For over a century, YW Boston has worked in Boston to eliminate racism and empower women.
We do that through our industry-leading consulting and training services, leadership development program, youth development work, and through advocacy work focused on reducing barriers to equity in Massachusetts.
Our work focuses on the power that comes when people work together. By harnessing our collective power, we know both individuals and organizations can positively impact policies, practices, and behaviors.
Our four areas of focus
Our experience tells us that impact is achieved through focus. That is why we concentrate our efforts and services in these four key areas.
Change can’t wait.
$30.5B
PER YEAR
The cost of turnover for companies
without inclusive practices.
Sources: Deloitte, McKinsey & Co.
Being in F.Y.R.E. makes me happy to open up about serious topics. I feel heard and seen.
Genna
Seventh-grader, Boston Latin Academy
LeadBoston has been perhaps the most meaningful experience of my professional life to date. To take my personal passion and insights around diversity, equity, and inclusion and be enriched by a cohort of like-minded leaders has expanded both my understanding and my ability to drive change across my spheres of influence.
Austyn Ellese Mayfield
LeadBoston Class of 2022
One benefit [of our work with YW Boston] has been that people are more prepared and willing to engage in courageous conversations across the board, even when it’s not related to race, racism, injustice.
Employee, Advocates
While for many years we have set annual goals, the introduction of the [YW Boston] diversity, equity, and inclusion action plan put an emphasis on the importance of our organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion work and we asked each person to include at least one diversity, equity, and inclusion-related goal in their individual goals in order to hold us accountable.
Government social services worker
[YW Boston’s] program offered a longer, deeper commitment that we felt would better enable us for lasting change. We wanted to pursue a long-term view that helped us build a framework to bring our full staff, artists, and board deeper into these conversations.
Bradley Vernatter
General Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Boston Lyric Opera
Of the many insights I gained in LeadBoston, the most essential one may be this: that significant change will only come when leaders break across the artificial boundaries of ‘sector’ and ‘field’ and instead name the entrenched boundaries of race and class that affect people’s lives every day.
Colin Stokes
LeadBoston Class of 2018
