Boards of Trustees

Nonprofit boards can be a fruitful and receptive audience for civic reflection. Nonprofit organizations attract talented, thoughtful people to their boards and staffs in part because they express and transmit particular values within our society; they appeal as places of meaning-making in a mostly money-making world. Yet these same organizations can find it difficult to invite reflection on the values that brought folks to the board in the first place, or to open up conversation about the organization's work in light of those values.

Board meetings that bring together executive staff and trustees offer a natural opportunity to cultivate the practice of civic reflection—to create significant conversation about difficult questions at the heart of nonprofit work: Whom do we serve, and to what end? Whom are we not serving? What expectations should we really have of those we serve? Of ourselves in this work? What basic values and assumptions are at play in this room, and where do my own fit in?

If you are an executive director, you may be reluctant to ask "one more thing" of your busy board. But if you build regular time into board meetings for reading and discussion, you will likely be surprised. Given a chance to explore key questions and ideas with fellow trustees and key staff, board members not only accommodate these conversations but often come to anticipate them as a rewarding part of their board work. The work of the organization will benefit as well, from leaders who are better able to speak clearly about the complex ideas at the heart of the work. A board member for a Chicago community service organization puts it this way: "Civic reflection has helped us talk more openly and frame the issues in a way we hadn't been able to do before."

Organizations of many types have benefited from this work. A sampling of successful board-based civic reflection projects includes:

A Conversation about Hilltop Neighborhood House in Valparaiso, Indiana brought together trustees and staff of a neighborhood serving organization for a retreat in which they examined the organization's history in relation to Jane Addams' work with Hull House. They followed up with three monthly meals and discussion of other readings—a process that, in the estimation of the executive director and chair, changed the direction of the organization.

The Maine Community Foundation hosted a civic reflection seminar for its board of directors. Key staff and trustees reflected on their own experiences of giving and on several related readings, asking, What is a good gift? Can gifts be bad? To what ends should one give? How do we help givers become more thoughtful? The foundation has now introduced a similar kind of conversation into its regional grant committees.

The Franklin Square Foundation, a small family foundation in Chicago, convened members of its board to read and discuss the essay "Four Traditions of Philanthropy" as preparation for developing foundation guidelines for grantmaking. This conversation led to the creation of formal guidelines for future grantmaking.

Through its Art of Association Project, the Federation of State Humanities Councils has encouraged the boards of state humanities councils around the country to introduce reading and discussion on questions of civic life into their regular meetings. Almost half the councils have now done so and many of these councils have in turn helped a variety of other civic organizations in their states to start civic reflection conversations of their own.

Several family foundations have included civic reflection discussions in their board meetings or retreats to allow conversation that engages not only the "head" but the "heart" and that allows different family members and generations to articulate and explore their different understandings of philanthropy.