Board Momentum Matters

Rethinking Governance in a Changing Arts Sector

A short consulting engagement this year began with a relatively straightforward conversation about organizational structure and eventually became a much broader discussion about the state of governance in the arts. The initial questions were familiar ones: Is the board structured appropriately? Are committees working? Are responsibilities clear? Does the board understand where governance ends and management begins? Are the right policies and procedures in place?

Those questions matter, but as we worked through them, another question became much more interesting to me: What is this organization actually able to do because this particular board exists? I think that is becoming one of the most important questions executive directors can ask.

The arts are moving through another period of recalibration. Funding models are changing, public support has become less predictable, contributed revenue is under greater pressure in many markets, costs continue to rise, audiences have changed their purchasing habits, and organizations are making difficult decisions about programming, staffing, facilities, and venues. The National Endowment for the Arts itself changed elements of its FY2026 grant structure, including eliminating the Challenge America opportunity for that year. Meanwhile, financial pressures have continued to surface publicly at major arts institutions. In an environment like this, I do not believe the arts can afford boards that simply govern themselves well. We need boards that help organizations become stronger. There is an important difference.

A board can meet regularly, approve minutes, review financial statements, maintain committees, follow its bylaws, conduct an annual retreat, complete a board assessment, and still have remarkably little effect on the trajectory of the institution. Those things represent responsible governance practices, but responsible governance should ultimately produce something beyond a well-organized board. It should produce organizational capacity.

The Return of the Working Board

I think we are beginning to see a return to something that was more familiar to many arts organizations in earlier periods: the working board. I do not mean a return to the days when board members substituted for professional staff, nor am I advocating for board members to involve themselves in casting, programming, personnel decisions, marketing execution, or the daily management of an organization. Professionalization of the nonprofit arts sector was important, and the distinction between governance and management should remain clear.

What I mean is something different. I believe board service is again becoming more active, more consequential, and more closely connected to the advancement of the institution. In the current environment, it is difficult to justify a model in which virtually all organizational growth is expected to originate with the executive director and staff while the board primarily receives reports about that growth.

A working board does board work. It opens doors. It introduces people. It understands the funding environment. It advocates. It cultivates relationships. It participates meaningfully in development. It brings expertise into conversations where that expertise is useful. It understands what the organization is trying to accomplish and recognizes where its own members can help make that possible.

This is not an unusual interpretation of board responsibility. The National Council of Nonprofits describes board members not only as fiduciaries but as ambassadors, advocates, strategists, and resources to the organizations they serve. Its guidance on engagement is even more direct: engaged boards work between meetings, partner with executive leadership, and participate in fundraising and advocacy. BoardSource similarly frames the board's responsibility around purpose and strategic direction, resources, and oversight rather than oversight alone.

The distinction matters because an arts organization does not become stronger simply because its board becomes better organized. It becomes stronger when better governance creates better organizational outcomes.

Board Success Is Not Necessarily Organizational Success

This is something I have encountered repeatedly in consulting. Some boards have become very good at being boards. They have governance committees. They have carefully constructed agendas. They have attendance policies and term limits. They review financial information and periodically revise policies. They may hold retreats and complete self-assessments. They may spend considerable time discussing board composition and board expectations.

All of this can be valuable, but there is a danger when the board becomes so focused on improving itself that its own functioning becomes the principal measure of success.

The organization is not there to facilitate the board. The board is there to facilitate the organization.

That does not mean facilitating every decision made by an executive director, nor does it mean surrendering oversight. A strong board should challenge assumptions, ask difficult questions, evaluate executive leadership, understand financial risk, and insist upon accountability. But the purpose of those activities is ultimately to make the institution more capable of accomplishing its mission.

For me, that creates two very different measures of success. There is governance success: meetings happen, fiduciary responsibilities are fulfilled, financials are reviewed, policies are appropriate, risks are understood, committees function, and legal responsibilities are met. Then there is organizational consequence: relationships are created, resources increase, opportunities emerge, strategy improves, risks are anticipated, public standing grows, leadership becomes stronger, and the organization becomes more capable of delivering its mission. The best boards accomplish both. A board that accomplishes only the first may be properly governed without being particularly consequential.

Appreciation Is Not Commitment

This may be one of the more uncomfortable conversations for arts organizations because we naturally recruit people who appreciate what we do. Someone loves ballet, attends the symphony, supports a museum, has children in an arts education program, enjoys theater, knows the artistic director, attends the gala, or simply believes that having arts organizations makes a community better. Those are all meaningful points of connection, and they can be the beginning of extraordinary board service.

But they are the beginning.

A person can love the ballet and contribute very little to governing a ballet company. Someone can attend every opening night and still know almost nothing about the organization's strategic priorities. A person can make an annual contribution and remain disconnected from the institution's financial model, development strategy, staffing structure, audience challenges, or long-term objectives.

Appreciation becomes valuable governance when it turns into responsibility.

