A Charity Empowers Young Leaders by Recruiting Them for Its Board

Antoine Bennett can still recall the very first meeting he attended as a new member of the Board of Directors

of YouthBuild USA, a charity with headquarters in Somerville, Mass., that provides education and construction-skills training to low-income young people. It was 1995, and Mr. Bennett, then 24 and a recent graduate of the YouthBuild program in Baltimore’s Sandtown neighborhood, was in a brand-new environment.

“I felt like I was in a very important room where major decisions were being made,” says Mr. Bennett. “I knew that whatever we decided on that level would have an impact on all of the affiliates.” YouthBuild today has 226 affiliates nationwide that enroll young people to work toward their General Educational Development or high-school diplomas while learning job skills by building low-cost housing for homeless and poor people.

That Mr. Bennett, a high-school dropout who did time in prison on an assault charge at the age of 18, would wind up with a seat on the board of YouthBuild USA is far from a coincidence, says Dorothy Stoneman, president of the organization. When she founded the charity in 1988, says Ms. Stoneman, her goal was not just to provide young people with education and job skills but also to redress what she saw as a fundamental imbalance in the distribution of influence and power.

“We work with low-income young people — rural, urban, black, Latino, white, Asian, Native American — and none of them has ever had power,” says Ms. Stoneman. “The first thing we had to do was get them to the table and insist, to all of the adults who were professionally trained, that they include the young people and listen to them and give them actual power.”

That approach is reflected in the very makeup of the charity’s 15-member Board of Directors; five of the seats are currently held by graduates of a YouthBuild program. Ms. Stoneman says it is important to have more than just one or two. “To make the inclusion of people who haven’t had power work,” she says, “you have to have enough of them so that they feel mutually supported and respected and bold enough to present their points of view.”

New Perspectives

For the other board members, the presence of so many young people who have participated in the charity’s program is often eye-opening, says Charles Clark, who served on the board for 10 years and is now YouthBuild USA’s vice president for asset development.

“They bring the perspective of actual experience to the table, and all of us are forced to change our perspectives as a result,” says Mr. Clark.

One example: a debate about how to respond when YouthBuild participants are found with drugs. After soliciting ideas from the charity’s Young Leaders Council, a national policy group elected by the affiliates, Mr. Bennett and the other graduates of the program weighed in with a strong message. “We didn’t want to be as relentless as the world had been to these young people,” recalls Mr. Bennett. “Let’s try to show these kids love and mercy, the things that had been missing in their lives.”

The board ultimately approved a measure that would warn offenders without immediately kicking them out. “A couple hundred thousand kids have come and benefited from that decision,” Mr. Bennett says.

The YouthBuild philosophy of giving a strong voice to the people it serves is integral to everything that the charity does, says Ms. Stoneman. In the group’s early days as a New York youth group that renovated abandoned buildings, she made no hiring — or firing — decisions without giving young members the last word.

While that custom may no longer be practical, YouthBuild has retained an insistence that its staff members and leaders should resemble the constituents they serve — in this case, young men who are members of minority groups, a description that fits nearly three quarters of program participants. More than two-thirds of the charity’s trustees are nonwhite men, while more than half of the charity’s 65 employees are nonwhite.

The key to assembling such a diverse staff, says Ms. Stoneman, is time and effort: “We make sure that every time we’re hiring that we’ve taken the time and done the due diligence to build the most diverse group of people we can.”

She notes that YouthBuild advertises in newspapers with significant black and Latino readership, and contacts organizations with minority members on college campuses. The charity also maintains a running list of minority candidates who have applied for one position but might be right for future openings.

‘Minority Majority’

Potential employees can easily see that diversity is more than just a buzzword for the charity, says Mr. Clark.

“When you walk into an organization and you see that the only person of color is the receptionist or the guy pushing the broom, you know you’re not in the right place,” he says. “Whereas when you see that the group interviewing you is ‘minority majority,’ that’s a critical thing.”

The individuals who work for and lead the organization also represent a diversity of experiences, including educational backgrounds, which Ms. Stoneman says may be the most difficult form of diversity to manage.

“There are a lot of people who can’t spell and punctuate perfectly and yet have enormous understanding, potential and commitment,” she says.

The charity encourages anyone who comes in without such skills to get them; three of the YouthBuild graduates who sit on the board of directors are currently attending college. And for those for whom writing doesn’t come easily, there is a “proofreading posse,” of which Mr. Clark serves as the informal leader.

For Mr. Bennett, the experience of joining the leadership of YouthBuild has been transformative. His time on the Board of Directors, he says, has groomed him to be a leader in his own community.

He now serves as the director of the Economic Development Employment Network, commonly known as EDEN Jobs, a nonprofit career- development and job-placement organization in Baltimore.

But he also credits YouthBuild with providing him with the necessary training to be an effective board member.

“I learned how to take notes and pay attention, how to look at things from a logical standpoint,” he says. “I asked a lot of questions that probably seemed ridiculous at the time: ‘What’s the difference between advocacy and lobbying?’ ‘What’s the difference between “integral” and “intricate”?’ But being able to ask questions like that has been vital to my development. I’ve succeeded because I was nurtured.”