A New Framework for Governance Duties: Loving Accountability and Abundant Resourcing

Nonprofit boards often uphold outdated power structures, prioritizing elite control over true community accountability. In Reimagining Nonprofit Boards, a three-part series based on the NPQ webinar, “A New Framework for Boards,” Ananda Valenzuela challenges traditional governance models and offers a new vision for boards that empower rather than constrain. By shifting from power-hoarding to power-sharing, nonprofits can create governance structures that truly align with their mission.

In this series, we have looked at how the modern-day nonprofit board evolved from systems that preserved class interests and how that legacy has carried through to this day. We have learned about three mindset shifts that transform how your board sees itself and interacts with the larger governance ecosystem. In this third and final piece, we will explore what roles the board is best equipped to play and how to go about changing your board.

So, what does good governance look like? If one starts by stripping away all of the assumptions we carry about what boards are “supposed” to do, the legal responsibilities of a board are the duties of care, loyalty, and obedience. None of those duties primarily entail decision-making. Yet the common understanding of boards, rooted in a history where powerful people want to maintain control via their board service, is that boards must make the most important decisions.

The predictable result of putting so much decision-making power in the hands of boards has been the mass disempowerment of the staff doing the actual day-to-day work of running nonprofits. It twists things around, resulting in nonprofits serving their boards instead of boards serving their nonprofits’ missions.

But we can let go of what doesn’t serve us. We can and should take steps to cultivate liberatory boards—boards that center wholeness and interdependence, sharing and distributing power as best serves their organizations’ missions—to curtail the historic tendencies of boards to aggregate power and represent elite interests.

The predictable result of putting so much decision-making power in the hands of boards has been the mass disempowerment of the staff.

To achieve this reimagining, we start by reframing boards’ responsibilities as falling into two categories: loving accountability and abundant resourcing.

Loving Accountability: This is the board’s core responsibility. The board should pay close attention to how the nonprofit is operating (impact on community, finances, staff morale, and so on), encourage transparency and clear communication to the larger community, and support and provide accountability for effective executive leadership.

Staff should be ready to transparently share information and answer challenging questions but not be expected to create long, formal reports or presentations solely for board consumption.

In the extreme case in which a nonprofit is in crisis, the board should step in proactively to support moving in a better direction but only engage in important decision-making if senior staff are incapable of making those decisions well.

Core questions your board should be asking to support loving accountability:

• Is your organization achieving the deeper social, racial, and environmental justice impact that you hope to achieve?
• How do the communities served feel about your organization?
• Is the board regularly reviewing financials and ensuring legal compliance?
• Is the organization’s leadership building a healthy and effective work culture that supports diverse staff and is responsive to community needs?

Abundant Resourcing: Nonprofits operate in a larger sector that has been purposefully underresourced, that too-often creates an institutional scarcity mindset, in which leaders compete instead of collaborate. The board, which plays an important role in ensuring the nonprofit has the necessary resources to accomplish its mission, needs to move from a limiting mindset to a mindset of abundance in order to make that abundance real. This can look like partnering with related nonprofits, sharing resources, or developing creative ways to give more generously both to the nonprofit and to the greater ecosystem working together to achieve shared goals.

Board members are often passionate, wise people with great insights into the organization’s mission and programming. The specific resourcing roles that board members might hold will depend on the needs of the nonprofit and what resourcing is done by other entities.

Core questions to answer to decide on a board structure that supports abundance:

• What specific resourcing roles and responsibilities (such as fundraising, volunteering, networking, acting as an ambassador, or otherwise adding value to the work of the organization) should your board members hold?
• How can board members best leverage their skills and networks to resource and energize the organization?

By reframing board responsibilities into the two categories above, boards can be more focused and maximize the impact of their limited volunteer hours.

Four Steps to Change Your Board

If you’re ready to build a liberatory board, the following steps outline an effective change management process to move your board forward:

1. Commit to change.

We should not attempt to force people to change, so the majority of your board needs to be committed to changing how it operates in order for this to be successful. Invite your board to read this article and facilitate a discussion about it. Offer opportunities to imagine new possibilities.

Importantly, this is the time to assess whether some people need to leave in order for your board to be able to begin this new chapter in your nonprofit’s journey. Participating fully on a board is a big ask, both in terms of time and emotional labor. You may have board members who are stretched too thin to have the capacity to invest in your board or who have a steep learning curve in order to get up to speed to the point of having these conversations. That’s okay. Life is hard. Show them love, celebrate their hard work, and say goodbye. There’s no need to guilt or shame people into staying on your board when the best choice is to step away, rest, or shift where your energy is focused.

Consider using a tool like a board self-assessment to help board members clearly identify whether or not they should be part of this next chapter. This is a great opportunity to assess whether your board has the fundamentals necessary for any group to work well together: high-trust relationships, a deep learning orientation, the capacity to disagree directly and respectfully, and a commitment to inclusion. If there are challenges in any of these realms, be sure to proactively attend to them in parallel with this structure change process.

2. Understand your nonprofit.

Make sure you understand your organization’s current culture and structure. Are staff trusting, joyful, and collaborative; or is there high staff turnover and low morale? Is the overall structure a hierarchy or an alternative format like self-management? How are major decisions made? Which key entities are involved in major decision-making, like senior staff, frontline staff, partner organizations, and other governance entities like advisory groups?

