Laurence Pagnoni - The Nonprofit Fundraising Solution: Powerful Revenue Strategies to Take You to the Next Level

CHAPTER 1

All nonprofit boards have one thing in common. They do not work.

Peter Drucker

Since you are looking at a book entitled Good Governance for Nonprofits, chances are that you are a board member, a CEO, or a staff member of a nonprofit organization. If so, you are in good company. There are almost two million nonprofit organizations in the United States, all of which have boards and most of which have someone functioning as the CEO. Tens of thousands of these nonprofits have sizable staffs.

While you may not agree totally with Peter Drucker's rather stark assessment of nonprofit boards, we suspect that you can think of areas where your board could be more efficient and effective. Here again, you would not be alone. There is no perfect board. Members and officers of nonprofit boards, assisted by authors and consultants, are training critical eyes on the structures and processes of their boards and coming away with lists of areas for improvementin some cases rather long lists. The problem, therefore, given the usually limited human and financial resources of nonprofits, has become less a matter of what needs to be done and more a question of how one attacks this to-do list in a systematic way.

Here are four nonprofit organizations whose boards were confronted with a list of improvements in their governance model. In , we have documented the course of action that each of them took to address its list. For now, we will simply introduce the four organizations and their situations.

Miriam's Kitchen has served homeless men and women in Washington, DC, for almost 25 years. Over the years, it has survived on an ounce of cash and a ton of heart. After the turn of the century, however, it stabilized its management and its operations and found itself moving from a somewhat unsettled adolescent organization to a more secure adult. Its board was still populated by highly committed and dedicated directors, but it needed a governance structure that would better serve this now mature organization.

The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) was a high-risk gamble by an unusual blend of public and private entities in Arizona, which together put down $120 million to bring the biotech industry to the state. TGen was the anchor store in what was expected to be one of the top biotech malls in the world. The board that was formed to govern TGen included some of the most powerful people in the state, starting with the governor. From the beginning of this impressive organization, its board needed a structure and a set of related processes that would accommodate the diversity of its members and the gravitas of so many heavy hitters.

The Association of Graduates (AOG) serves the United States Military Academy at West Point and its unique column of graduates known as the Long Gray Line. Although West Point was established by President Jefferson in 1802, the AOG was not formed until 1869. Its original purpose was to help bring together graduates who had fought on opposing sides in the Civil War. As the academy approached its bicentennial in 2002, therefore, the AOG was an old associationand its governance structure showed it. In 2004, the chair of the AOG board assembled a task force to identify ways for it to bring its governance into the twenty-first century.