Texas non-profits struggle with Latino representation

*I’m sure this is not a Texas-only problem. Of the 100 largest non-profits in Texas 47 have no Latino board members. Thirty four had 10 percent Latino representation, or less. I’m hoping Taquistas from across the counrty can shed a light as to the numbers in states other than Texas. VL

By Mimi Swartz, Texas Monthly

Juliet Stipeche doesn’t look like a troublemaker. She has a broad smile, a contagious laugh, and a barely tamed mane of black curls. Her disarming, effervescent manner is reminiscent of the most popular girl in your high school, the one everyone really did like. But behind that charming exterior lurks a relentlessness that would shame a Jack Russell terrier. This is particularly true when it comes to the Hispanic community that the forty-year-old strives to represent. A medical malpractice defense attorney, she has in recent years spent much of her time as a board member on the Houston Independent School District (she was president last year) and the associate director of the Richard Tapia Center for Excellence and Equity, an organization at Rice University that helps minorities and women succeed in school and business. Stipeche credits her immigrant parents—her father is from Argentina, and her mother is from Mexico—with her polite but insistent form of activism. Argentines, she said, could be aggressive. “ ‘What is the ego? It’s the little bit of Argentine in all of us,’ ” she told me, quoting a maxim she learned growing up. “My mom is generous and loves everybody. I had an interesting contrast growing up in the two worlds.”

Stipeche started her latest advocacy project, last January, by accident. A friend was waiting for his child to be admitted for surgery at a large nonprofit Texas hospital—Stipeche, citing his privacy, declines to say which. With time to kill, he started checking out those formal portraits of board members that so often adorn the walls of hospital lobbies. Something struck him right away. There were framed photos of prosperous-looking white men. And photos of prosperous-looking white women. And photos of prosperous-looking African Americans too. But there were no framed photos of Hispanics.

Why was that, he wondered? Were there really no Hispanic members on that particular hospital board? In the year 2015? When he told Stipeche about his discovery, she couldn’t let it go, so she decided to do some research. Just how many important Texas nonprofits did in fact have Hispanic members on their boards?

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