Growing up in Wisconsin, Terrance Walless wanted to become a physical therapist. Then his horizons widened. In 2012, studying for an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, he took a course on nonprofit leadership, which included a yearlong placement as a nonvoting board member at a Chicago-area nonprofit.

“It was a little intimidating at first,” Walless remembers. The other board members of North Shore Senior Center were a lot older and wealthier, capable of personally leading each year’s fundraising campaigns. “I couldn’t match that,” Walless recalls. “I didn’t even own a car. I had to keep renting Zipcars to get to and from board meetings. But the other directors made me feel welcome. And I learned a lot about how a well-run, successful organization operates.”

Today Walless runs his own digital health startup while serving on the board of the Center for Better Aging, an ambitious new nonprofit treating patients throughout Chicago’s South Side. He co-led the search committee that found the center’s first executive director. And when the center launched earlier this year with $122 million of state funding, Walless played a key role in drafting the grant application.

Nonprofits everywhere would love to find more board members like Walless. As consultant Barbara Taylor explained years ago in Harvard Business Review, the ideal nonprofit board should work closely with operating leaders to develop strategic plans, while also supporting capital campaigns, providing fiduciary oversight, and steering the organization through leadership transitions.

But such effective governance “is a rare and unnatural act,” Taylor observed.

Hoping to fix this shortage, New York financier David Golub, working with his brother Lawrence, has committed $25 million of philanthropic gifts from their firm, Golub Capital, to leading business schools. Nonprofit board training as a central focus; nearly $10 million has been paid out since 2018. The goal is to train new cadres of MBAs with the expertise and passion to step into nonprofit board leadership. David Golub is a former board chair of the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and as president of Golub Capital, he built a fortune that Forbes estimates at $2.1 billion.

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A Stanford-trained MBA, David Golub says he grew increasingly interested in the challenges facing nonprofit leadership during his 18-year stint as a board member of the Michael J. Fox Foundation. “I lived in a bubble with Fox,” Golub recalls, “because everything was so exceptionally well run. But I was aware of nonprofits where the mission wasn’t well defined or everything was too dependent on a single funder, and the board wasn’t taking action.”

“I wished there were more well-run nonprofits,” Golub says, “and I began looking for ways to help make that happen.” That search led him to identify seven elite U.S. business schools, including Kellogg, that now get funding through the Golub Capital Board Fellows program to expand programs aimed at steering MBA talent toward nonprofit boards.

Golub Capital’s early funding focused on faculty and staff, so schools could reach more students. Newer awards will help schools gather data and share insights about what works.

Right now, the Golub Capital Board Fellows program serves only a small fraction of the 580 accredited MBA programs in the United States, and an even tinier slice of the 1.9 million tax-exempt organizations filing annual reports with the IRS. That limited impact may be appreciated by nonprofits that want to protect a pluralism of boardroom perspectives and avoid being overrun by MBA-style thinking.

“But our hope is that as we build up, we can extend to a really wide range of programs,” says David Finegold, executive director of the Golub Capital Board Fellows Network. “We started with the most influential business schools,” Finegold adds, “figuring that if we expand and have strong reputational effects, a lot of other schools would want to follow.”

What the Data Shows

In 1997, Chicago community activist Anne Donnelly was teaching a rather dry lecture course at Kellogg about nonprofit board management. One of her students told her: “I love the content, but is there some way you can make this more experiential, where I can actually sit in a board meeting?”

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“I said, Sure!” Donnelly recalls. “I took what the previous professors had been doing and cast it out the window.” Onsite boardroom experience became a key part of the class. After Donnelly moved on, other instructors kept the course going. In 2020, MBA-trained Allison Henry took over, with a background that ranged from Bain & Co. consulting to two years as executive director of the People’s Music School, a midsize Chicago nonprofit.

Henry rapidly became one of Kellogg’s most popular instructors. (She won a teaching award in her third year on the faculty.) Now, as many as 200 students each year compete for spots in her signature class, “Board Governance of Nonprofit Organizations,” even though enrollment is capped at 50 people. Initially hired as an adjunct instructor, Henry soon became an assistant clinical professor, with a multiyear grant from Golub paving the way.

Could this course have a life-changing effect on graduates’ commitment to nonprofit leadership? Golub Capital underwrote a research survey looking at nonprofit engagement — if any — by more than 200 Kellogg alumni over a nearly two-decade span. Just under half the 218 respondents had taken Kellogg’s nonprofit boards course at some point. The others were a cross-section of Kellogg alums, including many who had tried to join the nonprofit leadership class but didn’t get in.

The survey’s results were startling. Among students who took the board-fellows class, 56 percent went on to serve as voting board members of a nonprofit after graduation, versus just 38 percent of the students who didn’t take the class. Students taking the class got their first board positions several years faster, too. And students taking the class were more likely to hold board leadership positions, such as chair, treasurer, or secretary.

