Board governance

Content for Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Readings

  • Chapter 5 in Grobman, An Introduction to the Nonprofit Sector1
  • Barbara E. Taylor, Richard P. Chait, and Thomas P. Holland, “The New Work of the Nonprofit Board”2 (you can read this online here; if you run into access issues, there’s a PDF of the article on iCollege under “Content”. Do not buy this article—you can read it for free)
  • Robert D. Herman and David O. Renz, “Board Practices of Especially Effective and Less Effective Local Nonprofit Organizations”3 (the PDF for this is on iCollege under “Content”.)

This is a helpful checklist that you’ll want to review when working on your project. I’d recommend skimming it before class, but you don’t need to read it in detail:

  • Chapter 4 in Peri H. Pakroo, Starting & Building a Nonprofit4 (the PDF for this is on iCollege under “Content”.)

Written response question

You just read a bunch of research about what makes nonprofit boards effective. Make a list of the five practices that you find the most important and explain why nonprofits should implement them. (Answer in ≈150 words.)

Slides

The slides for today’s class are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.

  1. Gary M. Grobman, An Introduction to the Nonprofit Sector: A Practical Approach for the Twenty-First Century, 6th ed. (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: White Hat Communications, 2021). ↩︎

  2. Barbara E. Taylor, Richard P. Chait, and Thomas P. Holland, “The New Work of the Nonprofit Board,” Harvard Business Review 74, no. 5 (1996): 36–46. ↩︎

  3. Robert D. Herman and David O. Renz, “Board Practices of Especially Effective and Less Effective Local Nonprofit Organizations,” The American Review of Public Administration 30, no. 2 (June 2000): 146–60, doi:10.1177/02750740022064605. ↩︎

  4. Peri H. Pakroo, Starting & Building a Nonprofit: A Practical Guide, 9th ed. (Berkeley, California: Nolo, 2021). ↩︎

Last updated on February 8, 2022

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