Tuesday, October 9, 2007

The need for more nonprofit board leaders

As we have updated our website, we felt it could be helpful to begin this blog with the goal of highlighting news and ideas about boards and board members in the nonprofit sector. One of the primary themes will be to share and solicit your feedback on how all of us, as supporters of the entire nonprofit sector, can address the deficit in energetic, engaged, and effective board members. Thomas Tierney (www.Bridgestar.org ) made a great case for the coming shortage of nonprofit execs but I don't hear enough about the open board seats that exist in most nonprofits in every city in the country.

We now have well over 1 mil charitable nonprofits and the trend is for people to sit on fewer boards, not more. That likely means that we have several million open nonprofit board seats at any point in time, and each of those organizations realizing less than their full potential. Tell us what you think and give us a heads up on resources that you know of that we can expand on in this space.

To speak the obvious, the products we offer at www.AllAboutBoards.com are designed to help get these new board members up to speed more quickly and clarify roles for even the most tenured board members.

Bryan