A DEI Journey: Personal, Professional, Community
COURTESY JOHN BISSELL
On April 11, I was honored to be a guest speaker at the Norman Rockwell Museum’s Business Members’ Breakfast, where I shared my thoughts about Greylock Federal Credit Union’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) journey. At Greylock, we also highlight Accessibility and we use the acronym IDEA. As our VP Rachel Melendez Mabee always helps me to remember, the goal of this journey has to be about reaching a place of greater equity for our employees, for our customers, and for our community.
My reflections touched on the personal, the professional and the community dimensions of our DEI work.
On the personal level, I was born and raised in Dalton and enjoyed a classic New England childhood. As one of four boys with loving and engaged parents, we were always on the go. Memorial Day and Fourth of July parades, Boy Scouts, camping, fishing, canoeing, cookouts at the state forest, maple syrup—the whole deal. Throughout my entire childhood, my parents emphasized a love of New England and the Berkshires, in particular. It seemed we ALWAYS had a coffee table book featuring Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations. We did not have a lot of money, but we were solidly middle class, and the imagery in that book reflected my values and my experiences very accurately.
I grew up with a lot of pride in my family’s heritage, too. My family has Revolutionary War heroes, Civil War heroes, buried all over these New En- gland hills. In the version of American history I grew up with, my family was “on the right side of history.”
It was only years later that I really started to think about the other side of my own family’s history. My dad’s family came to this continent in the 1630s and my mom’s family a few hundred years later. This meant, of course, that my ancestors participated in the original sins: theft of land from Indigenous peoples and participation in an economy built on chattel slavery. It is a measure of my privilege that I could navigate into my adult years without thinking about that fact too terribly hard.
Stepping from the personal into the professional, I came to work at Greylock in 2003. Coming out of Fortune 500 companies, where the mission was all about the bottom line, I was excited to join a community-based, not-for-profit financial cooperative where the mission was and is about building up a stronger community. And it was during my first decade with Greylock that I started to understand the true extent of my privilege, to understand how little I truly understood my own hometown. I always knew, of course, that some people lived in much more dire circumstances than me. I had relatives who experienced substance use disorder and bankruptcy, so hardship was not a totally foreign concept to me. But my white middle-class value system told me that since America is a meritocracy, if a person really knuckled down, they could rise above and get to that next level.
Working inside a financial institution where all the moving parts are right there in front of you, I began to see how my white middle-class value system flowed through ALL the major systems: credit and lending systems, justice systems, educational systems, even transportation systems. These had all been set up by people who look like me to benefit people who look like me. So, when Greylock tried to serve immigrants from South and Central America, we struggled. Our white-centric, Anglo-cen- tric systems simply did not meet folks where they were. We were culturally unprepared to engage with these New Americans, and the experience was painful for everyone involved. We struggled to retain Black and African American employees, and employees who identified within the LGBTQ+ community told me privately that they doubted they could ever be accepted in their full humanity at Greylock. As a person with a marketing background, I could see the community was changing, and we were not keeping up. I knew that if we want- ed to grow and stay relevant, we needed to reshape our culture.
I became CEO in 2015, and we embarked on our DEI journey in a formal way. I am honored to say that at many stages along our journey, I benefitted from heart-to-hearts with many leaders of color and mentors of all races, gender identities, and backgrounds. I have been blessed to work with senior leaders who were willing to be on the journey with me. We start- ed with deep work inside of our Board and Senior Management team, learning about implicit bias, studying real American history, and thinking hard about how we can revamp systems to be more inclusive.
In 2016, I attended a conference of community development credit unions, where the CEO of Prosperity Now provided a keynote presentation. Prosperity Now is a nonprofit focused on closing the racial wealth gap. Among the many stunning facts shared by this speaker, this one floored me: on average, a white high school dropout holds more household wealth than a Black college graduate. That hit me like a lightning bolt. I realized I was still clinging to my childhood version of America as a meritocracy. America, for all its wonder and glory, is in fact NOT a meritocracy and never has been. It took me a while to fully digest this and start to re-wire my own thinking, but as I did, I said to myself, “Okay, so you are now a CEO, what can you do to at least make Greylock a meritocracy? A place where people can develop their careers and have what they need to flourish, no matter where they are starting from. A place where women have equal say in decision-making and where veterans feel honored for their service; where people of all gender identities feel safe, and the diversity of our employee base reflects the beautiful diversity of our community.”
