is founder and CEO of Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), a New York-based national nonprofit organization seeking to develop “the next generation of African American, Hispanic and Native American leaders in major corporations, nonprofit organizations and entrepreneurial ventures.”

NEW YORK (CNN) — President Obama has challenged all Americans to participate in the volunteer service movement and to support initiatives that help solve the problems that plague our communities.

He recently introduced the Social Innovation Fund, intended to help increase the impact of the most effective and innovative nonprofits in our communities. This is a tremendous step in the right direction, but in order to expand these initiatives, we need a broader pool of leaders with a deep understanding of the communities they are serving and who have the skills, experience and relationships required to succeed in leadership roles.

According to the Bridgespan Group, a leading nonprofit consulting firm, the number of vacant senior manager roles in the nonprofit arena is ever increasing, with 24,000 positions available in 2009 alone. Over the next 10 years, this sector will need to attract and develop more than two times the number of people currently employed in order to fill these roles. This next generation of leaders must come from within the communities that struggle most, as these leaders are the most passionate about making change and have the most to gain if successful. Watch John Rice on preparing for leadership roles »

The good news is that there is an incredible desire among young African-Americans to give back to their communities.

Darren Smith is a young investment banker who grew up in one of New York’s underserved neighborhoods and won a scholarship to Baruch College in New York, where he graduated with honors. If you were to ask him what he wants to accomplish in his life, he will say that he aspires to do two things: become a business leader and build a nonprofit that has a large impact in the community in which he grew up.

He believes that developing strong business skills, broad relationships and a track record of success will prepare him to maximize his impact in the community.

Smith is one of thousands of talented African-American students and young professionals eager to become corporate or entrepreneurial leaders in sectors such as finance, technology, consulting and entertainment, where they have a broad sphere of influence that extends into their communities.

Yet minority leaders remain dramatically under-represented in leadership positions and in the pipeline to those roles. Despite representing 13.5 percent of the U.S. population, African-Americans hold less than 3 percent of senior executive positions and represent only 5 percent of MBA graduates.

To address this issue, I founded Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), a nonprofit that provides high-potential young people such as Smith with the “key ingredients” they need to realize their career potential — the step by step career roadmap, coaching and mentoring, hard and soft skill development, door-opening relationships and a high-performing peer community.

Every senior leader would say they would not be where they are today if they had not gotten some or all of these ingredients, but remarkably these key ingredients are not taught in even the best schools. Instead they are passed down through informal channels to which minorities still have more limited access. As a result, too many African-Americans who overcome a challenging home environment and troubled K-12 education system to attend college are not achieving their full career potential.

Here at MLT, we have had exciting results to date: nearly 40 percent of the minority students at top business schools such as Harvard, Wharton and Kellogg completed MLT’s MBA Prep program and 95 percent of the undergraduates who complete our Career Prep program land fast-track jobs at America’s leading firms across all sectors.

While participating in MLT’s Career Prep program as a college student, Smith and several other MLT fellows founded a mentoring organization that prepares high school students from New York’s most underserved communities for college. Like Smith, nearly 90 percent of our alumni desire to launch or lead a nonprofit organization at some point in their careers, and many are already well down the path.

To harness this potential, MLT has built a robust curriculum that prepares our fellows to enter and succeed in the social entrepreneurship sector, and we partner with leading nonprofits and foundations such as Teach for America, Stand for Children, New Profit, The Knight Foundation and Blue Ridge Foundation to connect MLT alumni to other talent pipelines.

Despite these advances, there is still much more to be done. It is not enough to get African-Americans into fast-track entry-level positions or MBA programs; we need a comprehensive, multistage approach to enable them to overcome hurdles they will encounter along the path to the senior leadership levels.

Research shows that the largest challenge for minorities is the transition from middle management to senior management, so more investment is needed at that stage.

By helping to grow organizations such as MLT and other successful talent development initiatives, I believe that we will succeed in filling the growing leadership gap in corporations, nonprofits, entrepreneurial ventures and the government.

