Social Justice is Advanced Collectively

I have recently become the Director of Governance Strategy for BoardSource, which for those of you who know me is the most perfect role I could ever have because I love strategy, leadership, and governance! I’m thrilled!

I’ve been reading and re-reading our materials and watching our webinars and videos. The book Governance as Leadership spoke to me in a way that nothing prior had as far as board leadership and governance. Then, BoardSource published Purpose-Driven Board Leadership, which took Governance as Leadership to a next level while also making it more digestible for people. As I’ve been watching the videos, and even before I took the role, speaking in the community about how boards could and should embrace Purpose-Driven Board Leadership, one of the things that kept coming up and keeps coming up for folks in our community is the why.

·????????Why equity matters for our boards and our organizations

·????????Why we have to be clear about and live our values

·????????Why we have to make decisions with those values in mind

·????????Why we have to work with our sister agencies to move forward the issues our organizations exist to serve

·????????Why we have to know and represent our communities

·????????Why we have to share power with the people we serve and on whose behalf we speak

Our organizations are “owned” by our communities and our boards represent and govern our organizations on behalf of those communities.

Boards are intended to involve and represent the community we serve. How do we give them the tools to do that? How can we help them build the board, their capacity and the people around the table to represent the community and appropriately govern the organization to meet the community’s needs? I submit Purpose-Driven Board Leadership is the answer.

Purpose-Driven Board Leadership frames Who is around the table; What they understand their role to be; and How they prioritize our work. Consider those three things. Who is on the board can drastically change the answers to the other two questions. We have to have the right people on the board, because those 15 or 30 people are representing thousands more in considering and advancing the work of our organizations.

That means they have to know and look like our community, be knowledgeable about the issues we face, the laws and policies nonprofits are expected to uphold, and understand their role in addressing the issues at hand.

It also means we have to be intentional about how we recruit and build our boards so that the right people are at the table, thinking about the right things, trying to make sense of our place in the world and advancing justice around those issues.

The Four Pillars of Purpose-Driven Board Leadership

These are the four pillars of Purpose-Driven Board Leadership, that follow the how, with who and the why:

1.??????Purpose before Organization

Most communities, especially the larger ones, have a variety of organizations doing similar work. Justice is advanced collectively, and we each have a role to play in moving forward the issues our organizations exist to address. There are, probably, other, smaller, organizations that are doing things that are aligned with our work, and we have to bring them along with us. Sometimes they have to bring us along with them, and we have to be willing to follow. Even though some of us have been trained that it’s our job to be the best, being the best gets in the way of doing the work. We don’t need to be the best; we need to advance justice. We have to put the collective work ahead of the organization.

Purpose before organization feels uncomfortable to a lot of nonprofit leaders. Most of us have come up being taught to be some version of competitiveness with our colleagues. That competitiveness gets in our way. I’m not competing against you. I’m competing against my best self. We are working collectively to accomplish a goal.

Competing against each other is not necessary, even if we’re going after the same grant, the same donor, or the same staff. Those decisions are not ours to make.

Purpose before organization is about the work, not the organization. Our organizations exist in service to the work, not in service to ourselves. We exist to move forward the mission and contribute to advancing justice.

2.??????Respect for the Ecosystem

We are all, hopefully, working in concert to advance and address an issue. That may mean across the community, such as with youth development organizations since there are usually many in each community; or across the state, such as in domestic violence or rape crisis centers as there’s usually only one per country or multi-county area. That means that I have to be intentional about the work my organization does so that it doesn’t negatively impact the work someone else’s organization is doing.

So maybe I can’t move my organization into one neighborhood because another organization is already working there and I have to consider what others are doing before I recommend to my board what we should be doing. It also means that if I have access to a lot of resources, I don’t need to go after all other resources. We can’t gobble up all the resources in our community, even if we’re the big dog organization doing the work in our community.

When I used to run the Women’s Coalition at Case Western Reserve University, we were always being encouraged to apply for money from the local women’s foundation. At the time, in the 90s, there were a lot of small fledgling women’s rights organizations that were working really hard to find their voice, find their funding and find their footing. If I went after money that they could access, they wouldn’t be able to and that money would be gone. I was working at one of the biggest research institutions in Northeast Ohio. I didn’t need to go after that money and I didn’t. Some people didn’t understand why. The why is because I didn’t need it; the why is because other people did. The why is because I didn’t want to be the gorilla in the room. The why is because justice is advanced collectively.

3.??????Equity Mindset

As we learned or learned anew in Leading with Intent, our boards are too white and too male. That’s real. It’s also in our way. If we want our boards to represent our communities, they have to look like and represent all the parts of our communities. What we’ve always done won’t get us where we want to go.?We have to recruit and retain board members differently. We also have to change the board culture to be more inviting, more democratic, more engaging and more respectful of different experiences and communities.

We can’t create two levels of board leadership, with one having more power and one being more diverse. Never that. We have to embrace diversity, equity and create one board that shares power and serves our organizations. Not because it’s politically correct but because it’s right. Boards that don’t understand equity can’t make equitable decisions for our organizations or our communities.

4.??????Authorized Voice and Power

You can’t credibly represent a community you don’t know and that doesn’t know and trust you. We need permission from that community. We have to find a way to include, hold up and engage the people on whose behalf we’re acting and make sure they have a voice at the table and a share of the power.

I really believe that Purpose-Driven Board Leadership and Governance as Leadership are two amazing ways to engage board members. Many board members - and I’ve worked with boards for the last 13 years, and for them for the last 30 years - are not engaged; they’re bored. They joined for our mission, yet we talk to them about problems. Purpose-Driven Board Leadership is a way to engage our boards in doing the work of justice. It’s also a way to engage our communities and our world to move forward our missions, improve our communities, and make sure that the work we do has the impact we want.

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If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate your tenacity! If you’d like to share your feedback, I’d be delighted to hear from you on how you think our educational strategy can be improved or evolved to meet your needs. Feedback is a gift and I welcome yours. Thank you for your leadership!