Peggy Zone Fisher wasn’t looking for a job when a friend on the board of the National Conference of Christians and Jews’ (NCCJ) Cleveland chapter suggested she interview for the nonprofit’s president and CEO post. Seven months earlier, in February 2005, she’d sold her Zone Travel Agency — the business her parents, Cleveland city council people Michael and Mary Zone, started — after 30 years of running it. She had agreed to stay on as a principal to onboard corporate clients to the travel company that bought it.
“I never really even knew how to run a nonprofit,” the Cleveland Heights resident says. “I knew how to run a business.”
But Zone Fisher knew of the human rights organization’s work to combat bigotry, racism and bias. And she remembered the discriminatory backlash her family experienced in their all-white neighborhood at West 65th Street and Detroit Avenue for supporting a black man, Carl Stokes, during his 1967 mayoral campaign. Suddenly, their friends’ parents instructed their kids that they weren’t allowed to play with them anymore. The family came home one day to find racist graffiti spray-painted on their new white siding. The Zones were undeterred. They continued to campaign for Stokes.
“[My parents] just taught us through their actions that the world is bigger than the intersection of West 65th and Detroit,” she says. “You need to respect people for who they are.” She interviewed for and got the position.
Zone Fisher started her new job by completing the NCCJ chapter’s transition to an independent 501(c)(3) counterpart to keep all the dollars it raised in the community, a task that included changing its name to the Diversity Center of Northeast Ohio. During her 18-year tenure, the center has grown from a Shaker Heights office with six employees serving Cuyahoga and Summit counties on an annual budget of $400,000 to a Beachwood-based entity employing 19 people providing services in 11 counties on a yearly budget of over $2 million. She continues to increase funding and expand services — services that in turn build the center’s budget.
Zone Fisher has increased fundraising generated by two signature annual events: the Humanitarian Awards Celebration dinner and the Walk, Rock, Roll & Run. The walk/run, organized a few years before she arrived at the center, brought in about $250,000 in May, mainly through donations and sponsorships. (Only 5K-run participants pay a fee — those who sign up for the 1- and 3-mile walks donate whatever they can.) Last year the November dinner, first hosted by the NCCJ chapter in 1954, raised approximately $600,000, a number Zone Fisjer attributes to working her many longstanding relationships to sell tickets and tables.
“People don’t give money to an organization unless they believe in the organization, they believe in the cause, and they believe in the leadership and the mission,” she says.
In 2019, Zone Fisher began adding to the annual fundraising tally by trademarking the center’s LeadDIVERSITY professional program she established and licensing it to other nonprofits. One of her proudest recent accomplishments is keeping the center open and staffers working during COVID, a feat that required adapting all in-person diversity, equity, inclusion and leadership-development programming for middle and high schools, businesses and LeadDIVERSITY so it could be delivered virtually.
Zone Fisher’s passion for the work is sustained by a desire to put the center in the best position to continue thriving.
“I’d like [the center] to be around for another hundred years,” she says.
