Rianka Dorsainvil was a math major at Virginia Tech when she discovered the financial planning profession.

“I studied personal finance as an elective and I loved it so much that I switched my major to finance and eventually ended up as an applied economics major,” Dorsainvil told Financial Advisor.

That was six years ago. Today the 28-year-old is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) and founder of her own advisory firm, Your Greatest Contribution, in Maryland.

Dorsainvil is among the 6 percent of African Americans and 23 percent of women advisors currently working in an industry of 73,000 CFP professionals, according to CFP Board data. Financial advisor jobs will grow by 27 percent by 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But only 6 percent of those jobs are expected to be filled by advisors under the age of 30, according to Cerulli Associates.

“We see the population of advisors is graying, and we are not getting the diversity from a gender, race or age perspective that we need to sustain the industry on a go-forward basis,” said Thomas Nally, president of TD Ameritrade Institutional.

TD Ameritrade and the CFP Board hosted an event at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Manhattan Wednesday to launch the Center for Financial Planning that included lunch and commentary from the National Urban League’s Cy Richardson and Anne Weisberg, author of Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace With Today's Nontraditional Workforce, and senior vice president of the Families and Work Institute.

“The more competent a woman is in the workforce the less she is liked, and it’s hard to get the top of an organization if nobody likes you,” said Weisberg. “There are issues around gender bias and stereotypes that are very real and that both men and women are guilty of.”

With this interest in mind, TD Ameritrade is making a multi-year, multi-million dollar investment in the CFP Board Center for Financial Planning to increase the number of students, people of color and women who opt for a career in the financial planning profession.

“It’s all about engaging the next generation, improving the diversity in our industry and ensuring we have the right support for faculty and schools to be able to continue to promote the profession and move it towards progress,” said Nally, who added that TD Ameritrade serves 5,000 registered investment advisors on a platform of $350 billion in assets.

In addition to diversity initiatives, the Center for Financial Planning aims to provide a forum for financial planning professors.

“We are creating an academic home where financial planning faculty can publish their research that leads to tenure, promotion and professional growth,” said Kevin Keller, CEO of the CFP Board.

More than 230 colleges and universities offer a CFP Board registered program, but there’s a shortage of financial planners to serve as professors.

“Sometimes they will find an accounting professor to lead the program or they are supplementing with adjunct faculty but we need to develop financial planning faculty to teach,” Keller said.