Fresh Faces on Board

Betsy Poirier recently landed a plum job in the for-profit world — as manager of new business development for Toys “R” Us. But she also had a nonprofit goal that many young professionals would not dare to reach for so early in their careers: to serve on a museum board.

Ms. Poirier, who this month earned her master’s degree in business administration from Columbia Business School, in New York, got a taste of what it would be like to realize her ambition last year, as a participant in Columbia’s Nonprofit Board Leadership Program.

In addition to attending board meetings of the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Mass., and schmoozing with trustees over cocktails, she spent 50 hours of her vacation analyzing market data and customer traffic patterns of the museum’s online store.

Her work, contributed as part of her service as a nonvoting member of the charity’s Board of Directors, supported its efforts to increase its revenue from sources other than admission fees.

Ms. Poirier is among a growing number of business students who are joining nonprofit boards as part of their business education, often through programs like Columbia’s, which mix the responsibilities of an intern and a consultant with the bonus of being able to sit in on board meetings. The programs give students a window into how charities and their boards work, without saddling them with all the duties of a voting trustee. At about a dozen American business schools, board-leadership programs like Columbia’s place students on charities’ governing bodies for a semester or longer.

Exposure to Charities

Students, faculty members, and charity leaders say the programs expose students to the inner workings of a nonprofit board much earlier in their careers than might otherwise happen. At the same time, charities, whose boards are often filled with people in their 40s and older, benefit from adding energetic young people with up-to-the-minute business skills to the mix.

“It’s always good to have fresh blood,” says Lise Strickler, a board member of the Environmental Advocates of New York, in Albany, and a Columbia alumna who served as a mentor to a student in the school’s board-leadership program this year.

For Ms. Poirier, who studied art in Paris and took many art-history classes as an undergraduate, the fellowship at the Rockwell museum led to a shift in thinking about how to act on her passion for the arts.

“I went from wanting to work for a museum to wanting to serve on a board,” she says.

Growing Interest

A decade ago, Ben Klasky and a classmate at Stanford Graduate School of Business, in California, developed what he believes was the first nonprofit-board fellowship program.

Mr. Klasky, now executive director of IslandWood, a nonprofit outdoor-education center near Seattle, had worked for Teach for America, the national teacher corps, for five years — first as a teacher in Baton Rouge, La., and later at the headquarters in New York as a researcher and fund raiser — before entering business school. Many of his classmates wanted to get involved with charities, but nonprofit organizations turned them away because of their lack of experience, he says.

“We wanted to create a way to get M.B.A.’s onto boards, to lend their business acumen,” he says.

With the help of four other Stanford business students, he and his co-founder recruited 30 charities in the San Francisco Bay area to accept Stanford’s board fellows. Ninety students applied for the 30 slots.

Student demand has driven other business schools to create nonprofit-board fellowship programs of their own over the past 10 years, administrators at those institutions say. Today, students like Charles Scrase, who this month graduated from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, in Durham, N.C., say the fellowship programs influenced their choice of business school.

Before attending Fuqua, Mr. Scrase did a mix of for-profit and nonprofit work, including a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where he met his wife. Although he is now working in the Ann Arbor, Mich., office of the technology company Google, he hopes to return to international-development work in 15 to 20 years, he says.

“I want to first start a business and then start a foundation to do education work in the part of the world where my wife is from,” he says.

New Generation

Observers say Mr. Scrase is among a new breed of business students, those who are as interested in solving social problems as they are in making money.

“We’re seeing a lot more students coming to business school than in the past with an interest in the nonprofit sector or social services,” says Matt Nash, associate director of Fuqua’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, which oversees the school’s Fuqua on Board fellowship program. Those students, he says, might have studied public policy in the past, rather than business.

“Business students are no longer making the mistake of focusing 110 percent on their careers,” says Andy Fenselau, director of product management for Symantec, an antivirus software manufacturer in Cupertino, Calif.

One of the first Stanford board fellows, the 37-year-old now chairs the board of Acterra, the environmental group in Palo Alto, Calif., that he joined 10 years ago as a student. At Acterra, he advises the group on how to design and execute new programs. “I only spend 10 hours a month on my nonprofit board,” he says, “but that makes a huge difference for the organization.”

The growth of board-fellowship programs at business schools reflects not only changing student priorities, some administrators say, but also larger trends in the nonprofit world.

“There’s a leadership vacuum in nonprofits,” says Raymond Horton, a professor of modern political economy and nonprofit management at Columbia Business School, citing the increase in the number of charities in recent years, the growth in size and complexity of existing groups, and the exodus of retiring baby boomers from leadership positions.

“You end up with a lot of important nonprofits that are searching around for managerial talent to lead them,” he says.

In addition to attending board meetings and serving on subcommittees, students attend classes and workshops related to nonprofit management and governance, meet with their peers to discuss their experiences, and work on projects that they design with the help of an executive director or a board member. Students usually are assigned board members as their mentors.

