Boards Reimagined: Breaking Free from Business as Usual

Picture this. It’s a Tuesday evening. The board meeting starts, someone calls it to order, the secretary notes quorum, and within minutes your eyes glaze over during a report-out on the last audit. A motion is made, seconded, passed. Next agenda item. Rinse. Repeat.

Sound familiar?

For too many nonprofit leaders, this is the soundtrack of board service. Predictable. Procedural. And often, completely disconnected from the urgent, creative work the organization actually needs.

Meanwhile, outside that boardroom (or Zoom room), the world is shifting fast. The conservation movement—and the nonprofit sector more broadly—is adapting to existential threats, including climate change, a biodiversity crisis, public lands sell-offs, political backlash, disinformation, funding cuts, and widening inequities. In the U.S. and in Canada, the National Council of Nonprofits and Imagine Canada continue to publish guidance on navigating these many risks, and staff are responding. Leaders are getting sharper about values, strategy, and power-building. Movements are becoming more interconnected. Energy is bubbling up everywhere … except in many boardrooms.

To their credit, many boards are trying to evolve. They’re getting smaller and more nimble, leaning into making the best of virtual and hybrid meetings, exploring how to bring in voices from impacted communities, and working to foster inclusive cultures where all board members feel heard. But often, board structures and procedures remain stagnant.

The result? Staff in some organizations continue to feel excluded from decisions impacting them. Board membership pathways remain narrow as conservation nonprofit boards continue to recruit from their inner circles of lawyers, accountants, wealthy donors, retired natural resources agency folks. And executive directors sometimes find themselves hamstrung by micromanagement or drained from having to deal with exclusionary board member behavior.

But what if boards could be something entirely different? What if they were engines of creativity, accountability, and connection? What if they helped organizations and their leaders meet this moment instead of clinging to business-as-usual?

How Did We Get Here? (Cue the Robber Barons)

Boards can be reimagined. But to do that, it’s important to understand where nonprofit boards came from. We could go all the way back to Britain, when charities emerged as a way to preserve wealth accumulation following the passage of the Rule Against Perpetuities. In North America, however, modern nonprofit boards took shape during the Gilded Age. As journalists exposed tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller as exploitative “robber barons” rather than heroic captains of industry, these magnates sought to launder their reputations (and their fortunes) through philanthropy. The charitable foundations they created helped seed the U.S. nonprofit sector, which soon began functioning as a kind of privatized social services system. In theory, nonprofit boards were meant to hold organizations accountable to the communities they served—much as governments do with public agencies. In practice, many boards were stocked with cronies of wealthy who served less as stewards of the public good and more as extensions of elite power.

Though laws were passed to prevent corruption in nonprofits (1969 in the U.S., 2011 in Canada), the legacy of hierarchical, privileged governance remains baked into the DNA of nonprofit boards. And with it, a set of assumptions:

• Of course the board makes all the big decisions.
• Of course only the board hires and evaluates the executive director.
• Of course boards have committees.
• Of course all boards run meetings using Robert’s Rules of Order.

This is the way.

But… why?

Reimagining Boards: It’s All About Power

In their Nonprofit Quarterly article series Reimagining Nonprofit Boards, Ananda Valenzuela (former interim TREC executive director) invites us to see boards differently—not as an insular body that rules an organization, but as part of an interdependent governance ecosystem where power (and trust) is shared with staff, constituents, and partners. Valenzuela lists three specific mindset shifts, all of which can be boiled down to a transformation of a board’s power from power over the organization and its staff to power with an organization.

I could wax on about power. Suffice to say, this idea of “power-with” was first articulated by Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), a writer, social worker, and political theorist who many look to as one of the earliest management consultants. While those in power viewed humans as workers and organizations as machines of capitalism, Follet urged thought of organizations as social institutions consisting of complex interactions: an ecosystem rather than a machine. Follet talked about three types of power: power-over, power-with, and power-to. 

• Power-over is top down and extractive, the type of power many boards today wield.
• Power-with is actually more effective, as it comes from collective action and movement building.
• Power-to is what we sometimes refer to as “empowered,” the power of agency and self-determination. Cyndi Suarez, a more recent thinker and author (and former editor-in-chief of the Nonprofit Quarterly) refers to power-over as “supremacist power,” and power-with and power-to as “liberatory power.”

If you take nothing away from this lesson on power, it is this: To truly transform, nonprofit boards must see themselves as having power with and not over organizations and their leaders. And by doing this, they will be more accountable, more trustworthy, more collaborative, and ultimately more effective.