That distinction is supported by research beyond the arts. A Stanford Graduate School of Business study conducted with BoardSource and GuideStar found that 27 percent of nonprofit directors surveyed did not believe their fellow board members had a strong understanding of their organization's mission and strategy, while 32 percent were dissatisfied with their board's ability to evaluate organizational performance. The researchers concluded that nonprofit organizations needed board members with relevant experience, deeper knowledge, engagement, and a stronger connection between governance and organizational performance.

Those findings are older, but the underlying question remains remarkably current: Does the board understand the organization deeply enough to help govern where it is going?

What Should a Board Actually Know?

I have become increasingly interested in asking very basic questions during governance conversations because the answers reveal a great deal. Does the board know the bylaws? Not every paragraph and certainly not from memory, but members should understand the document that establishes how their own governance operates. If someone is exercising fiduciary authority over an organization without understanding the basic rules governing that authority, there is a problem.

Does the board know the strategic plan? Again, not every line. But if the organization has identified three, four, or five major priorities for the next several years, board members should be able to discuss them. They should understand where the institution is trying to go, what success is supposed to look like, and what resources are required to get there.

Does the board know the mission and vision? It should be able to articulate them in substance without pulling up the website. If board members cannot explain why the organization exists or what future it is attempting to create, it becomes very difficult for them to determine whether the decisions placed before them are moving the organization toward or away from that future.

Does the board know the staff? Here I think arts organizations occasionally become too nervous about governance boundaries. Knowing staff is not the same as managing staff.

Board members should not create parallel chains of command or supervise employees who report to the executive director. But particularly in small and midsized arts organizations, I believe board members should know who the people are, what their general responsibilities are, and how the organization actually functions.

There is something fundamentally disconnected about governing an institution while being unable to name the people raising its money, teaching its students, producing its performances, communicating with its audiences, managing its facilities, selling its tickets, or delivering its programs. A board does not need to manage those people. It should know the organization well enough to understand the human infrastructure behind the mission.

Does the Board Create Capacity or Consume It?

This may be the most useful board question I have developed through my consulting work. Does the board create executive capacity, or does it consume executive capacity?

Every board consumes some capacity. Board packets have to be prepared. Financial information has to be assembled. Meetings have to be coordinated. Committees require communication. Questions have to be answered. Governance has an administrative cost, and that is perfectly reasonable. There should also be a return on that investment.

If the executive director spends enormous amounts of time keeping board members engaged, reminding people of commitments, filling gaps left by inactive committees, repeatedly explaining strategy, creating every fundraising opportunity, generating every relationship, recruiting every prospective board member, and pushing every initiative forward, the board may actually be consuming more organizational capacity than it creates.

A strong board begins to reverse that equation. Board members make introductions the executive director could not easily make. They bring information into the organization rather than simply waiting to receive it. They identify potential supporters. They advocate within their own networks. They understand community conversations the staff may not hear. They provide expertise when difficult decisions arise. They help identify prospective board members who fit the organization's future rather than its past. They participate in development and help create confidence around the institution.

The executive director still leads. The staff still executes. The board simply makes more possible.

Stanford Social Innovation Review has made a similar point from another direction, observing that well-functioning nonprofit boards can strengthen revenue, provide access to influential people, build stakeholder confidence, manage risk, improve leadership performance, and contribute to mission and strategy. Those are not merely governance activities; they are organizational assets.

Three Dimensions of a Successful Board

Rather than categorizing boards as good or bad, I have started thinking about board effectiveness across three dimensions.

A compliance-oriented board protects the organization. It understands fiduciary responsibility, monitors finances, follows the bylaws, maintains appropriate policies, manages risk, and ensures that governance is legal and ethical. This is essential. An organization without this dimension is vulnerable.

A support-oriented board adds something else. Its members attend programs, contribute financially, participate in development, introduce people, advocate for the organization, cultivate relationships, support executive leadership, and use their own networks to increase the institution's reach. This board does not simply protect what the organization already has; it helps increase what is available to it.

A strategically engaged board understands where the organization is going. Its members know the strategic plan, understand the environment around the organization, recognize emerging opportunities and threats, and understand what the institution will require two, three, or five years from now. Its composition reflects those future needs.

The strongest boards operate across all three dimensions. They protect, support, and position. The problem arises when an organization has come to define excellent governance almost exclusively through the first dimension. Compliance is necessary, but compliance alone does not build an institution.

The Board You Needed Five Years Ago May Not Be the Board You Need Now

This is particularly important for arts organizations because organizational needs change quickly. A company entering a capital campaign requires different board capacity than one stabilizing after rapid growth. An organization confronting audience decline needs different perspectives than one with a waiting list. An institution considering a facility requires expertise and relationships different from an organization attempting to expand nationally. An organization whose strategic plan calls for significant growth cannot reasonably maintain a board structure designed primarily for stewardship of the status quo.

This is why board recruitment should begin with organizational need rather than social familiarity. Too many boards reproduce themselves. Members recruit people they know, people who attend events, people who are pleasant to work with, people whose names look good on a roster, or people who already exist within the organization's immediate circle. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those characteristics. They simply should not be the strategy.

