Pathways to lucrative financial sector careers must begin in High School
For years, companies in the financial services sector have worked to increase Black representation so their workforces better reflect the diversity found in the real world. Despite these efforts, the proportion of Black workers still isn’t where it should be, particularly at the most senior levels. According to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Black staff comprise 13% of the industry’s total workforce. But across the entire workforce, senior-level Black employees held steady at 3% from 2018 to 2020—even as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within the industry increased.
Bringing more Black workers into these senior positions has obvious financial benefits within the Black community, since most of these jobs come with salaries high enough to have a generational impact on families. There’s also a significant downstream effect for the economy writ large: The investment decisions these individuals make in their senior roles have a ripple effect, impacting companies and workers in other sectors.
Increasing Black representation at the highest levels of the industry makes good business strategy for these companies, too. Another report noted that Black consumers will spend $225 billion on financial services in the next seven years. What better way for companies to earn their trust and loyalty than by demonstrating fairness and equity in their own corporate DNAs?
Given all of these financial and moral imperatives to increasing senior-level Black representation, it’s fair to ask why DEI efforts within the sector have failed to make an impact. One potential reason, while many factors determine an individual’s rise within the financial sector, most efforts to date focus on a single challenge: specifically, getting more Black workers to consider careers within the industry to begin with.
Changes to recruiting and hiring practices—and the use of targeted training and certification programs, which have been somewhat effective in increasing representation in low and mid level positions—aren’t sufficient if the goal is changing the composition of the boardroom. Many of those hiring initiatives fail to address the issue of social capital: who you know professionally is just as important as what you know—which is a gift if you know the right people.
But not everyone grows up knowing, say, a hedge fund manager or a Wall Street executive. And because they don’t see people from their community in those roles, they can’t see themselves doing them. Equally as important, Black workers often lack the “been there, done that” network that can help them navigate the somewhat treacherous path that leads to the boardroom.
The Greenwood Project takes its name from the Tulsa neighborhood—otherwise known as Black Wall ... [+]
Understanding the complexity of the challenge, the Chicago nonprofit the Greenwood Project is using the power of social capital to not only bring more Black and Latinx people to the financial sector, but to help them rise to senior roles.
The project takes its name from the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma otherwise known as Black Wall Street. In the early 1900s, Greenwood was a thriving, self-sustaining community of Black business owners, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers and other professionals—10,000 residents strong. But in 1921, a mob of angry white residents burned or otherwise destroyed 35 blocks of the business district, including shops, beauty parlors, churches and schools. More than 1,200 families lost their homes in the Tulsa Race Massacre, and hundreds of people lost their lives.
The mob erased in one day what took decades for Greenwood residents to build.
The Greenwood Project was founded in 2016 by Elois Joseph and Bevon Joseph, a native of Trinidad whose first job on Wall Street was as a floor trader. Back then in the mid 2000s, he noted that few of his colleagues and managers looked like him, a trend that continued as he worked his way from analyst to chief technology officer. He realized the message this sent to Black and Latinx kids considering careers in the financial sector: “There is no place for you here.”
The project offers a variety of programs for underserved populations—in many cases before they’ve even graduated from high school. The FinTech Institute, for example, familiarizes high school juniors and seniors with the stock market and programming languages like Python. The goal is to pique their interest in the financial sector enough for them to consider making it a career.
For older students, the College Internship Program provides four weeks of training in a segment of financial services, then offers a guaranteed six week full time internship within the industry. Participants earn no less than $20 an hour, and most can expect to make about $8,000 during those 10 weeks.
In the seven years since its founding, the Greenwood Project has served more than 800 high school and college students, most of them from Chicago’s South and West sides. Bevon Joseph said 100% of College Internship Program’s alumni have full time jobs, about 80% of them in the financial services sector. But the project’s work doesn’t end there, staying connected with and mentoring alumni to help them address unfamiliar challenges as they advance their careers in the financial services industry.
The project is a model for increasing Black representation in a sector that continues to hold an outsized impact on economic mobility today, more than 100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre. It shows that sometimes, all that’s standing between a person from an underrepresented community and financial empowerment is one critical factor: opportunity.
