Printable Version Email to a Friend 
Author Identification Judith R. Saidel, Ph.D. is Director, Center for Women in Government & Civil Society, and Associate Professor of Public Administration & Policy, Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York. |
The Crossroads in Context: Tough Questions Based on Research for Nonprofit Board Members and Staff
The title of a recent conference, “Nonprofits at the Crossroads: A Summit for Board Members and Staff,” inspired a keynote address delivered at the conference and later expanded into the observations in this article. The June 15, 2007 conference was sponsored by the Government Law Center, Albany Law School. Co-Sponsors were the Community Foundation for the Capital Region, Council of Community Services of New York State, Center for Women in Government & Civil Society at the University at Albany, and the Tech Valley Nonprofit Business Council, a unit of the Tech Valley Chamber Coalition.
Introduction
In the worlds of higher education and of university-based centers, the term “crossroads” evokes one of the meanings listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (1991): “the place where two roads cross each other; the place of intersection of two roads.” The two roads often referred to in these settings are research and practice or research and activism. This is the intersection that underpins the substance of this article. Research findings presented here derive from studies conducted over the past 18 years at the Center for Women in Government & Civil Society, University at Albany, State University of New York. The Center is part of the Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy.
Board Involvement in Government-Nonprofit Sector Relationships
In the early 1990s, Center researchers conducted a series of studies on the involvement of nonprofit board and staff members in relationships between government and nonprofit organizations with government grants or contracts. Interest in this area of research was rooted in shifts, both directly observed as well as reported in the research literature, in the distribution of organizational influence between boards of directors and executive staff. These shifts seemed to be related to increases in the proportion of nonprofit revenues derived from contracting with government to deliver public services.
We began by surveying board presidents and executive directors in a random sample of 400 nonprofits with government grants or contracts in four service areas — arts and culture, social services, general health, and mental retardation and developmental disabilities — to examine whether boards influence the government and voluntary sector relationship and, if so, in which directions and under what conditions. Are boards a mediating factor in the balance of mutual dependence between government and the voluntary sector or are they bystanders in the contracting arena?
We learned that, under certain conditions, boards are more likely to be actively engaged participants. Four of the more interesting conditions associated with higher levels of board engagement are:
1. Younger organizations
2. Organizations whose boards have greater legitimacy in the eyes of important constituencies, including state government officials
3. Nonprofit organizations that belong to statewide associations described as important in policy influencing
4. Nonprofits in which executive directors invest effort in educating and informing boards about government programs, practices, and policies
Tough Questions Raised by These Findings:
- With respect to levels of board engagement and the age of organizations, what happens to certain board functions as nonprofits grow older? Do these activities shift to staff, disappear, or cycle back to boards under changed circumstances?
- In terms of board composition and legitimacy enhancement, who currently serves as nonprofit trustees? What are the characteristics of individuals who boost an organization’s standing in the eyes of government funders? How do board recruitment processes actually work?
- In relation to nonprofits affiliated with more powerful associations, are the advocacy efforts of associations and individual organizations complementary in the sense that belonging to a powerful network of nonprofits pulls individual boards into the political process? Or, as other researchers suggest, does membership in an association have a kind of substitution effect that, if it exists, should be actively countered by both associations and individual organizations?
- And finally, related to the educational efforts of executives toward boards, are executive directors in general investing sufficient and ongoing effort in educating boards about the contracting process and the tradeoffs inherent in that process?
The findings reported above were so provocative that we decided to extend our analysis of the data to address two additional research questions: (1) In nonprofits that do business via a grant or contract with government, what are the patterns of joint governance between boards of directors and executive staff related to contracting? (2) What influences the adoption of these patterns in different organizations?
We discovered that governance, defined as including the important arena of external relations, “is not exclusively the board’s business.” In most nonprofit organizations supported in part by public funds, the governance challenge is met by both executive staff and board members. They conduct important governance functions, working together in several different kinds of relationships that we describe as “governance patterns.”
Two of the four patterns of particular interest here are — the “shared governance” pattern and the “bystander” pattern. The shared governance pattern showed up most frequently when staff and boards worked together in a kind of buffering function, i.e. in discussing possible goal conflicts and weighing the effects of government funds on nonprofit missions and programs.
