(Editor’s note: This article appears in the current May/June 2016 print edition of Boston Spirit magazine. Subscribe for free today.)
Nothing endures but change—it’s one of those ancient phrases uttered by Greek philosophers that still rings true today.
The sentiment is especially fitting to describe a general consensus among Greater Boston business leaders concerning the closing of the Greater Boston Business Council, as many of those nearest and dearest to the organization are taking a philosophical approach to the announcement of the March 1 closure.
“It’s all relative to changing times and changing landscapes” within and around the LGBT business community, says Sean Driscoll, founder and principal of BB2 Consulting, who served on the GBBC board from 2012 to 2014.
“Ultimately, it’s bittersweet but at the same time, as I wrote in the closing address [posted online], I don’t really see it as a bad thing,” says Valerie Clark, the council’s final president, who served in that role for the past five years and before that as the organization’s secretary. Clark now runs her Massachusetts-based financial investment company, Independent Financial, from her home in Hawaii.
“For 25 years, the GBBC has stood as a beacon for the LGBT business community of Boston,” Clark wrote in her goodbye letter on the GBBC website. “As an all-volunteer organization, it has grown increasingly difficult to service the growing demands of the community. Though it is the end of an era, we believe it is a positive sign for the LGBT Business Community.”
Positive? Well quite possibly. But still very hard to accept for many who volunteered so much of their time and energy over the years, as well as for the Greater Boston business community, which feels the loss, if not an outright vacuum.
“Sad to see this happen since during my term both myself and Vivian Meranda, then VP, worked diligently to build it to three times the size it was prior to our election,” wrote Ed Travers by email. Travers, a senior internal auditor at Boston Properties, served first as a GBBC member and then as its president for 10 years. “Handing off a strong organization, our thoughts were it was set for many years.”
“[We] changed the look of the organization and offered business and educational opportunity for all our members and corporate sponsors,” concurred Meranda, a senior loan officer at Berkshire Bank, also by email. “As you know, volunteer work is never easy, but we persisted in making LBGT businesses seen and heard as strong, powerful, smart, and successful, in this great city of ours.”
By a “positive” change, Clark speaks of significant advancements in the business community since the council opened its doors in 1990 and how in many ways she believes it’s time for a new 21st-century organizational approach to better address the needs of a new era.
As Driscoll puts it, “Sometimes it takes a hard stop and a restart to go forward.”
“At the time when the council started back in ’91,” Clark says, “it was still very different to be out per se, particularly at work, particularly if you were in finance. I mean, my God, it could be the end of your career. The council provided a shelter and safe haven for a lot of people, and gave them a place to interact.”
Clark adds to this a litany of other accomplishments and activities like the GBBC’s annual Pride Harbor Cruises—which raised thousands of dollars each year for nonprofits, including the AIDS Action Committee, Community Servings, and Boston Pride. Or Pride Lights, which, notes Driscoll, brought the LGBT community together and empowered many of us with the first glimpse of strength in numbers, an almost unthinkable revelation in today’s cyberworld. Or a host of other activities, like the monthly business luncheons at the Club Café that GBBC member Michael Travaglini, a service associate at Eastern Bank, fondly recalls hosting and says he’d be eager to start up again. Plus the Awards for Excellence dinners, which not only recognized those who made a difference in the LGBT community but brought business leaders and other professionals together to network, thereby sowing seeds for even greater differences to come. And the list goes on.
Adding to this, Driscoll notes how the GBBC also fostered “cross-connection” between minority business owners, including not just LGBT, but women, ethnic, veteran, disabled, all of the above and more—an effort he spearheaded from his experience consulting for Work Without Limits, a statewide advocacy group for the disabled—so that all groups can now rise together in ways they could not before.
By changes in the business landscape, one example Clark refers to is Governor Charlie Baker’s recent executive order making Massachusetts the first state in the country to expand the Commonwealth’s supplier diversity program to include LGBT-owned businesses—a program the GBBC helped set up with the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. She adds that through technology many things the council used to do—like facilitating local businesses to connect with the NGLCC and other groups—can be done online, citing her own telecommuting she does from thousands of miles away. “The way we meet and interact with one another has changed,” she says.
In her farewell letter, Clark directs local business owners to the NGLCC, which expands supplier diversity opportunities well beyond the state to reach national and even international organizations.
Says Jonathan Lovitz, NGLCC vice president for external affairs from his office in D.C., “The moment we found out that the GBBC in its original form was going to close its doors we immediately started to make sure that every available resource is still present in Boston and throughout Massachusetts.”
“We’re now shifting to an opportunity for a Greater Boston-area office to open which will be started by our great collection of NGLCC-certified businesses in the Boston area,” Lovitz says. “We don’t skip a beat. If you go to the nlgcc.org, you’ll see that everything people came to expect from the certification network, all of that, will continue, business as usual.”
Nancy Stager—vice president of talent acquisition and inclusion director at Eastern Bank and a former council member who served on the board with Driscoll from 2012 to 2014—acknowledges that “The ‘National,’” as she refers to the organization in D.C., “has done good work. But we need some boots on the ground here.”
“Look, more gets done when people in communities reach out to allies across a broader spectrum,” Stager says. “And so the GBBC was a great opportunity for people within the LGBT community to get together and discuss common issues, and it was a great opportunity for people who were allies of this community to more deeply understand what the issues are. And we’d like to continue that because we know there’s real value in getting members of the community together, business owners, business leaders right here in the Greater Boston area. We need to band together.”
Driscoll agrees with Stager. “We need to bring together a roundtable of people that are interested in new businesses—some LGBT corporate professionals and some other LGBT influencers—and ask, what does everybody want to do now? Because there are so many exciting things happening and it seems right that we need a network, whether it’s a chamber or some other structure. I think it’s out there and waiting. And I’m hopeful about that.”
