May 27, 2012 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, which supports social entrepreneurs and their fledgling organizations, believes a strong board is critical to a new nonprofit’s success.
During the fund’s three-year grants, a foundation employee serves on each grantee’s board of directors. Their goal is not just to be active board members but to help build the board’s strength for the long term.
Jenny Shilling Stein, the foundation’s executive director, says that when she joined Kiva’s board, the group, which connects lenders with entrepreneurs who are starting small businesses in developing countries, had strong trustees but that they weren’t as involved as they could have been.
To help remedy that, Ms. Shilling Stein volunteered to lead several big projects the first year she was on the board, including an executive-pay review and overseeing an audit. In each case, she recruited another board member to assist.
The following year, the other board member took the lead, with Ms. Shilling Stein assisting. By the third year, the board member was working with another trustee to complete the task. The approach both helped trustees learn how to do important tasks and gave the board a process to both passing those skills on to future members.
“We know what our exit is,” she says. “It’s three years, so in that period of time, we have to work really hard to get all the ducks in a row and people humming along.”
The foundation believes that serving on the board of directors helps defuse, rather than inflame, the power gap between a grant maker and its beneficiaries, says Ms. Shilling Stein.
At first the 10-year-old foundation didn’t always take a board seat at its grantees’ organizations. But such an approach locked the foundation out of the groups’ key discussions. Sometimes, says Ms. Shilling Stein, boards would debate a key issue and the foundation would only hear the final decision. Because she worked with a lot of grantees, she often had an opinion about what had been decided.
“Now I’m the big, bad funder coming in and imposing a point of view,” she says. “Whereas if I’m part of the board and I’m just one of eight voices, we can talk about it and hear each other’s points of view.”
