Nonprofit boards were initially created to ensure that the nonprofits they governed were ethical, compliant with legal requirements, and serving the interests of the public. At their best, nonprofit boards do exactly that: serve as representatives of the public and make sure that the nonprofit fulfills its mission to the community. But in practice, it is common to find boards that are distant from the people their nonprofit serves, with little to no personal knowledge or connection with the communities that they are purported to represent and serve. This is a problem that has created cultures of saviorism and supremacy that do more harm than good.

Of course, most nonprofit organizations do not purposefully try to build boards that will harm the populations and communities that their nonprofit seeks to serve and advocate for. But when nonprofits leaders are not guided by a strong strategy for building a board that will create the best outcomes for both the organization and the communities they serve, it is easy to fall back on outdated, ineffective board practices. These outdated practices can include prioritizing board members who have access to resources (money, power, connections) rather than those who have shared experiences with the community, creating a organizational structure in which staff do not have the freedom they need to make choices about serving the community without first undergoing a lengthy board approval process, or valuing the organizational mission so much that boards actively reject ideas that could better serve their communities just because they’re technically not part of the mission.

What these outdated and harmful practices have in common is that they value the longevity and health of the nonprofit itself over anything else, including the overall well-being of the communities that they serve.

When we work with boards, it’s incredibly important to ask (or begin asking) how decisions are being made in the interest of the people we serve versus the interests of maintaining a legacy organization. Communities face increasing systemic inequities from a variety of fronts: rising housing costs, stagnant wages, lack of access to resources, discrimination, harmful legislation, violence, etc. These threats mean that existing nonprofit boards need to evolve their policies and practices beyond the traditional top-down governance role to become more proactive, responsive, and representative advocates of their communities.

Leading With Intent: Identifying Common Board Shortcomings

Interestingly, it seems as if many board members are already aware of many of these issues. BoardSource's most recent Leading With Intent study, a survey of more than 800 public charity CEOs and board chairs, showed the following key findings:

Boards are not connected with the communities they serve: “Almost half (49%) of all chief executives said that they did not have the right board members to ‘establish trust with the communities they serve.’ Only a third of boards (32%) place a high priority on ‘knowledge of the community served,’ and even fewer (28%) place a high priority on ‘membership within the community served.’”
Boards are preoccupied with fundraising, at the expense of other organizational needs: 70% of chief executives said that fundraising was very important in terms of their expectations for the board. Boards that placed “the highest level of importance on fundraising have lower ratings in several key areas of performance as compared to those that do not place such high importance on fundraising.” These key areas include building a diverse and inclusive board with a commitment to equity, understanding the context in which the organization is operating, and monitoring impact in the context of strategic goals or objectives.
Boards know that they need to spend more time connecting with their communities and promoting equity, but ultimately fail to prioritize these efforts: “When asked to rate how much time is spent on each board area, executives reported that not enough time was spent on building a diverse and inclusive board with a commitment to equity, understanding the context in which the organization is working, building relationships within the community that help support and inform the organization’s work (separate from fundraising). But, when asked about how important these areas are, executives placed them very low on the list in terms of their expectations for the board.”

Other important findings from BoardSource’s Leading With Intent study include a wide-ranging lack in racial and ethnic diversity (78% of board members identify as white and 19% of boards are composed entirely of white members), as well as boards’ failure to inform themselves about the nonprofit ecosystem in which their organization functions (only 25% of boards say that “knowledge of the organization’s work or field” is a high priority when it comes to recruiting new members). In both cases, board members self-report that their boards’ whiteness and ignorance of their nonprofits’ fields are roadblocks to providing meaningful guidance and service to their organizations.

Decentering as a Board Strategy

There is no easy-to-follow, fixed formula for determining the ideal makeup of a board. Our challenge to boards that want to diversify, increase equity, and commit to making real, transformative changes in the communities that they serve is to venture beyond the “traditional” board model and embrace an entirely new strategy of evaluating your board makeup.

A “traditional” board centers the interests of the organization above all else. Influenced by the structure of white corporate culture, these boards are designed to protect nonprofit organization’s legacy and ensure their continued existence—even at the expense of serving the community.

Instead of centering the organization, we encourage boards to center the communities and people that they aim to serve. There is no one right way to carry out this “decentered” board strategy, nor is there a fixed set of rules in decentering your board and your nonprofit. Indeed, each nonprofit is different and will require a unique, tailored approach in building a more meaningful board. However, we have provided four recommendations—based on organizations that we have seen thriving thanks to the leadership of thoughtful boards—to guide you and your board in this journey:

Recommendation 1: Relinquish Control, Embrace Humility
Traditionally, boards have functioned more or less as supervisors, ensuring that the nonprofit executive director and staff adhere to the organizational mission. In fact, boards were largely put into IRS requirements as a legitimate check upon the power of founders and executive directors to represent the interests of the public. This is a very positive and useful purpose to fulfill, but in practice, these supervisorial duties often lead to a problematic hierarchy in which the nonprofit staff who have closest proximity to and most knowledge about the community have to obtain approval from members of the less-knowledgeable board if they want to make any changes or improvements to better serve the community.

