Entrepreneurs are told to find a problem to solve. In 2016, Evan Frazier ’92, then senior vice president of community affairs at Highmark Health in Pittsburgh, didn’t have to look far—the evidence was all around him. African Americans made up 24 percent of the city’s population, 13 percent of the county’s population, and 11 percent of the region’s population—but less than .1 percent of C-suite leadership. “We had lost ground,” he recalled. “Twenty years earlier, nearly every company had at least one or two top Black executives, but they had just disappeared.”

The problem was twofold. Black professionals who felt stuck in their careers were leaving to find greater opportunity elsewhere. At the same time, Black professionals who had been recruited to Pittsburgh “would come here, look around, and—seeing so few others at a senior level—feel isolated and disconnected,” he said. “They didn’t have a sense of belonging, and so they went someplace else.”

Frazier, who was included on Savoy magazine’s “Most Influential Black Executives in Corporate America” list in 2020, had often discussed the need to change the trajectory of the region’s African Americans with other Black executives. Drawing on those discussions, he wrote a concept paper in the summer of 2016 for an executive leadership program and sought feedback from “about 50 people like myself—corporate leaders, foundation leaders, community leaders—who would be directly impacted by the program. I used the feedback to really think about this in a deeper way,” he said.

The result was TALI (The Advanced Leadership Institute), a program he launched in 2018 to build the pipeline of African American leaders in Pittsburgh. After serving in a volunteer capacity as founding director for the first few years, he became TALI’s president and CEO in 2021 and led its transition from an initiative to an institute.

Laying the Groundwork

Frazier spent the first six years of his career at Eat’n Park Restaurants in Pittsburgh, where he had worked while in high school and which had given him internships and a scholarship while he was in college. He had HR responsibilities there and started the community relations department. During that time, he completed a self-directed concentration in marketing and planning at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, earning a master’s in public management in 1996.

As a 1998 member of the Luce Scholars—a Henry Luce Foundation fellowship program sending early career leaders on immersive professional experiences in Asia—he worked at Shangri-la Hotels and Resorts in Singapore and Hong Kong. After returning to Pittsburgh, he worked for Bill Strickland, one of the nation’s top social entrepreneurs, at the Manchester Bidwell Corporation, where, as senior vice president, he “wound up as an understudy” to Strickland and his chief operating officer.

Over the next several years, Frazier was vice president of strategic planning and finance communications at PNC Financial Services Group and president and CEO of the Hill House Association. He wrote a book, Most Likely to Succeed: The Frazier Formula for Success, to inspire youth and young adults. The book grew out of a quote he had written years earlier for a Cornell yearbook: “There are three ingredients to success: vision, a plan, and the right attitude.”

All the while, he continued his education, earning executive education certificates from Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and Harvard Business School’s Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management program. A decade later, he completed the Executive Development Program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2010, Frazier joined Highmark Health, a national health, finance, and delivery network, where he accelerated the company’s corporate giving, community programs, foundation activities, and market engagement. When he launched TALI in 2018, Highmark Health signed on as a founding member organization.

The Initiative Takes Shape

To create TALI’s signature program, the Executive Leadership Academy, Frazier partnered with Carnegie Mellon University, where he had served two terms as a trustee. The program, taught by Carnegie Mellon faculty and scholars from across the country, offers a world-class executive leadership curriculum; classes run two days a month over seven months. It is designed for executives and mid-level managers and “is similar to executive education programs offered by top business schools but unique because it weaves in some critical topics like how race plays itself out in organizations and best practices for dealing with bias,” Frazier said.

Each cohort member has an executive coach and an executive mentor.

Another powerful component, he said, is the cohort experience. “The first cohort was so excited to be a part of the program, but at the outset it was like, ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this, but we don’t think we’ll be here very long.’ By the end, they were getting promotions and purchasing real estate because their professional and social circles had changed how they felt about the region.”

In TALI’s first year, Frazier put together an executive committee and an advisory board, creating a structure to “tie together the pillars of community, corporate, and education.” TALI also has a Corporate CEO Council, a member of which is Jeff Broadhurst ’91, CEO of Eat’n Park Hospitality Group and son of Jim Broadhurst, who gave Frazier his start. The first cohort began in January 2019. By 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the growing national focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, Frazier began to create the concept for TALI’s next iteration.

That December, TALI received a seven-figure grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation to expand from an initiative into a self-sustaining institute. A few months later, Frazier left Highmark Health to lead the transition and extend TALI’s portfolio to a larger pool of African American leaders locally and nationally. Highmark Health provided the lead corporate gift of $1.5 million, which was followed by support from BNY Mellon and others.

...And Becomes an Institute

Under TALI’s new banner, a second offering was launched: an Emerging Leaders Program for professionals with three to five years’ experience. The program, which graduated its first class in the spring of 2022, is taught by faculty from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University, and Robert Morris University. Graduates of the Executive Leadership Academy mentor students in the Emerging Leaders Program, tying the two together.

Once classes end, the support continues. “We have all types of alumni activities to help people stay connected and grow professionally,” Frazier said. TALI Boards Connect, for example, connects alumni with nonprofit and for-profit boards. As of last summer, TALI had 128 alumni with plans to grow by at least 50 participants a year.

Also in the works is a national cohort. “Pittsburgh isn’t the only location with these challenges, and we believe we have an actionable solution,” Frazier said. “As we create the institute, it’s with the idea of continuing to solidify and take to scale everything we do locally, but then build it out to have impact nationally.”

That actionable solution has statistics to back it up: within two years of graduation, 87 percent of cohort members from 2019 had received either promotions or significant additional responsibility. “And of all our alumni, only a handful have left the region. That’s a vast difference from what we were seeing before.”

Before TALI

TALI isn’t the first organization Frazier has birthed. In 1989, as a student at what is now the Nolan Hotel School, he cofounded the National Society of Minorities in Hospitality (NSMH). Originally, it was intended as an umbrella organization for groups like Cornell’s Society of Minority Hoteliers. But after reaching out to other colleges with hospitality programs, the cofounders learned that “there were no other schools meeting regularly the way that we were.” So they planned a national conference.

The first was held in 1990 and drew about 75 participants from 17 universities. At the second conference, the society established an organizational structure. At the third, when Frazier was national chair, a constitutional convention created the first 10 chapters. That year, Frazier added a national advisory board and brought on an attorney and a CPA firm.

“Everything I learned at the hotel school contributed in some way to NSMH and my ability to grow as a professional and have early experiences in strategic planning and organizational management,” he said. “And that same skill set, motivation, and understanding helped lead to TALI years later.”

Today, NSMH has over 50 chapters worldwide. In 2015, Frazier helped create the NSMH Legacy Fund and has served as its chair ever since.

Frazier, who spoke in the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series in 2010 and 2021, is encouraged by what he sees when he returns to campus. “The diversity level is improving, which is wonderful,” he said. He also is gratified by the leadership that Cornell continues to provide to the industry, “especially now, in the aftermath of COVID, when innovation is particularly important. And as the hospitality industry evolves, there’s an opportunity to reinvent NSMH. As the organization’s birthplace, Cornell is well positioned to play a leadership role in thinking through how NSMH meets the industry’s needs and builds a pipeline of diverse talent.”