Picture this. Over forty executive directors of nonprofit organizations involved in homelessness services are sitting around a table. They come from shelters, transitional housing programs, substance abuse services, mental health programs, CDCs, and more. Their organizations range widely in age, size, and complexity. And everyone there is dissatisfied with the current system of homelessness services.

Sound familiar? This meeting took place in Toledo, Ohio, as part of a community-wide project to redesign the system of homelessness services. But such meetings happen all over the country, in communities large and small, where people are trying to improve responses to a variety of social issues. The impetus for such a meeting may be a new pool of money or a new mandate, but the motivation for such meetings is almost always that the system of services to solve a problem is ineffective and inefficient: The problem isn’t being solved; clients’ needs are not being met; service providers are frustrated; funders are impatient; and the community feels (at best) poorly informed or (at worst) deceived.

No board members attended the service provider meetings in Toledo. But if they had been there, if they had heard the message that “their” nonprofit and all the other nonprofits were sending about the problems with the whole system of homelessness services, how might they have reacted? How should they have reacted? What is a board member’s role when no one is pleased with how the community’s systems of services are working?

While today’s leading board gurus all send a message that can be quickly summarized as “focus on the big stuff of the organization,” none of them are asking board members to focus on the larger picture of the community’s goals and needs. Whether the emphasis is on policy over management (John Carver’s model), strategic work that matters (Richard Chait and Barbara Taylor’s “new work of the nonprofit board”), or a culture of performance (see High Performance Nonprofit Organizations by Christine Letts, William Ryan, and Allen Grossman), the advice and effort continue to revolve around the individual nonprofit organization and the board’s work on behalf of that organization.

The perspective that board members should safeguard “their” nonprofit and ensure that it can meet its mission reinforces competition and turf-defense, creating a win-lose situation for nonprofits, instead of a win-win for communities and clients. In other words, protecting turf perpetuates fragmentation which perpetuates victimization (a lack of control, a belief that the system cannot be changed). If the purpose of most nonprofits is to meet some social mission, board members who care about the “big stuff” must get outside of the individual organization and become aggressive leaders in the community for seeking comprehensive solutions to social problems. Just as the carpenter not only needs to keep each tool in good working order but also needs an overall design for the finished product, board members need sharp organizations, but they also need a clear blueprint of the community’s goals. Surely a board member would rather leave a legacy of helping solve a problem than of keeping one organization afloat?

According to historian Peter Dobkin Hall, board members who focus on the community’s goals are revisiting their core purpose as originally conceived. In A History of Nonprofit Boards in the United States (National Center for Nonprofit Boards, 1997), Hall points out that board governance in previous centuries was used to represent certain powers within the community (e.g., church, state, or donors) as decisions were made about the work of nonprofit organizations (e.g., universities). Trustees led organizations as stewards of the community’s welfare. In recent decades, however, trustees have simply become stewards of the individual organization’s welfare. By attending to system improvements and community expectations, board members can return to the roots of their role—to represent the community’s welfare to the nonprofit sector.

Not More Work, But More Important Work
If board members are finding time to volunteer at all, then helping fix the system to meet the community’s goals is the highest and best use of that time. When start-up or struggling nonprofit organizations turn to their board for operational assistance, board members will make better decisions about how to reach the organizational mission when they are guided by the big picture of community needs. When sophisticated organizations no longer need volunteer help with operational concerns, and board members are seen only as valuable fundraisers and community networkers, this value can be turned toward the full system of services to solve a community problem. Pat Holmberg, Executive Director of the YWCA of Toledo points out that, in her well-established nonprofit, “The staff keep things working well, and they just try to keep the board at bay.” Holmberg laments that this approach to board roles wastes everyone’s time. It is also a shameful waste of the valuable resources and influence that board volunteers can bring to community change.

