New Blood in the Board Room

A growing number of charities are recruiting youths to raise funds and to help run the organizations

Laurel Kean is growing more and more anxious. As she sits through a board meeting of the charity Women Express on a recent winter night, she is hoping that the proceedings will end soon. Like most of her fellow board members, she has many other responsibilities to juggle.

But Ms. Kean’s biggest concerns differ greatly from those of her colleagues. She has stacks of homework piling up and dance rehearsals to attend every day. While Ms. Kean, 15, is determined to be an effective board member, she is worried that she won’t be able to do it all.

“It’s very stressful,” she says. “I just hope I can continue. I really do.”

Ms. Kean is part of a small but growing minority. Slightly less than 1 per cent of charity board members are younger than 21, according to the National Center for Nonprofit Boards. But interest in putting young people on boards is growing, experts say.

Women Express, which is based here and publishes Teen Voices, a magazine written by and about young women, last summer invited Ms. Kean and one other teen-ager to serve on its 13-member board. The charity hopes that the young women will play a key role in helping to raise $500,000 by the end of the year and in teaching them how to solicit donations.

“The young people are a big part of fund raising,” says Alison Amoroso, the charity’s executive director. “You can see where your money’s going when you’re talking to them.”

Meetings Bore Some Teen-Agers

Although Women Express has had young women on its board of directors ever since it was started nine years ago, the result has not always been successful. Many of the young women said they found the discussions to be boring and had trouble finding transportation home after evening meetings, Ms. Amoroso says.

This time, though, she expects things to be different.

Five months ago Women Express started working with Youth on Board, a program that helps charities recruit and retain young board members.

Started in 1994 with a $150,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the program is housed at YouthBuild USA, an organization that trains high-school dropouts to renovate housing for the poor. It received $320,000 last year, mostly from individuals.

Youth on Board works with both adults and youngsters.

Training Programs

Ninety people aged 11 to 30 have graduated from its eight-week training program on how to serve on a board. Participants learn the basics of running an organization, such as developing a budget and writing grant proposals. They also learn to feel comfortable asking questions of board members and to recognize when they are being treated more like kids than like full-fledged board members.

In addition, Youth on Board assesses the procedures of boards composed primarily of adults and offers recommendations on how to make them more “youth-friendly.”

“Often boards don’t realize the little things that make it difficult for young people to participate,” says Jenny Sazama, a co-founder of Youth on Board and its associate director.

Boards may have to change the time and location of their meetings or their policies on reimbursing members for expenses, Ms. Sazama says. She also advises boards to choose adult mentors to guide the young members and suggests ways to enliven the meetings by dividing the boards into small discussion groups.

Karen Young, who recruited Ms. Sazama to help her found Youth on Board and is now the program’s director, says that putting young people on boards is especially important for organizations that serve teen-agers.

“In the past, services were implemented on young people,” she says. “It doesn’t work to just hand people services. You have to empower them.”

Ms. Young says serving on a board can be an “incredibly inspirational” experience for a young person. “That inspiration translates into the other aspects of their lives, now and for the future as well,” she says.

Some Initial Reluctance

Many charities that have given youngsters a strong governance role say the charities have benefited greatly.

In York, Pa., for example, staff members at a YouthBuild affiliate were puzzled by how much trouble they had recruiting teen-agers. “We had made and distributed brochures that, in our opinion, had answered all the relevant questions,” recalls Scott Dempwolf, the group’s director.

It was not until the charity placed young people on its board that staff members discovered the problem.

Young board members suggested that the charity note that teen-agers with police records or a history of previous drug use still were eligible to participate in YouthBuild. The charity made up a new brochure including that information, and within two hours of distributing 400 copies of the new version, 18 teen-agers had applied.

‘Less Jargon’

Adults say the addition of young people often leads boards to change their operations-and makes the boards more effective.

Patricia Driscoll, executive director of Girls, Incorporated in Lynn, Mass., finds that the charity’s board has used “less jargon” since two teen-agers joined it two years ago. “We really take the time to make sure what we’re reporting is understandable, and this benefits all the members,” she says.

Janice Brenner, executive director of the Holden School here, says that “adult board members behaved better” when they shared governance with two teen-aged board members. For example, adult board members’ attendance and punctuality improved, and they interrupted one another less at meetings, she says.

