Five Questions to Ensure Every Board Member’s Voice Is Heard

Editor’s note: This article was adapted from an article published in Stanford Social Innovation Review. An earlier version of the article the Chronicle posted in this space had not been approved by the Review for posting. The authors and the Chronicle regret that error.

Many foundation and nonprofit boards have worked hard in recent years, after the Covid crisis and the national racial reckoning, to better connect and reflect the communities they serve. They’ve recruited board directors, such as grassroots leaders or program alumni, who have personal experience with the problems their organizations aspire to solve.

These positive steps, however, will only lead to better board decisions when followed by the authentic inclusion of new voices. Without thoughtful changes, valuable community voices can get lost in “business-as-usual” agendas.

Through our work in philanthropic advising, serving on foundation and nonprofit boards, and interviewing practitioners and experts, we’ve identified five fundamental questions board leaders should consider as they build meeting agendas and create cultures grounded in inclusive values.

In which areas would hearing all voices around the table help us make better decisions?

To spark change in boardroom cultures, leaders often start by having candid talks with each trustee and senior staff member about the organization’s values ― and why inclusion reflects and advances them.

At after-school soccer and enrichment nonprofit Boston Scores, such discussions during Covid led to widespread recognition among board members that the only way to truly understand what students were facing in isolation was to hear directly from parents and public-school staff. As a result, the governance committee began recruiting new members from the school community.

As the board makeup evolved, reaching 30 percent representation by community members, leaders identified opportunities for community voices to shape better decision making. For example, the idea to consider parents as a talent pool for coaching jobs because the supply of teachers who could serve as coaches was dwindling. Community members on the board also informed how families and students could fully participate in a new Center for Excellence the nonprofit was developing in East Boston with spaces for community recreation and education.

Refashioning board membership and agendas generated deeper and broader input from those closest to community issues and helped the organization make better and quicker programmatic decisions.

Which board practices get in the way of full participation?

Sometimes traditions create barriers to achieving full board participation, like relying on committee chairs to present; sometimes a failure to create new norms, like setting time limits on who gets the microphone as a board gets larger, can create problems. Unexamined practices create unexpected stumbling blocks.

Take the New England foundation Anna B. Stearns, which supports women and girls and advances environmental conservation. When trustees began applying an inclusion lens to its grant making in 2017, they examined their own practices as well. This helped them realize that their norm of giving one-year grants created heavy proposal and reporting requirements for grantees and also gobbled up board time because large grant dockets had to be reviewed. So they shifted the default for trusted partners to multiyear grants, which shrank the semiannual docket and opened up time for generative conversation on strategic initiatives that drew on everyone’s insights. As Zoom meetings replaced in-person meetings through the pandemic, the board added check-in questions for each member and check-out feedback time at the end of meetings to continuously improve their practices.

Inclusive leaders regularly review and refresh board-meeting norms and practices with an eye toward hearing all voices.

Which board structures would maximize board-member participation?

Often a “board” is a single governing entity, but other structural options can maximize inclusion. Inclusive structures support refreshed practices and processes.

For example, at the relief and development nonprofit World Vision US, board members rotate through committees, including the Finance and Audit and the Program committees, during their first year before taking on a standing committee assignment. This approach enables them to interact in small groups with a variety of senior staff, work closely and consistently with a few other board members, and grasp the full range of the board’s work.

To deepen understanding in new areas, some boards create reading groups; others offer “vision” trips to walk around neighborhoods they serve or tour regions they aid.

When the Rauch Foundation was working to spur economic development on Long Island, it built board-civic relationships via learning trips to other regions that had done this, such as Louisville, Ky., and Charlotte, N.C., to meet leaders who were moving their regions forward and to allow board and civic representatives to build relationships and learn together in ways that could advance their collaboration.

How can listening to people we seek to help improve our discussions?

Teachers have flipped classes for students, guiding them to pre-class YouTube lectures to discuss during class time, drawing on insights from all students. Governance committees can do the same for boards.

Like Boston Scores and the national education nonprofit EL Education, many inclusive boards now dispense with the “inform” elements of an agenda by sharing reading material or short videos beforehand and holding preparatory calls. This frees up precious in-person meeting time to zero in on animating questions, such as changing community conditions and implications for resource allocation. They also prompt review of unexpected consequences of past decisions and, above all, inform their discussions with views of those they seek to help, through grantee or participant testimonies, survey data, and videos.

Further, at EL Education, the board chair and CEO pre-select one to three board members to frame and spark discussion on each agenda item. Those individuals then weigh in during meetings with relevant expertise — not just professional (such as evaluation or education-tech expertise) but also bringing in voices from the schools. For example, educators and members of EL Education’s diverse Student Advisory Council often join meetings to share their experiences, priorities, and perspectives from their organizational leadership roles.

Which financial items require nuanced interpretation?

Individuals sitting on diverse boards often can have different levels of comfort with reviewing financial investments and budgets. Creating inclusive conversations calls for both bolstering the financial understanding of some board members and ensuring all can bring their experiences to budget decisions.

Organizations we interviewed had multiple approaches to building their board’s acumen on budget and other areas of expertise. For example, some appointed board buddies to meet with new board members before meetings to decode agenda items; others created a staff liaison to the board to serve as a help line. Or the board chair made calls to each member before the meeting to review items for discussion, take questions, and use those questions to help shape the group discussion. Understanding board members’ questions in advance allows staff leaders to design agendas that provide meaningful answers and incorporate the trustees’ feedback.

Any foundation or nonprofit leader can foster inclusive fiduciary discussions by reporting on risks and opportunities of investments, noting where they are off track or exceeding expectations. This information helps all board members better understand past performance so they can look forward with wisdom.