The better question is: What does the organization need around this table now?

BoardSource's ongoing Leading with Intent research reinforces the gap that can exist here. Its current research reports that 49 percent of chief executives surveyed said they did not have the right board members to establish trust with the communities they serve, while only 32 percent of boards placed a high priority on knowledge of the community served when recruiting board members. BoardSource has been studying nonprofit board practices for more than 30 years, which makes that disconnect especially worth considering.

Board composition should follow strategy. If the strategy changes substantially and the board does not, leadership should at least ask whether the composition around the table remains aligned with the future the organization says it wants.

Why This Matters More in the Arts Right Now

I keep returning to this subject because the external conditions facing arts organizations make passive governance increasingly expensive. When funding becomes more difficult, relationships matter more. When a venue becomes uncertain, community influence matters more. When audiences change, outside perspective matters more. When philanthropy shifts, networks matter more. When organizations need to resize, reposition, collaborate, or reconsider how they operate, strategic intelligence matters more.

That does not mean every board member must be wealthy, politically connected, or professionally powerful. I actually think that interpretation has contributed to poor board construction in some organizations. People bring different forms of value.

One member may bring financial expertise. Another may understand the audience. Another may have extraordinary community relationships. Another may understand education. Another may be an effective fundraiser. Another may bring credibility within a constituency the organization has struggled to reach. Another may simply be willing to do an extraordinary amount of thoughtful work.

An older but still useful Stanford formulation describes effective board composition in terms of the “3 W's”: work, wisdom, and wealth. The point is not that every member must bring all three. The point is that board membership should bring something the organization can use. That is very different from constructing a board primarily from people who appreciate the organization.

The Working Board Is Not a Step Backward

I suspect we are going to hear more about working boards in the arts over the next several years, and I do not think that represents a regression.

The working board of the future should look different from the working board of decades past. It should respect professional management. It should understand appropriate governance boundaries. It should not interfere with staff responsibilities or use board membership as permission to direct employees. But it should work. That means board members understanding what they joined, understanding what the organization is trying to accomplish, and accepting some personal responsibility for helping create the conditions necessary to accomplish it.

BoardSource's advocacy work offers one striking example of the gap between expectation and practice: according to its Leading with Intent research, only about one-third of nonprofits reported board members actively involved in advocating for their missions. BoardSource's response has been to argue that advocacy and ambassadorship should be understood as expectations of engaged board leadership rather than optional extras. I think the same principle can be applied more broadly.

Engagement cannot simply mean attendance.

A Different Conversation for Executive Directors

The conversation I would encourage executive directors to have with their boards is therefore not, “Are you doing enough?” That immediately creates defensiveness and usually produces very little. The better conversation is about what the organization is trying to become and what governance must contribute to make that possible.

If the strategic plan calls for growth, what capacity does the board need to help create? If contributed revenue must increase, what role will the board play? If the organization wants a broader audience, who around the table understands that audience? If facilities are a strategic issue, does the board have the knowledge and relationships necessary for that conversation? If the organization wants greater regional or national relevance, does the board's own network extend beyond the organization's existing circle?

Those questions connect board development to mission rather than to board performance for its own sake.

They also create a healthier relationship between the board and executive leadership. The executive director should not have to drag a board toward the organization's future, and the board should not attempt to operate the organization in place of the executive director. The two should be in step about where the organization is going while carrying different responsibilities for getting it there. That is what partnership actually looks like.

The Question I Keep Coming Back To

The consulting engagement that started this conversation did not reveal a uniquely troubled board. In fact, that is precisely why the discussion became interesting. It revealed something I suspect exists in many arts organizations: intelligent, generous, well-intentioned people serving within governance structures that may be functioning appropriately but have not necessarily been calibrated to the organization's present needs. That is a very different problem from dysfunction. It is also much easier to overlook.

Stanford researchers found years ago that nonprofit boards frequently struggled with mission understanding, performance measurement, engagement, fundraising, and having the right skills around the table. More recent BoardSource research continues to identify gaps between the boards organizations have and the leadership their missions require. The National Council of Nonprofits continues to describe effective board service in terms that extend well beyond meeting attendance and fiduciary oversight. The literature is remarkably consistent on this point: boards are supposed to help organizations become sustainable, strategic, connected, and capable of advancing their missions.

For the arts, I think that expectation is becoming more important again.

A board can love an organization without moving it forward. It can govern correctly without creating capacity. It can become better at being a board without making the institution appreciably better at fulfilling its mission. The standard I would use is more demanding but also more useful: Is the organization more capable because this board exists?

If the board becomes stronger internally, some evidence of that strength should eventually appear elsewhere in resources, relationships, visibility, resilience, expertise, opportunity, executive capacity, or mission impact. If nothing changes outside the boardroom, then improving what happens inside the boardroom has limited value.

For executive directors, that may be the most important distinction. The objective is not simply a board that functions. It is a board whose functioning matters.