Teaching a 3-hour class on nonprofit governance as part of a graduate course on nonprofit leadership at Hong Kong University prompted me to pull together my major writings and resources related to this topic. This intent of this blog post is to present all of those resources in one place for the first time.
To start with, I am very pleased with the reception “Spotting and Fixing Dysfunctional Nonprofit Boards” is getting. This new Stanford Social Innovation Review article is on course to be my best-read SSIR article ever. It was published on October 5, 2020.
That piece is related to “A Case Study of Nonprofit Board Dysfunction,” which I published on September 7, 2020. In fact, those two articles were originally intended to be one very long article. I am glad I broke them apart.
In July 2020 I wrote “Eight Reasons Why I Don’t Believe in Minimum Giving Levels for Nonprofit Board Members.” This is an example of some of my “out of the mainstream” views on nonprofit governance. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Late last year the Chronicle of Philanthropy published “Unlocking the Secrets to a Strong Bond Between CEOs and Board Chairs.” I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on this, and the Chronicle ended up publishing it in its January 2020 print edition. This article may not be accessible unless you have a subscription to the Chronicle. I recommend that you subscribe, as I do. If you are desperate to get access to this and can’t subscribe, send me an email and I’ll try to make it available to you.
As part of the build up to the release of Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind, I published “Building a Great Board of Directors” on April 19, 2019. Some of the items in this post ended up in When in Doubt, Ask for More – among quite a few governance tips and techniques in that book. Chapter 12 of Changing the World and parts of chapter 13 capture the essence of my view on nonprofit governance.
I released four instructional videos on board management on my YouTube channel. Here is a link to the first. The next three videos on my channel are the remainder of that series. Each is about 5 minutes in length.
As for resources that I love that I did not write myself, at the top of the list is Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards, by Richard Chait, William Ryan, and Barbara Taylor (Wiley and Board Source, 2005).
Board Source (known at the time as the National Center for Nonprofit Boards) put out ten booklets on nonprofit governance many years ago that are out of print but that I still use today. The first of the series is by Richard Ingram and is titled, “Ten Basic Responsibilities of Nonprofit Boards.” It is excellent! Governance as Leadership seems to represent Board Source’s updated thinking on nonprofit governace, but I still love the simple and clear guidance in those original booklets. Try to track them down if you can — you won’t regret it!