Program Pairs Company’s Executives With Charity Boards

For years, Susan J. Scher wanted to donate her time and energy to a nonprofit board, but her job

as a managing director at the New York investment firm Goldman Sachs and the demands of her personal life stopped her.

“I’ve got a big, busy career and also a young family, so I’ve always chosen to contribute to nonprofits by writing checks,” Ms.Scher says. “But I always wanted a more personal involvement.”

She finally got her opportunity when she accepted an invitation from her company’s foundation to join a new program that plays matchmaker for 25 Goldman Sachs executives and charities from across the United States and as far away as Hong Kong and Johannesburg.

But this was not the nonprofit version of a blind date.

While corporations have long encouraged their managers to join nonprofit boards, the Goldman Sachs Foundation effort goes further. The foundation conducts an in-depth application and interview process and a weekend training session on nonprofit management at the Harvard Business School to help ensure solid partnerships between nonprofit groups and the company.

After the interview process, the Goldman Sachs Foundation matched Ms. Scher with the Posse Foundation, in New York, a charity that helps students from urban public schools in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York gain admittance to and graduate from college.

Stephanie K. Bell-Rose, president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, says her organization started the program, which is open only to the 55 grantees of the foundation, to deal with the “inefficient process in the nonprofit world to find the right board members and to get those board members to deliver.”

The Goldman Sachs Foundation has spent $52,000 on the program, but the foundation’s contribution in employee work-hours to set up the program makes the cost much higher, says Ms. Bell-Rose.

‘Critical Shortage’

According to a report released last year by Booz Allen Hamilton, a management-consulting firm, nonprofit boards are facing a “critical shortage” of qualified candidates, a phenomenon in part driven by the surge in the number of charities, resulting in 1.2 million “standing openings.”

One challenge corporate executives face when they join a board is that they are unprepared for how differently the charity world operates from the for-profit world.

“When they come to the nonprofit sector, people from a major corporation are often disenchanted because they find that more time needs to be put into consensus building,” says Marianne P. Eby, acting chief executive of BoardSource, a Washington nonprofit group that helps charities build effective boards.

The Goldman Sachs Foundation seeks to overcome that concern with the training at Harvard, which features workshops on understanding a charity’s mission and how to measure its performance. The employees from Goldman Sachs and the heads of the nonprofit organizations both attended the weekend retreat.

According to Ms. Scher, the experience at Harvard was vital in developing a relationship with the president of the Posse Foundation, Deborah Bial.

“It jump-started our relationship,” she says. “We could have had lunch every week for half the year and we wouldn’t have gotten to know each other the way we did in two days at Harvard.”

Posse joined the Goldman Sachs program, Ms. Bial says, to strengthen its relationship with the foundation, which recently gave the charity $1-million to expand its program to Los Angeles, and to expand its board as the charity grows.

Ms. Scher is a “perfect match” for the charity, says Ms. Bial. In only three months since she joined the organization, Ms. Scher has raised $5,000 for Posse through her own donations and a contribution from the Goldman Sachs company. She also is working to expand the number of colleges the charity works with, from 17 to 20, and develop an internship for Posse students at Goldman Sachs.

Alice Korngold, president of Cleveland’s Business Volunteers Unlimited, which helps business executives work with charities, says she sees a growing interest among companies in helping to train corporate volunteers before they accept board positions.

Says Ms. Korngold:”With the challenges that are facing nonprofits being more severe, companies are saying, If we’re going to encourage and support our people getting involved on boards, we’d better help prepare them because they’re walking into a pretty complex situation.”