Basic Training

Program advisers say the fellowships both demystify board work and prepare students to be effective board members. “They’re going to go out and be business leaders in their communities, so they’re going to be called upon to serve on boards,” says Mr. Nash. “It’s just what happens.”

Anne Cohn Donnelly, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, in Evanston, Ill., and director of the school’s board-fellows program, says the two courses in board governance that Kellogg requires sharpen students’ contributions to their organizations. For instance, students learn about trustees’ basic responsibilities.

“Most board members today couldn’t tell you that,” she says, “because most board members haven’t had any training.”

By attending board meetings in addition to learning about them in class, Ms. Donnelly says, students witness best and worst practices in board governance.

“They see a CEO being fired,” she says. “They see an organization seemingly going bankrupt. They see a brilliant strategic plan being developed. They see a financial report being passed around, but no one can understand it because it’s too obtuse.”

Students have most of the responsibilities of a trustee, but they do not vote on board decisions, a measure that protects students from legal liability, says Pat Palmiotto, director of the Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship at Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, in Hanover, N.H. And while charities often rely on trustees for financial contributions, business schools explicitly tell charities not to ask the students for donations.

“Most board members kind of understand that the students are facing $60- to $70,000 tuition bills,” Mr. Nash notes.

Still, some students end up making a donation anyway, he says, or they help organize the charity’s fund-raising efforts.

“We know that they give an awful lot of their time,” Ms. Palmiotto says. “And that’s as valuable to the board as if they gave actual cash.”

Students say the programs teach them not only about a board’s role and how it functions, but also what role they can play and how they can use their skills in a nonprofit setting.

They also learn that they contribute to a board even before they become established in their careers.

“It sort of breaks through that barrier that says you have to have a lot of money or a lot of connections or a lot of business experience to serve on a board,” Mr. Klasky says.

Fellows learn some of the quirks of working in a nonprofit setting. The nonprofit world moves at a different pace than the corporate world, says Ms. Strickler. “Your high-powered agenda does not happen overnight in these kinds of institutions,” she says.

Mr. Scrase saw that firsthand during his service on the board of the Durham Literacy Center. He contrasts the board meetings he attended with his work on the charity’s fund-raising committee, where he helped to come up with new, more creative ways that the group could raise money.

“Things actually got done in the committees, and board meetings were mostly reporting,” he says. “It felt very bureaucratic in comparison to what was happening in the committee meetings, and it felt redundant.”

For instance, a debate over what to do with a mold-ridden building owned by the charity took a year and a half to resolve.

“There was no structured decision-making process that allowed the board to come to a decision that everyone thought was OK.,” he says.

Other fellows have observed the sometimes delicate balance between trustees, with their fiduciary responsibilities, and staff members, with their focus on an organization’s mission and day-to-day work.

“If I ever lead a nonprofit organization, now I understand where the board comes from, or if I ever sit on a board, I understand how do you speak to the staff,” says Giselle Leung, who graduated from Columbia this month and served this past year as a board fellow at Amfar, the Foundation for AIDS Research, in New York.

Adding Value

Board members and directors of charitable organizations say that business students bring a fresh perspective into the nonprofit boardroom.

Older board members “are somewhat removed from the state-of-the-art business tools,” says Dan Cain, a Columbia alumnus and investment banker who served as a mentor to Ms. Poirier during her service on the Rockwell museum board. Older trustees, he notes, may not know how to market the charity via the Internet, for example.

“Essentially I felt like we got free consulting work,” says Ms. Strickler of the student she oversaw, who surveyed organizations similar to Environmental Advocates of New York about their board structure and governance. “We helped her shape her project, and she helped us figure out what questions we were really asking.”

Merilynn Bourne, executive director of Listen Community Services, a 35-year-old human services organization in Lebanon, N.H., has worked with Tuck board fellows for the past three years. She says she seeks fellows who can help her remedy the weaknesses she detects in her organization at any particular time, perhaps someone who can help her plan a capital campaign or inform her about general management principles. “There are times when all I need is the outside perspective, so I don’t have to second-guess myself,” she says, explaining that many of her board members have lived in the same community their entire lives. “I want to take every dollar and throw it at programs. I don’t want to have to hire a consultant.”

“Sometimes you’re trapped inside your bubble and you don’t think outside your bubble or box, and board fellows can do that,” she says.

Mr. Scrase says that soon after he settles into his business career, he plans to conduct research on organizations whose missions fit his interests and offer up his services as a board member.

“A lot of people my age don’t consider serving on a nonprofit board because they’re too young or don’t have a lot of experience,” says Mr. Scrase, 31. Without the board fellowship program, he says, “I may have never considered sitting on a board in the capacity I have until I was in my 40s or 50s.”