Once there, African-Americans and other under-represented minorities will have the passion, financial capital, experience and relationships they need to be change agents in the communities that are in desperate need of our support. The success of our nation depends on it.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of John Rice.

Wikio

E. do REGO,founder and chief administrator

Filed under: African-American Issues, Business, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Does your doctor judge you based on your color?

Story Highlights Studies have shown that race plays a role in quality of care a patient gets Race, poor education, poverty and lack of insurance can affect a doctor’s view Study: 46 percent of the doctors surveyed had a negative reaction to obese patients By Elizabeth Cohen CNN Senior Medical Correspondent (CNN) — John Reid, a retired businessman, came home from a Caribbean cruise a few years ago with an infected toe as a souvenir. As a diabetic, he knew it was serious, so he went to the emergency room near his home in New York City. There, he says, the first doctor he saw ordered an immediate amputation, scheduling him for surgery right then and there. Horrified, he argued with the doctor, insisting there had to be a way to avoid lopping off his toe. “You’d better bring the head doctor in here,” he said. Reid says the more senior doctor prescribed a long-term regimen of intravenous antibiotics and physical therapy — a treatment much more expensive and time-consuming than an amputation — and saved his toe. Reid, who is African-American, firmly believes that if he’d been a white man, the junior doctor wouldn’t have been so quick to order the cheaper and more drastic solution over his objections. “I think it was very disrespectful. As a matter of fact, I think she was looking down on me,” he said. “She just decided that, this guy was a minority [and] we’re going to do whatever we feel like doing without consulting you.” Reid says he thinks the young doctor assumed he wasn’t smart enough to think through a medical decision. “She just felt like minorities are all the same — they don’t know anything, they’re not intelligent, they’re not educated,” says Reid, a retired real estate agent who once ran his own business with nearly two dozen employees. “If she had known my background, I don’t think she would have treated me that way.” Watch more on doctors’ possible biases » CNN contacted the hospital but Montefiore Medical Center refused to discuss his case. Studies show blacks and whites are treated differently While it’s extremely difficult to tell in any given situation how much race — consciously or subconsciously — plays a role in a doctor’s decision making, multiple studies over several decades have found doctors make different decisions for black patients and white patients even when they have the same medical problems and the same insurance. “It’s absolutely proven through studies that a black man and a white man going to the hospital with the same complaint will be treated differently,” Dr. Neil Calman, a family physician and president of the Institute for Family Health in New York, said. Calman is also Reid’s regular physician. For example, a 2005 study found African-American cardiac patients were less likely than whites to receive a lifesaving procedure called revascularization, where doctors restore the flow of oxygen to the heart. The study authors at RTI International, a research institute, noted that all of the patients had Medicare, which covers the cost of revascularization. In a study conducted in 2007, Harvard researchers showed doctors a vignette about a 50-year-old man with chest pain who arrived at the emergency room, where an EKG showed he’d had a heart attack. Sometimes the researchers paired the medical history with a photo of black man and other times with a photo of a white man. The doctors were significantly more likely to recommend lifesaving drugs when they thought the patient was white than when they thought the patient was black. Is it racism or something else? “Racism in health care is a common experience of people of color,” Calman recently wrote on his blog. But he said disparities in medical care are about much more than race. “[Race] is one very important factor in why people get bad medical care,” he wrote. “So is poor education, poverty and lack of insurance.” Dr. Cornelius Flowers, a cardiologist at the Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, Georgia, agrees there are several reasons for racial disparities in medicine. “It’s about respect. If a patient is of a low socioeconomic status, a doctor might think, why do I need to go out of my way for this guy? I’ll just do the minimum I have to do and send him on his way,” Flowers says. He adds that sometimes African-American patients don’t insist on quality care. “Back in the 1950s and 60s, hospitals in places like Atlanta had a black side and a white side, and the care for blacks was second rate,” he says. “People who remember those days still consider themselves second-class citizens, and a lot of times they allow people to treat them that way.” Flowers said times are changing; younger minority patients are more likely to insist on good care, he says. “Younger people demand better. Younger people demand more,” he says. Studies also show that doctors can be biased against patients because of their body size. A study out this week from researchers at the New York University School of Medicine found more than 40 percent of the doctors surveyed had a negative reaction to obese people. “The lesson learned is, I tell people all the time to seek a doctor who will care about you,” Flowers says. “If you feel like you have a doctor who isn’t genuinely concerned about you, just get another doctor next time.” CNN’s Caleb Hellerman and Sabriya Rice contributed to this report.

