Shannon Nash is using the power of film to inspire women to sit on corporate boards!
A new movie is exploring the importance of having Black women on corporate boards and how board diversity influences the C-suites of major companies. OnBoard the film is generating buzz as it celebrates the untold stories of Black women on corporate boards.
“It’s important to tell this story because I don’t think people actually realize what boards do and why they’re important,” said Shannon Nash, one of the film’s executive producers and CFO of Alphabet, Inc. drone unit, Wing. Alphabet, Inc. is the parent company of Google. “But no one ever talks about… these people that work with the C-suite that run the strategy and hire and fire the CEO. I didn’t learn about it, quite frankly, until I was in college.”
Nash gained more information about corporate boards through Black Women on Boards, where two women, Merline Saintil and Robin Washington, hosted a virtual meeting to help women on the path to corporate board membership. Nash continued, “It was organic. They didn’t come together to start an organization. They came together during the pandemic to help other women that they knew—other Black women who were qualified—that they knew that were absolutely qualified to be on boards, but were not getting opportunities.”
The organization grew as the founders provided one-on-one guidance to Nash and others. “To scale this thing, to get the story out there, to really get in front of the next generation, I said, ‘You gotta make a film,'” Nash explained. She already had film experience from her award-winning documentary about autism called Colored My Mind. So, she took her expertise and recruited Coffee Bluff Pictures founder Deborah Riley Draper to write and direct OnBoard the film.
Photo Credit: Black Women on Boards