The Uncommon Trustee: Denver Art Museum Board Member Daniel Yohannes

The Uncommon Trustee
FROM ETHIOPIA TO L.A. WITH $150 IN HIS POCKET,
DANIEL YOHANNES BRINGS A
QUIET DETERMINATION TO HIS TRUSTEE ROLE.

By Leah Arroyo

This article was published in Museum, July/August 2008.

Trustee. The word brings to mind a venerable patrician of senior years, “trusted” to guide the interests of an organization or individual with wisdom and perspective. Someone with old-boy or -girl connections, decades of expertise and, especially, big bucks—not to mention the ability to pry others away from theirs. Ascot not required, but it couldn’t hurt.

In certain ways, Daniel Yohannes of Denver is not your typical museum trustee. At 17, with $150, he moved from Ethiopia to Los Angeles as an exchange student without knowing a soul. He immediately got a part-time job as a stock boy in a clothing store and went on to support himself through high school, Claremont McKenna College and the MBA program at Pepperdine. He began his banking career as a teller at Security Pacific Bank.

But in other ways, Yohannes is the very portrait of a board member. At 55, the president and CEO of M&R Investments, a firm specializing in real estate, financial institutions and energy. A former vice chairman of U.S. Bancorp. A few years ago he started a bank in San Francisco on the side. His board membership extends from the financial (a Fortune 100 company) and educational (U.C. Denver Business School) to community organizations (the chamber of commerce, the National Jewish Hospital and Research Center, the Boy Scouts Council)—not to mention political service (chairing the transition team of Gov. Bill Ritter, Democrat of Colorado).

And museums, a priority among the board invitations he has accepted. He served on the Smithsonian Institution’s national board for six years and is now a trustee of the Denver Art Museum (DAM), where he established the Daniel Yohannes Family African Gallery. “I get a lot of my inspirations intellectually and culturally through art and history, primarily through museums,” he says. “So when I was asked to sit on the [DAM] board, it was just a natural fit for me.”

For all his success, though, Yohannes hardly gives the impression of a Type-A personality. Courtly, soft-spoken, with a melodious accent paying homage to his Ethiopian roots despite his decades in the U.S., he is generous and unhurried with his time in interviews. On the phone, he asks how you are, what you’ve been up to lately; told that an interviewer just bought her first house, he chats for a few moments about how delightful and meaningful that purchase is. In person, for a conversation at the AAM Annual Meeting in Denver last spring, he walked into a rather dreary underground room in the convention center, suave in a conservative navy suit and warm in his greetings, politely oblivious to the tables cluttered with the conference staff’s walkie-talkies, office supplies and assortment of snacks. The photographer got sent to the wrong room and his interviewer had to scurry the length of several football fields to find her? No problem; he’d reserved plenty of time to talk. “Take your time.”

And yet you can at times glimpse the calm determination of a man who gets things done and, moreover, fully expects to. Vicki Sterling, the Denver Art Museum’s assistant director, says that “what was truly unique about working with [Yohannes] on the African gallery was his ability to bring together people from outside the regular museum donor community and get them interested in the Denver Art Museum.” When you ask him how he did this, who these new museophiles were, you can almost hear him shrug over the phone. “Friends of mine, people I knew,” he says. “They contributed because I asked them to.” He also shrugs off the question of how he fits all his commitments into his schedule: “I think as long as there’s a desire to get everything done, it gets done.” Asked what he does for fun, he has to think for a moment. “That’s a good one. . . . I walk, I play a little golf, do a little bicycling, sightseeing.” He also collects art, particularly African works, inspired years ago by his travels, though “only as a hobby.” Last but not least, he cherishes spending time with his three children, two of whom live in the area, and was overjoyed to become a grandfather in May (“She’s beautiful,” he beams).

You walk away from him with an impression of a quietly dynamic man who has more priorities than most of us but can somehow bring extraordinary focus to each in turn. He says he was driven from the very beginning. “It was my decision to come here, not my family’s. I’ve always been a very adventurous person, ever since I was a child, so I made a decision early on that I wanted to make it on my own. I wanted to go to a place that provided that opportunity for someone like myself, an immigrant. I could not find any other place but here in the United States that provided all of that opportunity.” Perhaps later generations of his family will be more jaded about the American dream, but Yohannes speaks of it with unembarrassed directness. “For someone like myself, it’s much easier to give to the community that has given you so much.”