I thought about the fact that 30–40 percent of the students in our county’s largest school district identify as people of color. How are we going to earn their business, their engagement, at my credit union?
With this growing awareness and strong support from our Board, we started to change everything.
Our hiring: Today, no one, not even me, can hire or promote anyone unilaterally. Hiring is done via panel interviews, and all hiring managers receive bias awareness training. Our training and development programs have been completely rebuilt with IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) principles woven in throughout. As a consequence, the percentage of employees of color at Greylock has grown from less than 3 percent in 2015 to about 15 percent today, and we are still hard at work to mirror our communities as we grow.
Our lending: We conducted a study on implicit bias in credit scoring and commissioned a study on historic redlining practices in Pitts- field. We now have a community lender from Pittsfield’s West Side who identifies as African American, and we are following the lead of the nonprofit West Side Legends and their vision of “buying back our neighborhood.” So far, we have provided $5 million in mortgages to West Side borrowers who qualified through this pro- gram focused on Black homeownership.
Our outreach: We have more than 20 bilingual employees and subscribe to a live translation service offering more than 100 languages. Greylock is privileged to experience strong growth in membership among New Americans, and last year alone we provided $8 million in loans to folks who have Individual Tax ID Numbers (ITIN).
Suffice to say that we have reevaluated every aspect of our culture and our brand through an equity lens. Too often, we do not like what we see, so we are continuously working to make the organization more inclusive, more equitable. We will never be done, but we are on the journey.
Now I am hearing locally and nationally that a lot of organizations are pulling back on their DEI investments. Some CEOs have told me, “We started in 2020, but it was too hard,” or “We can’t afford it, there’s a recession,” or “We weren’t seeing results.” Please understand REAL systemic DEI work takes time. We are talking about transformational change and re-wiring systems that have operated for 400 years. In our case, our IDEA journey has had profound positive impacts on our business.
Even though the population in the region is flat or declining, Greylock’s rate of membership growth has more than tripled since 2015.
Net income has doubled.
Asset quality has dramatically improved.
So, we are doubling down and expanding our work and our partnerships.
Which takes me to the community aspect of this journey. I mentioned a few of our other partners, and we are so grateful to have Norman Rockwell Museum as one of them. The vision that Director/CEO Laurie Norton Mof- fatt showed by creating the exhibit called Im- printed: Illustrating Race allowed me to come full circle with my own DEI journey. The coffee table book I grew up with really was only a part of the picture of Norman Rockwell—this complicated person who wanted to, and ultimately did, render a more full and painful version of America. I was so struck by the courage of this exhibit that I brought my executive team to the museum to do a brainstorming session with a DEI consultant, starting with a tour of the exhibit. Our Community Development team did the same. It was the perfect setting to have these hard conversations.
Today, I am very much still on a DEI journey, and many days I feel like a beginner. I speak from a place of great humility, knowing I still have a lot to learn. But, let me ask you this: What would it look like if this whole region pursued a shared DEI journey? If we could all support each other in this difficult and important work? What if the God-given potential in every student and every person could really come forward, be supported, and be celebrated? What would that look like?
I bet we would see our population grow. I bet we would see an inclusive approach to housing. I bet we would see crime rates drop and health outcomes improve dramatically. Reaching a state of greater equity does not mean taking away from some and redistributing to others. It means meeting people where they are and ensuring that every person has what they need to be successful. In my experience, it means larger opportunity for everyone. And that is something worth working for, even if the journey is long.
— John Bissell is President and CEO of Grey- lock Federal Credit Union. He also is a member of the 1Berkshire Alliance Board of Directors.