In Their Own Words: How Kaitz Grants Help a Trio of Orgs
By R. Thomas Umstead -- Multichannel News, 9/16/2007 8:00:00 PM
This year, The Walter Kaitz Foundation will offer significant financial grants to diversity-oriented organizations the Emma L. Bowen Foundation, the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity In Communications and Women In Cable Telecommunications, in support of their various diversity-related programs. The grants will be funded with revenue from Kaitz’s annual fund-raising dinner Sept. 19. Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead sat down with NAMIC president Kathy Johnson, WICT CEO Benita Fitzgerald Mosley and Emma L. Bowen Foundation president and CEO Phylis Eagle-Oldson to hear about the projects, programs and initiatives for which each organization will seek Kaitz funding. The following remarks are taken from edited transcripts of each interview:
The Walter Kaitz Foundation funding has been very important in allowing us to expand the reach of our programs and getting other programs off the ground. For example, our Leadership Seminar [a professional-development program created specifically to transform high-potential middle managers of color in the communications industry into effective leaders] was an outgrowth of our Executive Leadership Development Program to serve managers or supervisors of color.
We’ve heard from some of our members who say the ELDP is great, but, “I’m just a manager or a supervisor and I’m just trying to get to the next level.” The Kaitz funding was very instrumental into getting this leadership seminar off the ground. We’ve already had seven sessions and the eighth one is coming up in November at The Cable Center [in Denver]. All in all, we’ll have had about 280 people that have gone through the leadership seminar.
We have the leadership seminar in three markets now and we’re expanding it to a fourth market in 2008. Along with the Kaitz funding, the leadership seminar does charge the participants’ companies a tuition fee. Ultimately, we would like to wean ourselves off of the Kaitz funding and make it self-sustaining, because we and Kaitz would like to free up funds for other programs that are new and innovative.
We’re still looking at creating a program around diversity in ad sales and the digital-media arena — we’re hearing from the industry that there should be more diversity on the ad-sales side of the business.
Other projects that we have applied for this year include the creation of an independent, third party evaluation of our major educational programs.
We’ve also applied to create regional mentoring programs in three chapter markets to compliment our [national] L. Patrick Mellon Mentorship program. We’re launching those chapters in November in Southern California, the Mid-Atlantic region and Minnesota.
We’re adding 15 [mentees and mentors] per market for the regional mentoring program to go with the 150 executives currently in our National program.
We’ll also look to fund our continuing-education workshops that we continue to do for alumni of both the Leadership Seminar and the Executive Leadership Development Program.
Kaitz also sponsors the mentoring luncheon that we do at the NAMIC Conference, as well as the Television Writers’ Workshop. [The workshop is a new initiative focusing on the creative-writing aspects of television which launches during this week’s NAMIC Conference.]
The Walter Kaitz Foundation is helping to fund our Rising Leaders Program. Kaitz funded it for the first time in 2006 and it helps women in the early part of their management career to learn lessons upfront that others of us learned [on the job]. It’s really giving 40 women enrolled the skills and tools to manage people well, manage up, sideways and down, and get to know themselves and their personal communications styles so that they can modify them as they move up the corporate latter and encounter different individuals.
Eighty women have graduated over the first two years. We hope to do the program again in 2008. The first two years were funded by Kaitz, but next year we’re asking companies to subsidize a little bit of the programming costs, so we can devote less and less [funding] from Kaitz over time for the project, and move those dollars to another project that we’ll need funding for.
Kaitz is also funding a new [project] evaluation tool. [Kaitz Foundation president] David Porter and the [Kaitz] board really want to see how these programs are impacting the attendees and their companies in regards to [participants’] ability to matriculate through their companies and their jobs.
We’re also working on developing a tool that will provide [support] for the women going through the program. We’ll have information for them going in, we’ll check in with them and their managers over time to see what impact the participation in the program has had on [the participant’s] effectiveness at work, their ability to get promotions, and then track their progression over time.
We hope to then take that kind of a tool and apply it to Betsy Magness Leadership Institute and maybe to our other programs as well.
Thirdly, we’ve put a request in for funding for our “Tech It Out” program unveiled last fall that’s meant to really shine a light on the gap between the numbers of women and men in cable technology-related professions. We’ve asked Kaitz to fund some focus groups with women within the technology fields within the cable industry to see what challenges they face in their careers, how they are advancing and what opportunities they see for women entering the space.
We want to get a better understanding of where they are so we can give them the support and tools they need.
Kaitz has been a longtime [financial] supporter of WICT over the years, beginning with providing seed money for the PAR Initiative [developed to support the advancement of women through the measurement of pay equity, advancement opportunities and resources for work/life], which is now in its fifth year. They’ve also helped us with WICT Cable Bootcamp [designed for cable newcomers], which we started last fall. That’s three major new initiatives that we’ve done in the past five years that Kaitz has had a hand in.
They [Kaitz] are a lifeline. They really have stepped up to the plate, and we have several programs that are mainstays because of their efforts. Kaitz funds a big portion of our summer conference, which we created to give our interns a broader perspective on the industry. Kaitz covers the costs of getting the students to New York [for the conference], the cost of catering, housing and other expenses.
At those conferences, the key goal there is to get speakers to discuss the issues and trends of the industry and where all of the companies are going. We’ve focused a lot on new media and the digitization of the industry, as well as the issues of what happens to advertising and multiplatform content delivery. Of course, all of these kids are so savvy in technology they’re probably 20 steps ahead of us anyway.
Through these conferences, [interns] have the opportunity to network with these high-level executives from across a broad spectrum of the industry and ask great questions and get direct answers.
Another really big program that Kaitz exclusively funds is our link mentoring program. We just finished our fifth year. We take students from a particular region and match them up with high-level industry executives who meet with the students several times over the summer.
The link provides a very safe forum for them to ask the tough questions that they might not ask at a conference when there are 250 kids in a room, but would be much more comfortable to ask when there are 20 kids in the room.
A third piece that Kaitz funds is our career guide. We felt strongly that we wanted to make sure kids maximized their opportunities while in the program, so we put together a book that helps students strategically learn from day one of the program how to plan out their internship.
It also outlines the steps to rotate through a variety of functional areas. So if you have a kid that says, the only thing I want to do is be an anchor on the nightly news … once they begin to work at a cable system or a broadcast station, they see other things they’re interested in [and] they can rotate to that particular area.
The rotational aspect of this has been really helpful for students. They get to do the things they love, but also test out some things they didn’t know existed.
There’s also a whole section of interviewing skills, resume development, and closing the deal [with regard to] a job offer.
The next focus for the career guide will be workshops in 2008 that will help interns in their first five years of working with their companies learn what to do strategically within those companies to get themselves ready for that first management job.
Kaitz will also fund our research initiative. One of the things [Kaitz’s] David Porter wants to see is statistical data that backs up why there’s a great business case for companies to be part of the Emma Bowen Foundation, and why when you spend money on this program and on an intern, it says you’re more likely to have someone who stays both within the company and the industry. We’ve actually begun working with a researcher from the University of Pittsburgh to help us build that statistical case study as to why this makes good business sense.
They’re also helping us with our [foundation] capacity, because we have the same staff that we had when I started in 1999 and since then we’ve had over 200% growth in the student side and 150% growth on the corporate side, so we’re stretched pretty thin. Kaitz is helping us with some of our capacity building plans to get us up to the next level.
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