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Wikio

E. do REGO,founder and chief administrator

Filed under: African-American Issues, Racism and Bigotry, obesity

President Obama on what black America needs

• Story Highlights
• President Obama meets with seven reporters black media outlets
• He says fixing overall economy is the most urgent thing he can do for black community
• Says barriers have less to do with blatant discrimination, more with long-term inequalities

By Cynthia Gordy

(ESSENCE) — Several hours before President Barack Obama gave his well-received speech at the NAACP centennial convention in New York City, he spoke before another probing audience of African-Americans aboard Air Force One.

In a historic roundtable discussion with seven reporters representing various black media outlets, including ESSENCE magazine, the President discussed his specific plans for improving conditions for African-Americans, a community that some critics say he has neglected to address, and explained what he believes is the single most important issue they face in the 21st century.

The conversation, held in a brown leather-interior conference room on the jetliner, was the President’s first meeting with African-American media. It opened on a familiar critique-his resistance to implement a policy specifically addressing racial disparities, such as the 14.7 percent black unemployment rate.

Asked about Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s recent criticism of the president for failing to promote a race agenda, Obama replied dryly, “First of all, I think Mr. Steele should focus on what the Republican Party’s going to do.”

But he stood by his position that fixing the economy overall is the most urgent thing he can do for the black community, touting provisions in his recovery package that kept teachers and police officers employed, provided extended unemployment insurance, and created new jobs. “All these things help everybody, but obviously they’re especially important to African-Americans in this economy.” Essence: Michelle Obama’s influence becomes a worldwide phenomenon

That said, the president continued that he is, in fact, targeting communities most in need through the new White House Office of Urban Affairs aimed at improving employment and housing in American cities. One of his urban policy proposals, called Promise Neighborhoods, focuses on children in low-income neighborhoods with early childhood education and weekend community centers. Essence: Is the NAACP still relevant to black youth?

In addition, Obama said that the upcoming health reform bill should absolutely address health disparities such as the elevated rate of diseases like HIV/AIDS in the black community. He neglected to expound on how he would push for such legislation, however, instead re-emphasizing his broader approach.

“The African-American community stands to benefit enormously from an overarching health reform bill,” he said before explaining that many of the disparities are due to blacks being far more likely to be uninsured.

When a reporter asked how he felt about the dichotomy of Sasha and Malia Obama being the first daughters while black children in Philadelphia were recently turned away from a private swimming pool, the President said it underscored the fact that his election has not, in fact, ushered the country in a so-called “post-racial” era. Essence: Music stars want their share of the money pie

“On the other hand,” he said, “The biggest barriers that young African-Americans face today have less to do with blatant discrimination and more to do with long-term inequalities.”

For example, the most important issue for the African-American community, according to the President, is education. “If we close the achievement gap, then a big chunk of economic inequality in this society is diminished,” he said, arguing that getting our kids up to speed involves better teachers, greater accountability, and a combination of more resources and education reform.

Acknowledging the enormous expectations laid on him by some African-Americans, Obama expressed certainty in his polices but also called for patience.

“It took us years to get in the current situation. We’re not going to get out of it in six months,” he said. “I’m confident, but I’m also mindful that this administration is not filled with miracle workers. It’s going to be a tough hard slog for us to dig ourselves out of the hole that we’re in.”

All About

Wikio

E. do REGO,founder and chief administrator

Filed under: African-American Issues, Barack Obama