As a child, Ruth T. Jones Nichols and her family found refuge in a YWCA shelter. On Monday, October 26, the YWCA USA board named her interim chief executive of the national organization, effective that day.
The appointment opens a leadership search at one of the oldest women’s organizations in the country. Margaret Mitchell is stepping down after five years as CEO and 15 years with the YWCA. Nichols will work alongside Mitchell through October 30 while the board, working with Protégé Executive Search, conducts a national search for a permanent chief executive. The board has said operations, programs, and partnerships continue without interruption in the meantime.
A career that has run at every level of the work
Nichols arrives with more than 30 years in nonprofits and public service, and the rare biography that touches every floor of the building she now leads. She has run a local YWCA, as executive director of YWCA South Hampton Roads. She has run a regional food bank, taking the chief executive job at the Foodbank of Southeastern Virginia and the Eastern Shore in 2016. She has worked the federal side, as a senior advisor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Most recently she was executive vice president of local and national programs at LISC, one of the largest community development organizations in the country, where she oversaw 37 metro-area offices and a dozen national programs.
Board chair Ashlee Davis pointed to exactly that range. Nichols, she said, brings “a deep understanding of community impact, and a personal connection to the YWCA mission that makes her uniquely positioned to guide YWCA USA through this transition and into its next chapter.”
Her training is in social work, with a doctorate from the Catholic University of America and a master’s from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Hampton Roads native who started as a sociology major at William & Mary. The through line in her record is root causes. Describing the food bank lines she used to walk, she told the William & Mary Alumni Magazine: “Some people are in our lines because of choices they made, some folks are there due to circumstances, others are in our lines because of the context into which they were born, but regardless of why they are in our line we have a responsibility not to just feed them, but to really address the root causes.”
The organization she inherits
YWCA USA is a federation of more than 190 local organizations providing domestic violence services, affordable housing, and childcare in towns, cities, and counties across the country, and it belongs to a global movement, World YWCA, that has set a goal of reaching 100 million young women and girls by 2035. Its stated mission is to eliminate racism and empower women. The permanent CEO search will decide who leads that work next; the interim job is to keep a 167-year-old network steady while donors and local associations watch.
Nichols has described her own ambition plainly, and it fits the chair she now occupies: “I want to do that in a way that levels the playing field for marginalized people who have not been represented at the table.”
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