Mercy Corps, the international aid charity, is taking an unusual step to help fill three positions on its board: It has issued a public call for applications.
The approach is common in Europe, and the organization hopes to reach the widest possible pool of candidates, says Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the group’s chief executive.
“It is vital that our board reflect a range of cultures, experiences, and proficiencies,” D’Oyen McKenna wrote in an email to the Chronicle. The online description of the open board positions especially encourages applications from candidates who live in countries where Mercy Corps operates programs. Mercy Corps will accept applications through January 31. The new directors will serve three-year terms.
The international aid charity provides humanitarian relief in more than 40 countries. The pandemic has galvanized its work, inspiring more than $60.5 million in donations to meet Covid-19-related needs.
The call for trustees comes on the heels of a tumultuous year for the organization. In October 2019, The Oregonian published an investigation into accusations that Mercy Corps co-founder Ellsworth Culver sexually abused his daughter, Tania Culver Humphrey, and that the organization mishandled her allegations when she detailed the abuse to Mercy Corps officials in the 1990s and again in 2018. The charity’s former chief executive, Neal Keny-Guyer — who had led the organization for 25 years — resigned days after the story ran, and longtime trustee Robert Newell, stepped down from the board after the news outlet informed the charity of the story’s forthcoming publication.
Last October, after roughly a year of interim leadership, Mercy Corps tapped D’Oyen McKenna, then chief operating officer at CARE, as chief executive.
In answers to emailed questions, D’Oyen McKenna did not directly say whether this new strategy for recruiting board members was a reaction to last year’s scandal. She did note, however, that “overseeing Mercy Corps’ progress in safeguarding and continued commitment to survivors is an important role for Mercy Corps’ global and European boards.”
Making board service more accessible can help foster good governance of an organization, says Anne Wallestad, chief executive of BoardSource, an organization that works to improve the effectiveness of boards.
“If you think about openness to public search as one way of increasing the diversity and the independence of the board, you can see the relationship between this as a recruiting tactic and a strategy for building a board that is really independent and not insular — both of which can be challenges in terms of providing appropriate oversight,” she says.
More Public Searches
A forthcoming study from BoardSource found that 22 percent of nonprofits publicly advertise available board positions. “This does seem to be an increasing trend,” Wallestad says.
Typically, new trustees are selected by a board’s nominating and governance committee — generally drawing on trustees’ and executives’ personal and professional connections.
This shift in recruitment strategy is a key way to redistribute power, says Eleni Refu, senior engagement associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, where her research focuses on equity.
“Often in philanthropy, organizations tend to work within their established bubble,” she says. “This is an opportunity to get candidates that they might not have a personal relationship with but that might be good for this position.”
In the forthcoming study, 96 percent of respondents said they relied on the personal and professional connections of their trustees as one of the tactics to find candidates for board service. Another 88 percent said they used their chief executive’s connections to tap candidates. If a nonprofit’s trustees and executives are homogenous, relying on their personal and professional connections can perpetuate the problem.
“The connection between who board members are and the way that they govern and lead an organization is real,” Wallestad says. “It’s really important for boards, through their collective composition, to have deep understanding and ideally lived experience from the communities that they seek to serve.”