Fortunately, he sees museum leadership as part of that obligation.

Daniel Yohannes

The website of the Museum Trustees Association lists ten “moral and legal obligations of museum trustees,” beginning with setting policy, making strategic plans and decisions, allocating resources and setting goals. “Raising funds” comes in at number five.

But not really. “As a trustee,” Yohannes explains, “you’re the patron; you are part of the governing body of that museum, not only by looking after the museum’s activities but primarily by providing a lot of financial support, either individually or by raising funds. The major job is to really do a lot of fundraising.”

The amount of additional involvement varies. Some board members are otherwise mainly a famous name on the letterhead, bestowing gravitas and showing up for meetings. “You can do the very basic limit,” says Yohannes, “but I think it’s the involvement that makes it very exciting, being able to make a contribution. Not only financially—it’s a big picture at the end of the day. Most things are decided at the board level.” It is a responsibility, among so many, that is especially dear to him. “When you are on a board for, say, a university or medical center, you’re dealing primarily with current issues. When you get to museums, the big difference is, you see yourself as the caretaker of what has been preserved by previous generations. A tremendous responsibility, when you think about it.”

He felt especially privileged to help govern the national museums of the Smithsonian, an institution that “provides a connection,” he says. “We have a small space that we occupy [in our daily lives]. This is much bigger. This is something that connects you to the past—what has been done in technology, sciences, history; who we are as human beings. We might have differences, but at the end of the day, I think, as humans, we have a lot more in common than we have differences. It’s just like an umbilical cord.”

This philosophy also led him to establish the Denver Art Museum’s African gallery not long after he moved to the city, working closely with the curator. He is now primarily interested in diversifying the collection from its focus on West Africa to including more artworks representing the whole continent but is also “doing a lot of fundraising” to acquire works by contemporary African artists and undiscovered African American artists. He sees his family’s art gallery as “how we connect other people that live here with something about us, about me, about my culture, who I am. The most beautiful opportunity of being an American and coming from a different culture is the ability to bring something from the old country.”

His friend Frank Abraham, a retired Bank of America executive who has known him some 20 years, isn’t surprised that Yohannes has come so far and given back so much. “Dan always had the trappings of someone who would be very successful at the executive level and the philanthropic,” he says. Another quality that makes Yohannes a valuable board member, says Abraham, is his “global perspective, as someone born outside this country.” Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, concurs. “Dan tends to look more broadly, more strategically. He always makes us look up, not down.” For example, when Bunch and Yohannes worked together on a project for the New Jersey Historical Society, Yohannes kept his colleagues focused on the importance of addressing such difficult topics as race “while still satisfying the traditional community,” says Bunch. “He can grapple with ambiguity.”

Bunch also notes that “Dan is one of those people who really feel committed to making sure African and African American culture are made accessible to a wide audience. He was so willing to advise a new startup such as the new African American museum,” slated to open in 2015. “I was struck by his smart, strategic sense of how you create an institution, how you gather excitement.” He and Yohannes agree that, if museums are to generate and sustain such excitement, they must embrace diverse new perspectives at all levels—especially their boards. Seeking not only trustees who can donate and raise money but also those who bring other resources to the table—young people, Yohannes suggests, and community leaders—will give museums a better chance to remain able to count on community support.

As successful as Yohannes has been in both business and community stewardship, he doesn’t see the two as separate spheres. One example is the priority he places on environmentalism, whether chairing the mayor’s Denver Green Print Counsel, an effort to turn the city green, or co-founding the New Resource Bank in San Francisco, which finances options for green businesses in addition to traditional banking.

“If you look at it in terms of business opportunities,” he says, “the green business is the fastest-growing sector of the economy. Organic food is growing at 50 to 60 percent per year. And every time you turn around, people say, Gee, I want to build a green building because it’s energy-efficient and much more healthy. It’s a business that’s going to continue to grow for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

“But beyond the banking,” he stresses, “is how you look at this globe if you don’t take care of it. I feel we have responsibility for the next generation—not only 10 years, 15 years, but for the next million. If we don’t take care of it, nobody will. It’s our responsibility to get involved, both as individuals as well as businesses.”