Exploding Your Board Structure: A Few Ideas

So what does power-with look like for a board? Legally, boards only have three fiduciary duties: care (act in the org’s best interest), loyalty (avoid conflicts of interest), and obedience (follow the law). That’s it. Everything else—committees, rituals, Robert’s Rules—is optional. Which means organizations have far more freedom than most people realize. Here are some radical (but very practical) ways to rethink your board structure:

• Build a “minimum viable board” to handle the legal and fiduciary basics. Then, create an advisory board that reflects the community you serve and the future you’re building. Fundraisers? Yes. Visionaries? Absolutely. Network-weavers, activists, AI experts, philosophers, anthropologists? Bring them in. Advisory boards can be compensated, culturally relevant, and rooted in shared values—while the legal board is there to ensure compliance.
• Experiment with multi-entity models. Fundraise through your 501(c)(3), lobby through a 501(c)(4), hold property in an LLC. Each entity gets a board aligned to its purpose, all connected by a shared vision.
• Have board members draft their dream job descriptions and crosswalk them with the org’s actual needs. Then fill the gaps.
• Try shared leadership models. Co-executive directors, co-chairs, distributed decision-making: it’s all on the table.
• Write a robust charter, not just bylaws. Spell out how you’ll show up for one another, how you’ll make decisions, and what shared accountability looks like.
• Experiment with using a sociocracyrather than Robert’s Rules of Order to run your meetings. Sociocracy is a system of governance that distributes power and decision-making authority through interconnected, semi-autonomous “circles” that decide based on consent rather than majority rule.
• Use the Advice Process. In tandem with sociocracy, you can center transparency and collaboration by ensuring those most impacted by a decision and who have the most knowledge about the subject of the decision are centered in decision-making processes. Which means the board isn’t always the decider.
• Involve staff in ED hiring and evaluation. After all, they know the organization best—and will be working most closely with the ED.
• Conduct a board self-assessment to support accountability. You can check out some key questions to ask yourselves in our Board Self-Assessment resource.

Real-World Examples

In the third article in their Nonprofit Quarterly series Reimagining Nonprofit Boards— Ananda Valenzuela provides three examples of boards with alternative governance structures. Here are a couple of other examples that I’ll add which are specific to the conservation sector.

• An Indigenous-led environmental justice organization operates with a lean legal board focused on compliance, while a dynamic advisory council drives strategy and vision, grounded in community needs and leadership. The advisory council uses talking circles and Indigenous governance to make decisions, rather than Robert’s Rules of Order and majority voting per bylaws. Not being tied to formality also allows the mostly Indigenous advisory council culture to be more culturally relevant and welcoming to community members.
• A land trust runs multiple entities: a nonprofit dedicated to stewardship and conservation, an LLC to hold property, another LLC to manage a community forest, and yet another to oversee a conservation burial ground. Each entity has a board composed of people with direct expertise in that sector—for instance, the burial grounds board includes leaders from the end-of-life and deathcare fields, while the community forest board is made up of local residents. All boards are in direct conversation with each other, with shared goals around representation and engagement, but more specific commitments unique to their specific LLC.

The Bottom Line

Boards don’t need to be stuck in time. They don’t need to replicate power-hoarding structures born in the Gilded Age.

Instead, boards can be alive, adaptive, inclusive, creative. They can be ecosystems, not hierarchies. They can be whatever your organization needs them to be. So let’s stop settling for the way things have always been. Let’s start imagining what boards could be if we designed them for your unique mission in this moment.

In community,

–aparna

Board Self-Assessment Template

Customize this sample board self-assessment questionnaire to run your own confidential board self-assessment in your favorite survey tool/program! It is designed to help your board reflect on individual and collective performance, identify areas for growth, and assess the inclusivity and effectiveness of board culture and practices.

Decision-Making for Equity and Inclusion Activity

This resource includes two sequential exercises to learn about equity-minded leadership and how to embed it into your decision-making. It is meant for individuals who are key decision-makers within their organization such as an executive director or program manager. It can be adjusted for a group by choosing one decision to use as an example throughout the exercises.

External Resources

• Ananda Valenzuela, Reimagining Nonprofit Boards, Nonprofit Quarterly (February 11, 2025)
• Ananda Valenzuela, Liberatory Decision-Making: How to Engage in a Healthy Process, RVC blog (August 30, 2022)
• Cyndi Suarez, Introduction to Power, Nonprofit Quarterly (June 7, 2022) 
• Executive Orders Affecting Charitable Nonprofits, National Council of Nonprofits (Updated Sep 16, 2025) 
• Indigenous Governance Toolkit 
• New Left Accelerator, Unlocking Progressive Power-Building: Changing the Culture of Philanthropy to Effectively & Equitably Support Multi-Entity Organizations 
• Sociocracy For All 
• Ted Rau, Sociocracy: The Movement, Enlivening Edge (January 20, 2018) 
• The New Gilded Age, Throughline (National Public Radio December 22, 222) 
• Tom Geraghty and Jade Garratt, Power and Mary Parker Follett, Psychological Safety (August 26, 2022) 

aparna rajagopal

Senior Consultant

Favorite food or beverage?

aparna has an unhealthy obsession with coconut water (as in too much potassium isn’t awesome), which she uses as her primary hydration during epic mountain bike rides in Oakridge and airy rock climbs in Smith Rocks. 

Favorite or special place?

aparna’s favorite place is an “unnamed” high alpine lake above Mendarrin Lake on the homelands of the Sheepeater Shoshone people in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. Her son named it “God Lake” when he was 4, and let it be known that this is where her ashes will be dispersed!

Book, art, or music recommendations?

aparna’s trying to read 50 books in her 50th revolution around the sun, and one of her favorites so far is Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden. The Miseducation of Lauren Hill will always be her favorite album. Always.