Fundamentally, the board does not operate in a vacuum. It is part of a larger ecosystem. There are layers to that ecosystem: the structure that paid staff operate within; the various governance entities your nonprofit is directly involved with (including advisory bodies, coalitions, funders, and other oversight mechanisms); the constellation of nonprofits with related missions, the nonprofit sector as a whole; and the larger society within which your nonprofit operates, which is a wide world of for-profit, governmental, and nonprofit entities and individuals.

Deciding on the board’s purview must start from understanding that larger ecosystem and then identifying how the board best fits into it. It’s not necessary to fully understand all the layers of that ecosystem, but the board will want to have a clear picture of all the entities directly involved with major decisions made at your nonprofit. With that larger picture painted, you can identify what checks and balances the board is best equipped to offer.

3. Decide on board roles.

Have some fun together! Daydream with the board about what could be, imagining specific potential responsibilities with loving accountability and abundant resourcing in mind. When your board is doing this brainstorm, be sure to specifically ask: What should the board actually be deciding, either on its own or in partnership with others?

After the blue-sky brainstorm, use a process like dot voting to access the group’s collective wisdom to quickly narrow down which responsibilities feel most important for the board to hold. If there are any important areas of disagreement, this is a great point to pause and unpack those, particularly when they come to differences of opinion on what the board should decide. Keep regrounding in the three mindset shifts during these conversations.

Fundamentally, the board does not operate in a vacuum.

Take that draft list of most important board responsibilities and organize it, checking to ensure that they encapsulate the core legal duties of care, loyalty, and obedience as well as conveying the unique roles your particular board is best equipped to hold. Then share the draft list of responsibilities with staff and other key governance entities for feedback on whether those are the right roles and responsibilities. Be sure to ask them which board roles would add the most value to the organization as a whole.

Once you’ve integrated the feedback, officially approve the document and move forward with new board roles. Things will organically evolve over time, but having a clear, accessible document outlining roles offers a strong starting point and ensures everyone is aligned about what the board’s responsibilities are—and so everyone understands the boundaries that the board should not overstep that could entail an abuse of power.

4. Evaluate the new structure and revise it as needed.

You’re never going to get it perfect on the first try! Plan in advance to evaluate this new structure, usually six months to a year later. Seek feedback from board and staff about how the board’s evolution is feeling via survey, group discussion, and/or one-on-one conversations. Be aware that power dynamics could make staff inhibited to share feedback directly with the board and consider soliciting input via anonymous survey.

Ask questions like: What practices should the board start doing? Keep doing? Stop doing? Be sure to transparently report out both the survey results and what changes you decide to make.

Inspiring Alternative Governance Structures

As we imagine new possibilities, our thoughts can be constrained by the invisible boundaries of our own lived experiences and beliefs about how things are “supposed” to be when it comes to the role of boards in nonprofits.

In order to open up the spectrum of possibility, here are three different board models to learn from:

• Change Elemental: They see the board (which they call the “Governance Team”) as mycelium, the rootlike structures of fungi “that connect our board and core team to other people, groups, and organizations, enabling us to turn toxins into nutrients and nourish ourselves through our relationships to ensure collective thriving and care.”

The board and staff practice power-with and share responsibility for major strategy decisions. Staff lead on organizational decision-making, with the board as a partner fulfilling its accountability role by offering feedback and asking difficult questions where needed. The board engages in resourcing primarily by deepening and broadening the organizations’ networks. A blog post by Change Elemental team members Natalie Bamdad and Mark Leach offers a fuller picture of this model in action.

• Progress Alliance: The board’s primary focus is on accountability, with staff trusted to hold decision-making. Strategic leadership has been purposefully moved from a primary board responsibility to the BIPOC-led Political Leadership Table made up of grantees and other movement leaders.

In terms of resourcing, the board is expected to be ambassadors, spreading the word about Progress Alliance to potential funders and the wider community. Progress Alliance describes how this board consciously invests in building a healthy culture and recruiting board members that reflects the movement leadership it aims to support in this article.

• East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative: EBPREC’s eight-person board represents all their major constituent groups and “stewards the process by which work is carried out, as opposed to directing the substance of the work.”

Staff are organized into a self-managing structure, and the nonprofit’s bylaws officially give staff the high level of responsibility traditionally seen as the board’s role. The board is instead focused on accountability, with limited resourcing expectations. Read the group’s user-friendly bylaws to learn about their legal structure, created with support from the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

We in the nonprofit sector cannot change our problematic past, but we do have the power to shape our future. By understanding the history of nonprofit boards as vehicles for intervention by wealthy elite, often in order to maintain a societal status quo, we can critically analyze—and change—so-called “best practices.” We can shift the paradigms shaping our understanding of boards in order to embody governance that centers mission and communities served.

Impactful boards see their core roles as loving accountability and abundant resourcing, and devote their limited time to the activities that make the biggest difference for their nonprofit. If we can right-size the amount of time and effort we put into our boards, we create spaciousness for us to focus on addressing systemic injustices.

Let’s kindly invite ourselves to envision brighter futures, where boards see themselves as one part of a much larger whole and were we are united in our efforts to work toward our collective liberation.