Beyond the Traditional Junior Board: Ways to Turn Millennials Into Leaders

Engaging millennials is a high priority for many nonprofits. These 20- and 30-somethings know how to use social media and care about doing good. And, of course, they will become the donors of the future. In order to capitalize on this potential, some nonprofits recruit young adults to join “junior boards.”

Traditionally, junior board members are young professionals who help raise funds and plan events for nonprofits. Young people like the opportunities these groups provide to network, socialize, and contribute to a cause. At the same time, companies appreciate having their young employees serve as visible community leaders.

A traditional junior board can serve as a pipeline — or a “farm team,” as Carol Weisman, president of Board Builders, puts it — to the real governing board.

For example, since 2007, when the Lee Park & Arlington Hall Conservancy in Dallas started a junior board, at least six members ultimately joined the board of directors, and one became its chairman, says Gay Donnell, conservancy president. “It’s the most fun, serious way to move on to the board,” she says.

But Ms. Weisman says she has mixed feelings about junior boards. To begin with, she explains, relegating millennials to a “kids’ table” apart from full board service can create resentment and distance them from the organization.

While some nonprofit leaders are thinking about placing millennials directly on governing boards, others are not ready to ditch junior boards altogether. Rather, they’re reconsidering the purpose of such a group and the way to choose participants.

Regardless of how they do it, nonprofits should make sure to incorporate millennials’ ideas, Ms. Weisman says.

“I think it’s to the peril of nonprofits not to have a place, either junior board or big board, for people in that under-30 group,” she says. “If you don’t listen to the younger people and bring them on the board or junior board, they will start their own organization.”

Here are some ideas from experts about how to incorporate young leaders in your organization.

Play Up Corporate Appeal

There are three legs to the traditional junior board system: young people, the nonprofits for which they volunteer, and the companies for which they work.

The combination works well to serve the needs of many millennials, Ms. Weisman says.

“The types of people I find who have really enjoyed junior boards are out of college. They may have a new profession, and they want to meet people similar to themselves,” she says. “It’s a wonderful opportunity outside of the bar scene to connect with a values-based group.”

It also fits neatly into many employers’ corporate culture. Companies know millennials want jobs that appeal to their sense of purpose, and they sometimes use the promise of placing young employees on nonprofits’ junior boards as a job recruitment strategy.

“That’s a powerful marketing tool for them to attract talent,” says C.J. Orr, senior associate director at Orr Associates, a consulting firm.

That concept inspired Mr. Orr to co-found CariClub, a website that charges companies to match their young employees in New York City with junior board openings at nonprofits. During the site’s pilot stage, it matched 25 Citibank employees with junior board positions, and when the site went live in July, more than 100 employees from the investment firm KKR signed up.

Leap Into Leadership

To some people, a junior board seems like an unnecessary holding pen.

After a 29-year-old friend of Ms. Weisman’s son complained that he wasn’t learning anything from the junior board he had joined, she placed him on the governing board of a senior services organization. It was a perfect fit.

“He left a message on the answering machine, and it was so ebullient that I saved it,” Ms. Weisman says. “I played it for the CEO of the organization, and he said, ‘I can’t thank you enough.’”

She hypothesizes that older board members today are more open to respecting young people’s ideas than they were in the past because they respect millennials’ technology skills.

“When I joined my first board at 23, there was nothing that people in the room who were 50 didn’t know. That’s not true today,” Ms. Weisman says. “Boards today … they want people under 30. They have a whole different view of how to get messaging out.”

There’s some evidence that governing boards are indeed skewing slightly younger: According to BoardSource’s 2015 Leading With Intent survey, board members under age 40 increased from 14 percent in 2010 to 17 percent in 2014.

Heading straight to the top is the idea behind Direct Impact, a new leadership training program developed by Echoing Green, a nonprofit that provides fellowships to individuals with innovative ideas for social change and creates leadership workshop curricula. Direct Impact participants — New York City residents in their late 20s and early 30s — will take part in four months of workshops, site visits, and retreats designed to prepare them to serve on nonprofit governing boards. The first cohort of 13 people will meet for the first time in September.

“Junior boards are not really boards; they’re really a fundraising vehicle,” says Lara Galinsky, senior vice president at Echoing Green. She hopes that Direct Impact will be a “win-win-win”: for participants, for Echoing Green, and for “corporations that need to show they’re investing in an incredibly talented population.”

Put Advocacy Before Fundraising

Rather than discard the junior board model entirely, in 2014 the Greater Chicago Food Depository created an associate board whose work focuses not simply on raising money, but rather on advocating on behalf of the nonprofit’s clients.

After a young man proposed the food bank start a group for people his age, the nonprofit invited him to research how other local junior boards work. He found that they mostly provided fundraising services. But the nonprofits he approached also said it was important to find meaningful work for young volunteers.

“It really solidified our thought that we were going to do this a little bit differently,” says Kate Maehr, the group’s executive director. “We have so much meaningful work we have to have help with. It underscored the importance of defining the organization around advocacy and education as opposed to fundraising.”

The other reason for avoiding a fundraising focus, Ms. Maehr says, is that “we don’t want to create a sense that certain associate board members are more valued than others based on their capacity to give.”

The food bank made it a goal to recruit people with diverse jobs, including teachers, government employees, and religious leaders. And she believes that’s also part of the group’s appeal.

“To be able to meet people from a different walk of life or who have a different perspective on Chicago is exciting,” she says.

During the associate board’s short existence, members have staffed the advocacy tent at the food bank’s annual hunger walk, participated in the “SNAP Challenge” to shop and eat on a food-stamp budget, called members of Congress, lobbied state legislators, volunteered at the food warehouse, and developed social media strategies to connect low-income kids with summer meals.

Fundraising is not forbidden, of course.

“If an associate board member wants to have an event and raise money, we’re not going to say no. But that’s not the greatest need that we have,” Ms. Maehr says. “We don’t exist to raise money. We exist to feed hungry people and strive to end hunger in our community.”

Ms. Maehr notes that the energy young people bring to the associate board is infectious.

“I sense something in the generation of young professionals coming up today. There is a substance — they want to be a part of solutions in their community, and they are actively searching for that,” she says. “It does more than advance our work. For a lot of us, it fills us with incredible optimism.”

Ms. Donnell agrees. “I have donors who have given us significant gifts who really love to see that this organization has the vision to educate at a younger age about conservation, preservation, and history,” she says. “They love seeing that there is someone coming up behind them that also has the interest.”