ICSC program helps members share diversity program information

“Many of our members have programs under way that seek to bring greater diversity to our industry, and we have found that many are unaware of the work others are doing in parallel,” said Margaret Wigglesworth, ICSC’s executive vice president of member and volunteer services, who is spearheading the launch as a way to tie many disparate industry programs together. “This means that the initiatives are missing out on an opportunity to put collaborative forces together for a greater impact.”

The new initiative is being managed by Jazmen Johnson, who recently ran ICSC’s Public Private Partnership program, in Washington, D.C. “I’m looking forward to leading such an important initiative,” said Johnson. “Our twin goals are to foster communication among our members and create a positive change in our indusry, and I am confident we will achieve both.”

Her first task will be organizing an initial event around the end of Feburary or early March next year.

Currently, ICSC holds the Diversity Reception at its annual RECon event in Las Vegas. Wigglesworth says the new initiative will create even more networking opportunities. “A lot of things get started if you just create a forum in which people can meet and understand their priorities,” she said. “Ultimately, a strategy emerges.”

The ICSC initiative augments other commitments already made by ICSC, which has supported the Real Estate Associate Program (REAP) for many years. REAP is a 10-week educational program with 20 classes held in the spring and fall in seven major U.S. cities.

The new ICSC program comes at an opportune time, given that the commercial real estate industry still lags behind others in diversifying its ranks. The most recent major study on diversity was published in August 2013, and it found that the number of women and minorities in the industry is relatively small, when compared to the available pool of workers. White men hold the overwhelming majority of executive (77.6 percent), managerial (68.9 percent), professional (58.5 percent) and technical (59.7 percent) jobs in the industry. The one job category in which women predominate is clerical work, where 57.2 percent are white females, and where there are three or four times as many women as men in every ethnic category.

Nevertheless, there are companies working hard to hire and nurture those in underrepresented groups. Some 6,500 JLL employees participate in the company’s employee-resource groups for African-Americans, Latinos, LGBT, women and military veterans. These are designed to foster career-enhancing skills.

Forest City Realty Trust launched three new diversity-focused associate resource groups over the past few years. It created Women’s Excellence in Leadership Education Advancement and Development (WE LEAD) in 2012; the African Americans Connecting and Creating Excellence and Leadership (AACCEL) in 2013; and a Hispanic-focused group called UNIDOS in 2014.

Phillips Edison & Co., half of whose workforce is female, launched the PECO NOW (Networking Opportunity for Women) initiative in 2014. That program includes formal management training and interpersonal skills as well as networking events, golf scrambles, wardrobe consultations and wine tastings.

This year the Mortgage Bankers Association honored CBRE Group for its efforts in organizational diversity and inclusion. This is the first year the MBA recognized member companies for initiatives developed and designed specifically to increase diversity and inclusion within its leadership and employee base. CBRE was highlighted for initiatives that include its Advancing Women in Leadership program, its IMPACT! Program, diversity executive briefings and inclusive leadership training, plus a long-standing focus on employee network groups — among these the African-American Network Group, the Asia Pacific Network, the Hispanic and Latin Business Resource Group, LGBT & Allies, the Women’s Network, CBRE Military and more.

Change is happening at the grassroots level too, as many local organizations adopt more-formalized nonprofit operating structures. In Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the Commercial Real Estate Diversity Collaborative, formed in 2010, is now looking at broadening its mission and becoming a fully staffed nonprofit to more aggressively tackle the industry’s persistent diversity challenges.

Similarly, the former African American Real Estate Professionals of New York (AAREPNY) was rebranded as Council of Urban Real Estate (CURE) in 2014 and restructured as a nonprofit.

ICSC is a logical conduit for making a difference, given its membership base of 52,000 in North America alone, Wigglesworth says. “That’s quite a pool from which to pull,” she said. “If even a quarter of those people participated in some meaningful initiative, we might actually move the needle, and there is a lot of exploratory work to be done about how that would happen.”

There is no underestimating the power of networking, Wigglesworth notes. “You put a bunch of passionate, smart people in a room, and great ideas come out of it,” she said. “The more we can create the possibility of collaboration, the more the collaboration is going to happen. People start talking to each other, and start thinking about what one another is doing and how they can build upon that work.”

The continuity of demographic change will play a key role in structuring diversity programs in the future, says Wigglesworth. “As we look at retail real estate, the group that is going to carry it forward is the Millennials, so how do we help those people come into our industry? How do we create an avenue for people who might not have thought of commercial real estate as a possible career?”

This is where Wigglesworth’s former experience as president and CEO of Colliers International comes into play. “A lot of people think of commercial real estate just as brokerage,” she said. “But in fact, there are all kinds of different things that one can do in commercial real estate, and so the greater success we have in introducing those possibilities to a younger generation, the better off we are. We’re missing out on a lot of talent because we just don’t have the street paved or an obvious way in. We have an industry that isn’t representative of today’s demographic and [it] should be and needs to be, if we are to capture all the talent that is out there.”