‘An Incredible Opportunity’

Ms. Young says she got the idea to start Youth on Board after she was appointed by then-President George Bush to serve on the U.S. Commission on National and Community Service, the body responsible for putting the National Service Act of 1990 into effect.

All 21 of the other members of the commission were older than she was and included such people as the late George Romney, the former Governor of Michigan; Paul N. McCloskey, Jr., the former Republican Congressman from California; and the late Joyce M. Black, who was then national president of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America.

“I didn’t have any training or support structure,” Ms. Young recalls. “It was very intimidating, but at the same time I recognized that it was an incredible opportunity for me.”

Ms. Young and others who have worked with boards offer the following recommendations to charities that are considering the recruitment of teen-agers and people in their 20s:

Be selective. Boards have to be careful to identify young people who “understand the core values of the organization,” says Jennifer M. Rutledge, vice-president of the Delphi Consulting Group in White Plains, N.Y., and senior associate at the National Center for Nonprofit Boards. “You need to take the time and ask yourself, ‘Do they have the skills, the maturity, the drive?’”

Adults should resist the tendency to select youngsters who meet adult criteria of leadership.

“You have to go to the young people’s community — the schools and universities, the neighborhood associations — and let them tell you who leads them,” Ms. Rutledge says.

Nevertheless, Andre Olton, executive director of Walker’s Point Youth and Family Center in Milwaukee says it is clear that young people must demonstrate certain qualities. “It takes a special kind of youth,” he says, “one that is interested in delayed gratification, in seeing that the process of boards can be very tedious at times. It’s somewhat distant from the nitty-gritty of providing services, and that’s what hooks teens in-being able to see how their own experiences can be used to help other young people.”

Ms. Rutledge recalls that when she started serving on a charity board at the age of 21, she was treated poorly. “I was the only young person on a board of 25,” she says. “I was the token. I was put on display rather than engaged.”

“I caution boards against picking one youth to speak for all youths,” she adds. “Young people bring different perspectives from adults, but they also bring different perspectives from one another.”

Provide training. Lyn Duff, a sophomore at Laney College in Oakland, Cal., says she gets ample guidance as a member of the board of the National Center for Youth Law in San Francisco. But she says her experience at another youth group, which she declined to name, has not been as good-in large part because the group did not provide the young board members with adequate training. She says she fears that fights between the teen-age and adult members may destroy the board and damage the organization.

“Adults are putting youths in positions that they can’t handle without any guidance or preparation,” she says. “Then, when it doesn’t work out, they turn and say, `See, you can’t handle it.’

“The young people are accusing the board of ageism,” she says, “but at the same time, they can’t even organize a conference call.”

Watch for biases. A board has to “take the time and look at where it doesn’t take young people seriously,” says Ms. Sazama.

Identifying bias is often difficult for adults. “There’s nothing tangible you can put your hands on, but it happens in almost every interaction,” she says. For example, adults may be discussing an important fund-raising luncheon and ask the young board members to choose the color of the tablecloths rather than consult them on whom to invite to the event.

Consider legal issues. Few charities that have young people on their boards have encountered legal problems, but many non-profit leaders still worry about the potential troubles. In Florida, Pennsylvania, and several other states, it is illegal for minors to serve on boards.

What’s more, many states do not consider contracts made by young people to be legally binding, which could discourage businesses from making agreements with groups that have minors on their boards. If the contract is made in the charity’s name, however, there should not be a problem, says Mike Trister, a Washington lawyer who works with many non-profit groups. However, he cautions that charities with large numbers of young people on their boards could possibly face legal obstacles if they are sued for negligence.

Try alternatives to board service. Mr. Olton of Walker’s Point Youth and Family Center has found that for many teen-agers, board meetings are often difficult to sit through. Although he thinks that young people can help boards operate better, he says his own experience in putting teen-agers in governance positions “has not been that good.” Instead, he has developed alternatives to board service that, he says, help youngsters get involved with an organization.

For example, his center has an advisory committee made up of young people. The advisory board designed one of the Walker Center’s most popular programs, a telephone “helpline” that allows troubled youths to talk out their problems with the center’s teen-age volunteers. The two-year-old program is the only one in the area, he says, and receives about 50 calls a month.

“Adults played a very minimal role; it was the teens who pushed for it and organized it,” Mr. Olton says. The teen-agers did everything from meeting with foundations to attract money for the project to recruiting the volunteers.

That involvement, he notes, made a big difference to potential donors. “The foundations really wanted to hear from the teens themselves,” he says.