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» VISIT US ONLINE @ DSNEWS.COM 97 "IT SHOULDN'T TAKE REGULATION TO IMPLEMENT SOME NORMAL TOOLS FOR INCLUSION. AND WE DON'T WANT REGULATION TO BECOME ANOTHER FORM OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION." 40, maybe everyone is of Judeo-Christian background, maybe everyone is straight‒‒and seek out qualified applicants in those areas. e dilemma, of course, is that people, no matter who they are, are not automatically qualified to be anything in life. So mortgage servicing companies looking to diversify their ranks should start recruiting and orienting workers of tomorrow at the high school and college levels, which is a dynamic Travis- Johnson is quite familiar with. Travis-Johnson's husband is a police officer (in what she calls a "very elite community" outside Dallas, Texas). e police department, she says, builds a pool of potential recruits organically, not unlike the farm system in baseball. Officers oversee youth citizen patrol groups, for example, that expose kids to the concepts of law enforcement in high school. is, in turn, builds community trust by showing families that the police are not mechanized autocrats and by building up future ranks with people from the community, who understand the community because they grew up in it. Similarly, she says, internships in high school and college (like the one that got her into finance as a career) can bring young people into the industry early, so that when it comes time to graduate from college, there are opportunities in place in the field for which they are qualified. And these young professionals bring a twofold benefit: they come from the community and, thereby, understand it; and they know how younger people think and what they want in ways that older workers could only guess at. "ey don't see us," Travis-Johnson says. "We have to increase our presence at colleges." Travis-Johnson started her career as a high school intern with Home Savings & Loan. She then interned in the marketing department at Crocker National Bank (now Wells Fargo). "With that experience," she says, "when I graduated I went straight into the management track at First Interstate Bank (now also Wells Fargo). College graduates since 2008 have had an especially sharp axe to grind against the banking and mortgage industry, she says. ey have trouble finding work and blame financial companies for their woes. But even as the economy has picked up, the perception that banks are the bad guy has not. As a result, Travis-Johnson says, those who do find their way into lending and servicing are not aspiring to the work. "Some [graduates] settle for the industry," she says. "But we're not the first place they look." At VRM, Travis-Johnson oversees much in the way of diversity training and is at the helm of VRMU (university), a training program for industry professionals designed to foster diversity and inclusion. is incorporates more obvious pathways such as racial and ethnic diversity, but also includes less-obvious populations such as military veterans. Most people join the military as young adults. eir entry into general adult society is delayed by four years or more, and so far this century, an enormous number of service personnel have been deployed to combat zones. ey're not, in other words, acclimated to general life in America as an everyday private citizen. "e Veterans Administration is one of the biggest lending institutions in the country," she says. "Veterans should have a program in place to help them transition when they return, which, VRMU will be providing. ese people should not come home to crickets." So progress towards diversity and inclusion is happening at a lot of levels. e industry is aware that more than just WASP men make financial decisions and buy homes. But there is one thing to keep in mind, however uncomfortable it might be for some to know‒‒ white men are still the overwhelming majority of executives leading most companies in the United States, and that's as true for the housing industry as it is for any industry. Encouragingly, though, the dynamic of white men making all the decisions in business is indeed changing. Barbone has been in the servicing profession for about 30 years. Since his first days, he has "seen an increase in diversity throughout the various organizational levels in the industry," but he says "there remains CHERYL TRAVIS JOHNSON COO, VRM MORTGAGE SERVICES

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