Hildy Gottlieb is about halfway through the April board meeting of Creating the Future, a group she co-founded to help other charities advance social change. The trustees are debating what types of education the new group should emphasize: Webinars that earn quick cash or more intensive training.
Kent Schell asks through Twitter: “Are these values necessarily in conflict? Is it necessarily either/or?”
Mr. Schell isn’t a Creating the Future board member. He’s never even met Ms. Gottlieb or any of the group’s nine trustees. He’s a consultant who connected with Ms. Gottlieb a few months before through Twitter and decided he was interested enough in Creating the Future’s work to attend its board meetings.
And thanks to the group’s policy of opening up those meetings, virtually, to anyone who wants, he can. The organization has been using Google’s conference tool and Twitter to include new voices in its decision making.
“We give lip service in this sector to board diversity,” says Ms. Gottlieb, who hosts The Chronicle’s Making Change podcast. “We think that if we have one blue guy and one green guy and one brown guy, we’re diverse. We really wanted diversity of thinking.”
She adds: “If your group wants to create change, it seems counterproductive to close your doors and say, We’re the five, or the 20, smartest people in the room, and we’ll figure it out.”
Open Meetings Rare
Open board meetings are rare. Some states have sunshine laws that require certain types of charities—state universities, for example—to allow the public to participate.
Typically, though, board meetings are closed-door affairs. Few nonprofits actively solicit input on management decisions from people beyond trustees and staff members or open every board discussion to outside participants.
Nonprofit experts see opportunities and risks in this approach. “If it creates a sense of community ownership, that could be positive,” says Anne Wallestad, president of BoardSource. “And the idea of cultivating new leaders who could support the organization, whether as a board member or committee member, could be a potential benefit.”
But she and others say that open board meetings could be unwieldy and impractical.
“It’s a good idea and could be appropriate in some situations, but you’ve got to have a lot of patience and time,” says Gail Perry, a consultant who specializes in boards.
She adds, “If you really need a decision made, and you really need a smart strategy laid out, you need a very carefully selected group of people or else it’s going to take forever and you may wander all over the world in your discussion.”
Sharing Power
Judy Freiwirth, who runs a consulting firm called Nonprofit Solutions Associates, is trying to take board reinvention a step further. Since 2008, she has helped nonprofits get people they serve and others affected by their work involved in making decisions about how those groups are run.
For example, the board of Centro Presente, an immigrant-rights group in Massachusetts, shares most key decisions about its fundraising, advocacy, executive hires, and future plans with about 50 people who are involved in different aspects of its work. Financial and legal duties still reside with the board.
Ms. Freiwirth says she began to work on her so-called community-engagement model after seeing the same issues crop up again and again with the boards she worked with.
“We’d been saying, If boards only had more information or knew their roles and responsibilities, they’ll improve,” she says. “That helps sometimes. But we wanted to look underneath and say, Are the traditional models really working, or do we need to look at something completely different?”
Sharing power can be tough for boards, she says. But benefits include being able to seek help with fundraising, gathering ideas from people who represent the communities served by a nonprofit, and achieving greater visibility for the group’s work.
Blunt Opinions
Creating the Future has benefited from listening to people beyond its board, says Ms. Gottlieb. When her group was weighing whether to spend $5,000 on a domain name for its Web site, she got positive feedback from nonboard members, and the group made the purchase.
And at the April board meeting, Ms. Gottlieb says, a few Twitter comments encouraged her board to seek ways to balance its more ambitious goals with concerns about the group’s financial survival. Eventually, Creating the Future opted to emphasize basic education services that include an introduction to social-change work.
Outsiders can be more blunt than trustees, says Ms. Gottlieb: “Boards have to be with each other all the time, which means they tend to be nice to each other and they don’t challenge each other. Folks who aren’t on the board have the ability to ask tough questions. They can lob a question and then leave if they want to.”
