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Wed Sep 15 09:06:35 PDT 1999

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Filling Board Is a Challenge For Nonprofits

Janet I. Tu
Wall Street Journal 9/15/99

Five years ago, ACAP Child and Family Services had a 12-member
board. Today, it has only six directors, and a struggle ahead to
recruit more.

The agency, which assists low-income families in the Auburn, Wash.,
area, faces stiff competition from other director-poor nonprofits
looking for the same thing: a diverse mix of people with
professional skills. The demand is so great, and the pool of
candidates so limited, that many concerns are operating with boards
much smaller than they would like.

"I must get at least one call a week from organizations looking to
increase the number of people on their boards, or they need more
business people, or more qualified people, or diversified people,"
says Jan Levy, executive director of Leadership Tomorrow, a
Seattle-based nonprofit that grooms community leaders. The charity
world has changed. For one thing, it's grown a lot bigger. There are
more than 37,000 not-for-profit corporations registered in
Washington, nearly twice as many as there were 10 years ago.

"There are almost more organizations than people to serve on their
boards now," says Peter Donnelly, president of Corporate Council for
the Arts, a Seattle nonprofit that raises funds for arts
organizations and trains potential board members.

And nonprofits' standards have changed. They still want directors
who believe in their mission, but smaller agencies such as ACAP are
also increasingly interested in people with certain professional
skills that their paid staff may lack.

"We're asking different things of our board membership than in the
past," says ACAP's board president, Debra Sexton, a sales
representative for a Seattle-based forklift company. "Our
requirements are more professional now."

Being "cool and rich" is no longer qualification enough for board
members, agrees Mary Machala, business manager of the Seattle
Shakespeare Festival, which operates on a budget of $250,000 a year.
"Now they need to have specific skills, be a CPA or a lawyer," she
says.

Nonprofits in the Puget Sound region "are really in a period of
flux," says Mary Stewart Hall, a professor in the not-for-profit
leadership program at Seattle University. "They're rethinking what
the role of boards should be."

Those that attract directors with business skills "and allow boards
to become more strategically involved are going to see those
organizations more successful," she says. "Those organizations that
don't do this will limp along with the right head count on their
boards, but no real assistance and steering from them."

But finding and attracting ideal directors is a challenge. Indeed,
Ms. Machala says, by setting its sights so high an organization can
price itself out of the market.

"Those folks are just not easy to find for a small theater company,"
she says.

With so many positions going unfilled, some groups are making the
duties of board members less burdensome -- trimming back the number
of required meetings, for example, or shortening terms. The
University District YMCA, which wants to enlarge its board to 15
members from seven by the end of next year, is telling potential
directors they won't be required to attend every monthly meeting.

"You have to be more flexible these days," says board president Gina
Iandola.

The American Red Cross of Seattle-King County, whose board has shrunk
to 30 members from 40 since 1997, recently halved to six a year the
number of meetings members must attend, and has shifted to the staff
some of the less-pleasant details of fund-raising events that were
once the responsibility of directors.

ACAP, which just launched a campaign to find nine more directors, is
cutting board members' terms to three years; in the past, there was
no limit. The change "is more inviting to people," Ms. Sexton, the
board president, says. "They know there's a light at the end of the
tunnel."

Ms. Sexton says her agency is looking for a certain kind of director.
She's searching for men and minorities to balance the current board
membership of six white women, along with folks who have expertise in
strategic and financial planning.

This goal of broadening a board's mix is a common one, and makes the
search for directors even more complicated.

Tina Podlodowski, an openly gay member of the Seattle City Council,
says that after she announced she won't run for re-election next year,
she got about 50 calls from nonprofits who wanted her to sign on. She
suspects many of them were drawn by her sexual orientation as much as
her political and social connections or her being a Microsoft
millionaire, she says.

"Many times there are organizations that go after board members
because they're a name or a category," says Ms. Podlodowski. "They
say: We need diversity -- lesbian, African-American -- without any
thought whether that person is a good addition or a good fit on the
board." 

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