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Yvette Frisby always wanted to live a life of both impact and service, and she traces some of that desire to her parents.

“I was raised in a house where my dad was a police officer for 30-something years, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom, so service was in us,” she recalled. “I grew up in a house that was about public service — giving back and making sure everybody was always OK within the community, on your street, and within your family.”

Sadly, no one is always OK. But in her 40 years with the Urban League of Springfield — and now as its president and CEO — she’s been, and continues to be, dedicated to helping as many individuals as possible access the resources and opportunities they need to achieve stability and success.

It’s a powerful — and gratifying — role, one Frisby doesn’t take for granted.

“When people say, ‘throughout those 40 years, did you know you wanted to be the president of the Urban League? What did you want to end up doing?’ … I didn’t know. I wanted to do whatever my soul led me to do, whatever felt right. And I believe that my steps are guided, so I am meant to be here in this time and place, right now. And it feels good.”

After longtime (as in 49 years) President and CEO Henry Thomas announced his retirement in the spring of 2023, Frisby was named to that role on an interim basis, and on Aug. 1 of this year, the board of directors concluded an extensive, national search by simply removing her interim tag.

The first woman to lead the organization in its 111-year history, Frisby was deemed the best choice to advance the organization’s mission of economic empowerment, equality, and social justice in the Greater Springfield area.

“Yvette is the ideal choice to lead the Urban League during this transformative and historical period,” said Maurice Powe, board president. “She is extremely knowledgeable about the organization on a local, regional, and national level. Yvette possesses a formidable executive viewpoint on the strategic direction the Urban League is moving in. During these challenging yet hopeful times, we are embracing a tremendous opportunity to impact the community and elevate the Urban League to the next level.”

Starting in 1984, Frisby has held various positions, including office manager, executive assistant to the president’s office, Youth & Education director, and Camp Atwater administrator, and others. She stepped into a senior leadership role in 2003 and was eventually promoted to senior vice president of Operations & Administrative Services and then interim president and CEO, before being officially appointed to that role.

The Urban League’s programs, which have traditionally focused on education and youth development, health and wellness, economic and workforce development, and productive aging, have evolved over the years, Frisby said.

Currently, the organization’s main youth and education program is Project Ready Mentor, which focuses on college and career awareness and readiness for middle- and high-school students.

“Whether they’re going on to college or planning to go into a career, we give them the skills and the tools to make decisions around that — helping them with their academics and doing some civic-engagement activities with them so that they become familiar with Springfield and the surrounding area, know what the issues are, know what’s important for young people. That gives them a sense of belonging, which they hopefully keep to some degree and then give back to their communities.”

Many people have generated such a legacy, she noted. In March, the organization will hold a celebration honoring four alumni of Urban League programs who have gone on to give back to their communities: Ashley Bogle, assistant general counsel and director of Legal Services at Health New England; LaMar Cook, deputy director of Gov. Maura Healey’s Western Mass. office; Anthony Moore, director of Membership Programs at the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts; and Kiyota Woods, dean of Student Initiatives, Academic Advising, and the Transfer Center at Springfield Technical Community College.

“They’re still continuing to give back in the work that they do,” Frisby said. “So that’s a big component of what we’ve done over the years with our young people in the afterschool programs: leadership development, civic engagement, and also giving them the tools to make good decisions.”

It’s that legacy of giving back — one she has helped shape in myriad ways for the past four decades — that she’s excited about as she charts a course for the coming years at the Urban League of Springfield.

Determinations of Need

As noted, the Urban League targets many programs at specific constituencies. Affiliates across the U.S. have created a ‘foster grandparents’ program that recruits older individuals to work with kids in schools and day-care systems. Locally, the Urban League has also offered computer training for seniors, to help them navigate the basic technological needs of life, from bill payment to using Zoom to virtually attend church or visit their grandkids.

Speaking of technology, the Digital Connectors program — a collaborative effort with the Urban League as one of its partners — is a movement that engages teens and young adults in leadership development, digital education, life-skills management, and community service to help them with educational advancement and workforce preparation.