For Golub, this was the payoff he had been seeking. The Kellogg program worked; and it or something close to it could become a national template. In November, Golub committed more than $7 million to support similar programs at Carnegie Mellon, New York University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Wharton, and Yale.

“I think about how to leverage impact in everything I do,” Golub explains.

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Henry’s classes include a mix of lecture-style concepts, small-group working sessions, in-the-field boardroom experience — and periodic one-on-one check-ins with the professor so that students can get personalized guidance about how to thrive as boardroom newcomers.

Boardroom Advice

It can take many years to master the skills — and perspectives — necessary to be a valuable nonprofit board member. But when Allison Henry teaches her boardroom governance classes to MBA students at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, these are some of the pointers she shares.

Find your voice on the board. For shy board members, this means being confident about speaking up when appropriate. For garrulous people, it means making room for others to be heard.

The board has only one employee: the CEO. The appropriate role for board members is to build trust, offer support, and stay in your lane.

Watch out for Schedule O. On any nonprofit’s financial statements, Schedule O is the place where auditors require additional disclosure of any material facts that extend beyond the regular reporting categories. Henry likes to quote a guest lecturer a few years ago who said: “It’s ‘Oh,’ as in: ‘Oh, what do we have here!’”

Keep the three Cs in mind: As Henry sees it, the most important qualities in a nonprofit board member are context, curiosity, and courage.

Even in her driest lectures, when Henry explains how to analyze the annual Form 990 financial statements that nonprofits file with the Internal Revenue Service, the unexpected gets its moment. “Anytime there’s something unusual in the audit,” Henry says, “you’ll discover that the 990 says ‘Go to Schedule O to read more.’ “I call it: ‘O,’ as in, ‘Oh, what do we have here!?’” Henry says.

Be braced for anything, Henry recommends. “You’re going to be in rooms where everyone else is older than you and more experienced, too,” Henry recently told a lunchtime meeting of 50 new Kellogg board fellows. “You’ll be engaging in executive-level conversations in ways you might not ever have done before. My advice to you is: Take advantage of every opportunity you get.”

Overcoming Student Jitters

Staying confident and on task isn’t easy. Almost every day, Henry holds private chats in her office, over a cup of tea, so board fellows can recalibrate their efforts and open up about their challenges. On a recent Wednesday, the first visitor is second-year student Gal Apeloig, 31, a former captain in the Israeli Defense Forces.

Apeloig has been paired with Hephzibah Children’s Association, an Oak Grove, Ill., organization that needs more homes for foster children. Apeloig has volunteered to do a strategic study for the board. Available data is fragmentary, and her original plans for multi-month research would be too slow to meet Hephzibah’s urgent needs.

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“I feel like I’m not really on track,” Apeloig confides.

Henry has seen such hesitation before. “Tell me the steps you want to take,” the professor says, gently. Each time Apeloig goes through her to-do list, everything gets a bit more focused. With small nudges, Henry guides Apeloig toward the strategic perspective that a board member should have.

After a few minutes, Henry heads to a nearby white board and starts diagramming boxes that will define Apeloig’s boardroom impact. Soon Apeloig is expanding the plan herself — and her jitters fade. Apeloig cheerfully snaps a cellphone photo of their joint whiteboard creation and leaves Henry’s office exultant. “That’s a really good way to show it to the board,” Apeloig declares.

Later that week, leaders at Hephzibah share their perspectives on the Kellogg program. For them, students’ hesitations aren’t necessarily a problem. “What I like about the fellows is that they’re not fully formed,” says Juliet Yera, Hephzibah’s head of development and communications. “They’re open to feedback, and they’re very good listeners.”

Boardroom Lessons and the Next Generation

At less famous business schools, nonprofit board service often follows a simpler, scrappier pathway. Schools such as the University of Colorado or the University of Cincinnati rely on student clubs working to arrange informal board fellowships on their own — without course credit or deep faculty involvement.

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Such efforts have their own benefits, too, says Karen Johns, chief executive officer of Net Impact, a nonprofit that has advised many such student groups since the 1990s. At the very least, they “can be a valuable way for students to develop leadership skills.”

There’s value, too, in getting students out of the business-school bubble so they can become more aware of people’s hardships and what can be done to address them. As Alexandra Sossa, chief executive of Farmworker & Landscaper Advocacy Project, puts it, “There’s a lot that the [MBA] fellows can learn about what life is like for a low-wage population.”

On a recent snowy afternoon, two leaders of Chicago’s Center for Better Aging — board member Terrance Walless and executive director Estrelitta Harmon — are eager to show a visitor around their organization’s newly built facilities. Just before the tour starts, Walless pulls out a multi-color spreadsheet. It shows what a new Kellogg board fellow, Tigran Tyler Pell, will be doing as part of his engagement with the center.

“I’m blown away by his expertise in budgeting and projections,” Harmon says. Walless nods and adds: “He’s eager to get going. I see a little of myself in him. And I tell him, Don’t feel intimidated on the board just because you’re the young guy.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.