For decades, nonprofit boards have been treated as the gold standard of organizational oversight. Volunteers, drawn from the community, are entrusted with authority over finances, strategy and leadership. The assumption has been that goodwill, professional success in other fields and civic commitment are sufficient to govern nonprofit organizations.
That assumption is now being challenged in the nonprofit world.
Today’s nonprofits are more complex. They often manage large budgets, navigate employment law, address safety and risk, and depend on low-paid professional staff members to do emotionally demanding work. Meanwhile, board members are often volunteers with limited time, uneven experience and minimal understanding of nonprofit operations. Despite this mismatch, a traditional board can hold immense authority over major organizational decisions.
This isn’t a criticism of board members as individuals. Most serve because they care deeply. The problem is structural. Traditional boards hold significant power but are largely accountable only to themselves. When things go wrong – such as unbalanced budgets, constant leadership turnover or unethical member behavior – there are no mechanisms built into the system to help boards correct these issues.
Nonprofit board problems are not rare, and they are not the fault of individual board members. They are predictable outcomes of a system that depends on good intentions but lacks checks and balances. As a result, many nonprofit boards are rethinking how their governance works.
Across the sector, organizations are moving away from traditional president and secretary roles that were based on the “social club” boards of the 20th century. Updated boards use methods such as holacracy that match authority with expertise and accountability. This helps prevent the “Titan” problem, because authority is tied to a domain (for example, “Financial Lead”) rather than a member’s officer title or donation history.
In newer models, board members focus on areas such as ethical and legal compliance, fundraising and financial oversight, executive director support, and measuring the mission. Strategy, vision and values are created by staff members who know the organization best, while progress is measured by board governance councils or structured leadership groups designed for that purpose.
Modern board governance also integrates independent accountability. This includes outside human resources support, ethics review processes, ombuds services and third-party evaluations of executive leadership. These safeguards reduce risks to board members and help protect the nonprofit and its mission when internal conflicts arise.
Some nonprofits are experimenting with shared, or “circle-based,” governance, where decision-making power is distributed across groups. Others are adopting two-tier systems, common in other countries, that separate oversight from management entirely. Still others are professionalizing boards by setting performance expectations and enforcing consequences when standards are not met by board members.
These approaches may sound unfamiliar, but they work. They reflect the simple truth that effectively governing a modern nonprofit requires new thinking about board structure, board focus, and checks and balances.
Governance updates require boards to do the hard work of fixing themselves where the system is broken. Creating new board roles can reduce power struggles. A laser focus on compliance, executive director support, funding and metrics can increase impact. Getting outside help protects boards from situations they lack the expertise to handle, and allows staff members to focus on operations instead of navigating board politics.
The future of nonprofit governance is not about punishing boards for a broken system. It is about updating boards with focused roles, external support and structures that recognize both human limits and human potential. When boards improve their own governance systems, nonprofits are empowered to do what they were created to do: serve their communities with integrity, stability and impact.
Julie Dreyfuss holds a master’s degree in international development and has 30 years of experience working with nonprofits worldwide. Based in Durango since 2003, she has spent two decades working with local nonprofits and is launching Sea Change, a free, eco-friendly fundraising platform for grassroots organizations in the Global South.