Another program, launched about five years ago with the help of a significant MassMutual grant, is the Black Business Support Initiative, which has helped more than 30 entrepreneurs develop skills and access resources to turn an idea into a business or create a business plan to take an enterprise to the next level.

The impact of programs like that go well beyond the individuals and businesses served, Frisby noted. “These small businesses employ other people, plus they’re employing themselves. So it is growing the economy and contributing to the economy in a very impactful way.”

The Urban League also partners with other organizations on two job fairs at the Basketball Hall of Fame each year, partners with the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts on food distribution at the Dunbar Community Center, maintains an employment-opportunity program with some of the region’s largest employers, offers scholarships to local students, and … well, much more.

Including, notably, Camp Atwater, the oldest African-American camp in the U.S., which has been serving families for 103 years; part of Frisby’s expansive role is serving as the camp’s executive director.

“It’s a legacy for many of them; the parents send their children, and their children, when they get old enough, send their children,” she said. “We have a cycle of young people that are coming through Camp Atwater. It’s still thriving.”

The national Urban League has established a few areas of focus in 2024, encouraging its 92 chapters to create programming around the themes of “defend democracy, demand diversity, and defeat poverty.”

On the former, she noted that the Urban League is taking part in an initiative to encourage voter registration and make sure people know where to vote and what options they have, including early and mail-in voting.

“I even instill that in my children, who are 38 and 42: ‘did you vote? We fought for this, so make sure you’re getting out there to vote,’” she said. “We need to make sure everybody exercises that right. It’s important.”

The thread running through all these efforts, Frisby noted, is impact that ripples out over entire communities, often across generations.

“Whether it’s seniors, whether it’s youth, whether it’s small businesses, by receiving the services of the Urban League, they become more engaged and involved in their communities and want to give back. They see the Urban League as a resource, not only to them, but to the community as a whole.”

Generational Impact

Born and raised in Springfield — and having lived there all her life — Frisby has a deep connection to her community that drives her passion to raise others up. That’s why, after five years at her first job, at MassMutual, she came on board at the Urban League and has never looked back.

“Having worked within every department within the organization, understanding the needs of each person in each department, gives me a leg up in being able to provide people what they need, whether it’s professional development or whether it’s computers or the tools they need to get their jobs done,” she told BusinessWest.

She also went back to school along the way, earning a bachelor’s degree in human services and a master’s degree in organizational management and leadership from Springfield College, which led to another role: teaching at Bay Path University.

“It was in grad school that I realized what I was really passionate about — not just working in the community, but also the development of girls and women,” she explained. “I haven’t been able to teach since I became interim because it was time-consuming, but I’m hoping, once things kind of level out, I can get back into the classroom because I really got a lot of joy out of teaching.”

Asked by the board to offer a vision of her first 180 days as president and CEO, Frisby had a few ideas, including an internal assessment to determine what each department needs and where the gaps exist in best serving the community, a focus on board development and making sure the governing body is diverse and represents all aspects of the community, and determining where the Urban League of Springfield should be building more civic partnerships.

“Where can we be more strategic about coming together so that we’re not working individually in silos?” she asked. “That’s a community assessment of who’s doing what and how can we be better partners and collaborators.”

On a more personal note, Frisby understands her role as an example and inspiration to other aspiring women leaders. To make that point, she mentioned a required first-term class at Bay Path called “We Empower Learners and Leaders.”

“It’s really about women doing self-reflection on themselves as leaders and looking at themselves as leaders, even if they didn’t feel like that. And at the end of the course, they put together their leadership-development plans,” she explained. “I never called myself a teacher; I called myself a facilitator because I was facilitating a process within them, and to see that come to fruition, to see that kind of impact on women, was really an awesome experience.

And now, to be the first female president of the Urban League of Springfield?

“There’s a lot of responsibility that comes along with that. But at the same time, I look at it like this: when I was growing up, I saw what was in front of me,” Frisby went on, pointing again to her parents and their examples of service and helping others.

“Now little girls can see me in front of them. When I go into Springfield Public Schools and do read-alouds and they say, ‘what do you do?’ I can tell them. It’s amazing to have that kind of impact and see young people light up when you tell them that.”

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