The Office of LGBT Affairs’ LGBTQ+ Leadership Pipeline program is currently underway in its second formation. The series, which has been renamed the Michael S. Hinson, Jr. LGBTQ+ Leadership Pipeline, aims to increase the number of LGBTQ+ candidates in board leadership positions for nonprofits and social-impact organizations. The office is producing the cohort in a cross-sector partnership with the William Way LGBT Community Center, the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund and the Independence Business Alliance.
PGN spoke with Office of LGBT Affairs’ Deputy Director Erik Larson about the second cohort, which has already had two workshop sessions, with a third expected later this month. Larson said there will be a total of six sessions, followed by a period of time where participants will be matched with a board. Additionally, candidates who are successfully placed will have their financial commitment waived for their first year of service.
Larson noted how he began working part time with the Office of LGBT Affairs in 2018, the same year the initial Leadership Pipeline series began. The program continued into the summer of 2019 and while there was always an intention to bring the cohort back, it eventually stalled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That was definitely a hindrance to continuing the program but this time last year, we felt like we were in a place where we had the capacity, and we were able to work with our partners again to bring it back,” Larson said. “We were definitely very intentional about what a second cohort would look like, compared to the first one. And we did make some substantial changes to the operations, the scale and scope of the initiative, as well as some of the partnerships that we’re working with in the second cohort, too.”
Larson said the office met with individuals who completed the first cohort as well as the community partners to gather feedback. They then used that feedback for their internal strategy to make adjustments accordingly. The biggest critique they took note of was the size of the cohort.
“The first cohort was quite ambitious, in its scope and scale,” Larson said. “We had 20 candidates go through the program, and then trying to match 20 candidates with boards and organizations that would be a good fit for each individual person was just a scale that — we learned from the feedback that we heard — was just not sustainable.”
This number of participants in the current cohort is almost half the size of the original cohort, Larson said.
“We wanted to be very intentional in the second cohort to make sure the scale was something that was more manageable, and that we could give the candidates and the community partner organizations — who will eventually be offering spots to these candidates — more individualized and personal attention,” Larson added. “[We wanted to] steward the process a little bit more gracefully at this more reasonable scale.”
Larson also said the office wanted to set expectations from the very beginning with community partner organizations. This involved signing documents and letters of agreement to participate.
“The first cohort relied very heavily on personal relationships and goodwill to find these spaces for these folks,” he said. “However, we wanted to make sure this time around that we were much more solidified and clear with the expectation from the beginning. We had extensive conversations with every organization beforehand about what the expectation was, what the timeline was going to be, what the process was going to be for getting folks onto these boards, and put it all in writing.”
While many changes for the leadership pipeline were internal, there was one big external change. That was the renaming of the cohort to the Michael S. Hinson, Jr. LGBTQ+ Leadership Pipeline. The cohort’s namesake, who died in Aug. 2022, was the first LGBT liaison for the Mayor’s Office. Former Mayor John F. Street appointed Hinson to the role in 2000. In 2008, former Mayor Michael Nutter established the Office of LGBT Affairs via an executive order and then in 2015, Philadelphia citizens voted to make it a permanent fixture of city government. This made Hinson a trailblazer for the Office of LGBT Affairs.
Larson called Hinson a “beloved community leader” who “touched and interacted with not only the partnership organizations that are involved in the cohort of the leadership pipeline, but so many of the other social-service organizations across the city for decades.” In addition to being the first LGBT liaison, Hinson founded Colours Magazine, and co-founded the Black Gay Men’s Leadership Council and Philly Black Pride.
“We felt that this was a really special way to honor Michael and his legacy, especially with his personal commitment to developing and fostering leadership in emerging leaders and the next generations,” Larson said.
Looking ahead, Larson said he hopes participants in the Michael S. Hinson, Jr. LGBTQ+ Leadership Pipeline will “feel empowered in their own leadership skills [and] that they’re able to find something in these organizations that aligns with their own personal ethos and leadership style.”
“I’m really looking forward to what the future holds for these people,” he said. “We have a really great cohort of individuals and I’m looking forward to the completion of the program to see where they all end up.”