Boards who are invested in centering the community will recognize and trust the expertise of staff members, relinquishing control beyond ethics and compliance issues so that their organization and staff can have the support they need to be nimble, flexible, and responsive to those they serve. Boards will also need to embrace humility, as they realize that they must be open to learning from both staff and community members in order to be a better board member.

Recommendation 2: Ditch the Board Matrix (and ditch tokenism too!)

A board composition matrix is designed to help a nonprofit get a snapshot of each members’ skills, demographics, knowledge, expertise, and connections, providing an overview of what qualities a current board has and what areas they may be lacking in. A board matrix can be useful as an initial diagnostic tool, especially for boards that are particularly white and privileged. However, the problem with a board matrix is when it becomes the primary tool for building a board, making diversity into a matter of checking boxes. This tokenism makes it clear that board members who are BIPOC, women, disabled, and/or LGBTQIA+ are being valued because they make the nonprofit look better, not because of the expertise, skills, and perspectives that they can contribute.

Making real change in board equity and diversity–not just tokenism–is especially important when it comes to including members from the community on the board. Many organizations have begun including one community member on their board. However, just one community member on the board is likely not enough, especially if that community member has more of an advisory role (as is also common). Having just one community member on the board can not only lead to tokenizing that individual, but can often make it easy to ignore the community member’s perspective and recommendations. This both negates the purpose of having them on the board and harms the relationship between the nonprofit and the community. Nonprofits who are genuinely committed to centering their community should not be afraid to have several community members on their board! If the thought of having a board that is primarily composed of community members gives your board pause, then it would be worth your board’s time to ponder why community members do not deserve to play a part in governing an organization that claims to serve them.

Recommendation 3: Meaningfully Include Youth

This recommendation is similar to the previous one, but we wanted to give it its own separate section because of the unique success that we’ve seen amongst nonprofits who have included youth in their boards. Including youth as board members (advisory or otherwise) has been a somewhat common practice amongst youth-focused nonprofits. More recently, many environmental-focused nonprofits have included youth as board members to acknowledge both that youth have long been at the forefront of environmental movements and that youth will inherit the environmental problems (and solutions) that older generations will not be around to experience.

But your nonprofit does not have to be oriented towards environmentalism or youth services to include youth as board members and leaders. After all, climate change and environmental degradation are not the only challenges that youth are inheriting. In a rapidly changing world, we cannot always assume that the strategies of yesteryear will be effective in addressing tomorrow’s problems. Nonprofits need to cultivate youth leaders so that they can be better prepared to serve the future needs of their communities. Furthermore, including youth strengthens bonds between generations, giving them opportunities to learn from each other and collaborate together. (Of course, as in our previous recommendation, it is crucial to give youth meaningful roles on the board and genuinely value their input, or else there is a risk of damaging the relationship between the nonprofit and the youth they serve.)

Recommendation 4: Be Ecosystems-Minded

This recommendation is inspired by this blog post by Nonprofit AF (please check it out!) and the work of adrienne marie brown in Emergent Strategy. In the nonprofit sector, it is crucial to understand how your nonprofit organization fits within the “ecosystem” of the field that you work in and the community you serve. No single nonprofit can provide all resources or address all needs, which means that nonprofits must learn to work together—with other nonprofits, community members, government organizations, grassroots leaders, etc.---in order to create the best possible environment for the well-being of their community. Too many nonprofit boards imagine themselves in the scarcity mindset of corporate America, as if their nonprofit is seeking to establish market dominance, destroy competitors, and secure its legacy. This mindset not only harms other organizations, but also negatively impacts the community as well.

Ecosystems thinking is perhaps the most important part of this decentering strategy, as it helps us see that the communities we serve and the nonprofits that also serve them are part of a large network that can work together to produce better outcomes. Ecosystems-minded boards welcome the opportunity to collaborate with other organizations so that better services and resources can be offered. Ecosystems-minded boards celebrate other nonprofits’ successes because they know that having strong, quality partners is crucial to creating a healthy ecosystem of resources for their community. Ecosystems-minded boards also are aware that sometimes what seems like a great choice for their nonprofits is not always the best choice for their communities, and in these cases, they defer to the needs of their communities. In short, boards who think of their nonprofits as being part of ecosystems are more likely to actually address the needs of their communities!

Conclusion: What Amazing Successes Can Your Board Accomplish?

Building a meaningful board can be an incredibly challenging task. But it doesn’t need to happen overnight. As you reflect on the changes that your board and nonprofit might need to make in order to decenter your organization and center the needs of your community, we encourage you to remember that each board will have their own unique journey to improvement and that the path to building a meaningful board is not a one-time occurrence but rather a constant practice of assessment and growth. We are cheering for you, your board, your nonprofit, and your community as you embark on this journey!