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In the news: The Thunderbirds remain all-male and mostly white. Dr. Ashcraft comments on the "race for relevance"
June 26, 2024 (AZCentral.com) — The Thunderbirds were formed nearly 90 years ago to promote Arizona tourism through the Phoenix Open golf tournament, now billed as "The People's Open." To this day, the group has never had a single woman member.
It is seemingly the only all-male organization still hosting one of the more than 40 PGA Tour events in the U.S., more than two decades after the group's leaders said they were considering greater inclusion of women.
The Thunderbirds also remains a mostly white organization, putting the nonprofit out of step with many similar charitable groups, which have tried to reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, and with golf itself, which is trying to shed its all-male, white image by aggressively reaching out to more women and people of color as players and fans.
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Are the Thunderbirds built for 'ever-changing' demographics?
There are over 1.7 million nonprofit groups in the U.S., and some still have homogenous memberships, which remains an "acceptable practice" depending on the organization's purpose, said Robert Ashcraft, a professor at Arizona State University who teaches courses on nonprofit management and philanthropy and runs the university's Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation.
Ashcraft said groups with homogenous memberships and leadership tend to have missions with a narrow demographic focus, like Italian American clubs.
On the other hand, most public-facing charitable groups that started as all-male, white organizations have since evolved to include women and people of color so they reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, Ashcraft said. Otherwise, they risk losing their relevance.
"It's a race for relevance. Because if you don't solve for that, what is the future of the PGA and the Waste Management Open?" Ashcraft said. "And we've seen legacy nonprofits over the years, those that have not been able to pivot, typically shrink in membership."
Ashcraft said his advice to the Thunderbirds would be to follow the direction of leadership guru Frances Hesselbein, who headed the Girl Scouts of the USA. Hesselbein said the most successful organizations are led by people who are "mission-focused, values-based and demographics driven."
"If I were brought in to (advise), I would just be probing a lot of questions to say, 'How is (the Thunderbirds) built to last in an ever-changing demographic environment?" Ashcraft said.
The Thunderbirds, after all, are in the business of organizing a major golf tournament to raise money for charity. So it makes sense, Ashcraft said, to include women and people of color in the group's membership at a time when there are concerns in golf about the pipeline of young players.
Inclusion relates to who makes up the fan base, who buys tickets and who cares about the Phoenix Open, Ashcraft said. "The question would be, 'Are they evolving to assure impact and relevance for the years and decades to come?'" Ashcraft said.
In addition, if a charitable organization wants to maintain integrity in the equitable granting of money to community groups that serve diverse populations, diversity within the group itself matters, he said. For any charitable organization that wants to make a social impact through grants to community groups, "it only makes sense to be inclusive around the design of how decisions are made, (and) people with lived experience," Ashcraft said.