|
November 15, 2008: All in the Family? |
|
|
|
|
A periodic plea must again be made to those we know starting a
nonprofit: PLEASE, if you are trying to establish a sustainable community
institution, don't start the easy way, the way of the family. All too
often, people establishing 501(c)(3)'s think about the requirement to have
officers as a simple bureaucratic hurdle. They don't understand that they
are creating the foundation for governance and community responsiveness
capacity that is dangerously fragile.
The song of the stakeholder must be sung yet again. Please tell all of
the well-intentioned organization founders that you run across that they should
think about whom will be benefited by the success or failure of the
organization AND put representatives of those impacted parties on the board of
trustees. It never ceases to amaze me how people put only people they
know, beginning with their own family.
Even more amazing, is how these same people have immense difficulty
grasping why it is that they experience such great difficulty in gaining community
awareness, credibility, advocacy and funding support. By choosing the
easy route, the path of least resistance and least consideration, founders
frequently doom the organizational manifestation of their greatest passion
to a life of struggle, if not an early demise.
|
Board Tech Blog 