Board members could spend the same amount of time seeking community-wide solutions and collective resources that they currently spend raising funds for one nonprofit. Having a community goal and a blueprint for reaching it will galvanize funding resources toward the tools to solve the problem. By strengthening the whole system and ensuring adequate resources for solutions, board members can decrease the constant effort needed to focus on the mere survival of their individual organizations. New Orleans provides a helpful case in point: When community leaders had developed a shared goal for addressing homelessness, they were able to envision and create UNITY, a centralized service for obtaining and distributing funds, so that individual shelters and housing programs could focus on service delivery and avoid time-consuming fundraising tasks.

Similar results can get started in a number of ways. First, board members can participate in system-wide discussions of particular social concerns (such as the Toledo project on homelessness) that are already being convened in their community. Or board members can join local indicators projects (to measure community quality of life) or sustainability initiatives (to balance economic and ecological demands); many communities have already undertaken such efforts. Third, board members can insist on being part of committees that request or distribute large federal pools of money, such as the Continuum of Care application to HUD for homeless services or block grant disbursement task forces. In each of these settings, board members can influence community decisions and bring their experiences back to the nonprofit organizations to inform decisions there. Where a system of services is not already getting comprehensive attention, board members can initiate community-wide discussions and get help in these efforts from such organizations as the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the National Community Building Network, or the Collaboratory for Community Support.

Community Governance
Whereas we have long thought of board members as ambassadors to the community on behalf of the nonprofit, today’s challenges require board members to be ambassadors to the nonprofit on behalf of the community. This work is much different than ensuring that the nonprofit is fiscally responsible or ethical in its treatment of clients. As ambassadors of the community, board members look at the truly “big stuff” of what are and should be the community’s goals, needs, and expectations, and how is “my” nonprofit as well as the whole system of services moving our community toward needed solutions? In Hall’s words, these board members “conceive of organizational leadership as part of a larger process of community leadership,” using their board position to develop broad consensus on the definition of the public good.

Accomplishing the community’s goals will require a new kind of “community governance” that works across nonprofits and across sectors. An example of this work can been seen in Kansas City, Missouri, where the Local Investment Commission (a 36-member citizen group) oversees the city’s welfare-to-work reforms, neighborhood planning, and social service coordination efforts by gathering the necessary data, organizing sub-committees to govern particular service systems, and deciding how state funds will be spent. Participants thus leverage their own volunteer time for widespread change, but they also depend on board members from individual organizations to align their efforts with the Commission’s community-wide plans.

Board members can embrace this form of community governance and make it their flagship response to local needs. They will become systemic thinkers, educating themselves and others about the full range of services necessary to get to solutions, and helping others to focus on serving the whole, rather than the fragmented parts. When the board member, like the carpenter, has the goal in front of her, she will turn to whatever tools are needed to get the job done. Having more than just a hammer at her disposal, she no longer sees everything as a nail.

By becoming thus engaged, board members take ownership of the challenges facing nonprofits and their local communities and will not leave their organizations vulnerable to imposed solutions that don’t fit with local needs. This work then demonstrates to policy makers, business leaders, and the funding world that nonprofits are not mournful victims of decreasing resources and impact, but productive networks of services designed to meet the community’s goals.

Having leaders who are engaged in community governance will be increasingly important for local communities, because government mandates are looking to community-wide boards to decide how best to spend social and cultural service dollars and to prove that the systems of services are having the intended results. In this environment, it is certainly important for nonprofit boards to help their own organizations be financially and managerially strong. But the most significant contribution that board members can make is to promote and participate in community governance, and bring the outcomes of these efforts back to the nonprofit sector, encouraging and supporting the alliances, multiple strategies, diverse representation, and mission definitions that improve the system and respond to the visions developed by the local community. What better legacy can a board member leave?

The Collaboratory for Community Support
7423 Hickory Ridge Drive
Ypsilanti, MI 48197-9487
Phone: 734-623-4952
www.thecollaboratory.us
For more information email us: jcrubicon@aol.com

© 1999 The Collaboratory for Community Support