A Closer Look: Micah Kiel
Vice president, community affairs consultant, Wells Fargo & Co.
For Micah Kiel, growing up in Southern California was a bit like a storybook of cultural diversity wrapped in sunny skies with mountains for a backdrop. That was true until 1992, when Kiel would have been 9 or 10 and he climbed the trees in his backyard in the Moreno Valley and watched smoke rise from Los Angeles. The city was on fire after a jury acquitted police officers in the beating of an African-American. Riots followed. A truck driver was beaten by a mob. The evening news carried reports of shootings, murders. Southern California was in a recession. Not long after, the Kiel family was moving to Iowa, where his parents were from and relatives still lived. Kiel was 10. It was February. There was a 32-degree differential in the temperature. He grew up in Clive, graduated from Valley High School and Creighton University, where he took study-abroad classes in impoverished areas of the Dominican Republic. Many years later he would take his sisters to the Dominican Republic for their first trip abroad. He wanted it to be meaningful. “In Iowa, my 10-year-old brain was saying, ‘I’ll be able to ride my bike outside at nighttime whereas I could not in California, and those headlights coming down the hill will never be a drive-by shooting. So it puts it in perspective. I really loved California. I missed it. I missed the ocean. I missed the mountains. I missed the diversity of people, which is in part why the diversity inclusion space is so nice for me.” He has found that space at Wells Fargo & Co. “I think we’re continually interested in diversifying our company in every way in every category in every dimension and not just diversifying but recognizing and accepting and promoting the diversity of folks.”
Tell me what your title means. What do you do?
Basically, community affairs is in charge of charitable giving in the state of Iowa.
How do you make the determination? How does it work?
Charitable giving in the state of Iowa has two councils. One is Central Iowa, so Polk, Dallas, Warren counties, then another council called Greater Iowa to also include in the Quad Cities, western Illinois, from time to time, but there’s another council that governs those requests. And so basically you have very senior business leaders who sit on those councils who represent those markets, and once a month we get together with all the net new requests that have come in and we make determinations on each request.
Is it your job to carry the good, or bad, news back the organizations making those requests?
My job is to carry the good news and the opportunity for how it might work in the future.
What are you looking for in general? Wells philanthropy is a big deal in the community, and I’d like to get a sense of how that works and how you make that work.
In a broader sense, a nonprofit, any nonprofit, can request a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Of course, there’s the corporate one and a portion of funds are allocated to every market, in this case, the state of Iowa. So anybody can request those. This year we have three national categories — we have a social category and an economic category and an environmental category, and human services [is a fourth, local category].
Does this involve your internal volunteer programs?
Everything I have spoken of is pure charitable giving. Some of the offspring resources Wells has go beyond that. So last year for instance, in 2017, our team members logged 210,000 hours into local communities. That’s part of the power that Wells can bring to a nonprofit for an initiative or an event; we have very passionate team members who truly, wholeheartedly want to make a positive impact for an organization. Ultimately, though, for a cause to help solve the problems, we go back to the charitable side, that is going to be tied to the problems the nonprofit is also trying to solve. And so we consider ourselves partners with them, and them with us, to try to cause as much positive change as we can.
I think the level of those two is a little more, I’ll say, conceptually strategic. So in other words, in our economic bucket we try to pay attention to communities or segments of a community that are underserved economically or with banking or financial literacy, naturally, that’s within our subject matter. And you can imagine that’s a perfect pairing, not only for dollars received in the community, but also for volunteering as well. Financial literacy organizations are ones that we partner with. We have our hands-on banking program that can actually send our team members with their knowledge base and with this program and material into a nonprofit, and I’ve seen that work well, in many different situations, with low-income citizens, with refugees, with students in school, so it’s really able to deploy in a myriad of situations.
Do you feel as though, candidly, that you’re making a difference?
I’m going to say it this way: At the most fundamental level on an individual basis the answer is absolutely yes. And I bet every corporation or organization that has given money would say that. The challenge is when you scale, are you solving a social problem, an economic problem? I’ll just say it is our aim more and more to really look at it that way, collaborating with partners who are like-minded within a given subject matter to see if those things are possible. And I will say I don’t have any data, just the mindset of what we’re looking at in that direction.
Why are you doing this?
I’ve had a good history outside of work or softly within it in community engagement. Most recently, though, I was a senior project manager within Wells Fargo home lending or the mortgage part of the business.
What does it mean to carry an international certification in project management?
You do a boot camp, you study, you take a test, you’re certified and recertified over three years. So it’s fairly standard within the industry. I will tell you this: Sometimes people look at project managers as folks who take minutes and set up meetings. I wholeheartedly disagree. To me, project management is about leadership of people. It’s about setting a culture that’s going to work for the type of work that you do. It’s a strategy setting a path forward that’s going to allow us to solve a problem when the answer is completely unknown. I’ve been blessed with some really great opportunities within the company to tackle some very tough challenges, some of which were in the modernization of the home mortgage business model, some customer facing technologies that were really important to the company. I’ve also done a lot of work within the company in the last seven years in the diversity and inclusion space and with what are called our team member networks. Leaders and folks were able to see how I’ve taken that skill set and put it to use in that diversity and inclusion space, and then also how to put it to use in community engagement spaces. And I think there was the feeling that it could be useful in this role. There’s a lot of different events that happen. There’s a lot of different partners to work with. There’s a lot of different initiatives that need to get off the ground, all of which project management speaks to.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
The job move has me thinking differently. Before, I had really great success and opportunities and support in the last several years. And so moving on the executive track is definitely on my mind. But I really want to see what getting into this space and how aligned with my personal passion, just what we can do. So I now think less about how my career’s going to go and more to what are the tangible differences we can make in a community? What are the problems that we can solve? You know, the company’s treated me well. I’ve worked harder than I probably ever would have guessed before, but in this role, it’s about the problems to solve in the community first and foremost, and that’s what I’m most interested in.