On the other hand, when asked about policy influencing activities (the word “advocacy” was not used in the questions) to advance organization-specific interests as well as policy changes with a broader impact, the most frequently reported pattern was “bystander.” In other words, little or no activity occurred with respect to policy advocacy by either board or staff. This was true for well over a third (38.8%) of organizations that respondents were describing.
Several other findings also provided important insights. Again, executive director education activities exerted a powerful effect on the partnership of board and staff in governance activities. And boards with high legitimacy members were also more likely to demonstrate a pattern of shared governance as compared to a bystander pattern. That is, they were more likely to be co-participants with staff in political advocacy.
Tough Questions Raised by These Findings:
- Are board search committees taking sufficiently into account the capacity of potential executive directors to fulfill important board leadership responsibilities?
- What are the consequences of the fact that a high proportion of individual nonprofits are on the public policy sideline? Is the strength of the nonprofit sector seriously diminished by bystander organizations or do alternative vehicles for political advocacy compensate for these groups?
The continuing saliency of these findings and questions has been reinforced by a study on immigrant organizations and the state policy process that the Center is currently conducting.
Findings from an exploratory study recently presented at a seminar jointly sponsored by Birkbeck/University of London and the Institute for Voluntary Sector Research reveal that community based, immigrant run,and immigrant serving nonprofit organizations provide a remarkably broad array of immigrant integration services and programs to their constituencies. At the same time, a significant proportion of nonprofits in this sub-set of the voluntary sector are also in the policy bystander category, at least at the level of state government. Whereas many of the same reasons for low policy engagement apply to this group of nonprofits, we also learned about a number of barriers unique to immigrant organizations. These are summarized in the table below.
Table 1.
Barriers to Policy Engagement
- IRS (tax) law and nonprofit status
- Absence of formally assigned advocacy role
- Limited financial resources
- Lack of funding for policy staff
- Program-based funding as a structural constraint
Unique to Immigrant CBOs
- Concerns associated with government funding
- Distrust from community
- Silencing effect on potential dissent
- Limited involvement from constituents
- Staff skill deficits and attitudes
- Limited knowledge about US policy system
Tough Questions Raised by These Findings:
- Does the lack of formally assigned advocacy roles compromise the ability of immigrant organizations to give voice to their constituents?
- Can an organization that lacks a formal advocacy role be effective in promoting the kind of system changes that may be necessary to fully integrant immigrants into new communities?
- What types of board and staff strategies can immigrant organizations implement to balance the tensions of managing an interdependent relationship with government on the one hand, and substantial constituent mistrust in government — post 9/11 — on the other hand?
___________________________________________________
Conclusion: Overload, Entanglement, and Enticement
In the random sample study reported on at the beginning of this article, 40% of respondent nonprofits indicated the presence of an advisory group. In a follow-up examination of a small purposive sample of nonprofits with advisory groups, we learned that advisory groups were involved in a wide variety of governance activities that supplemented, duplicated, or, in some instances, virtually replaced the work of boards of directors in particular governance areas.
Overload
In that piece of research, we raised the following tough question — and I raise it again here and add a second question — Has the sheer magnitude and complexity of current governance challenges exceeded the capacity of even the most conscientious boards of directors and executive staff? If so, should boards and staff acknowledge and explicitly fulfill a kind of meta-accountability function whereby they jointly identify the critical accountability tasks that must be performed and distribute to multiple actors, including themselves, responsibility for performing and reporting on explicitly designated tasks?
Entanglement
Contracting with government inevitably entangles nonprofits in the contested arena of politics with all of the attendant positive and potentially negative consequences that such an entanglement implies. The noble and worthy intentions of most charitable organizations should not blind nonprofit actors, whether board or staff, to the powerful coercive pressures exerted by government partners who, by virtue of holding the revenue and regulatory cards in their hands, will always be the more powerful players in the still interdependent contracting relationship. Political savvy, clear-headedness, courage, strong negotiating skills, and large reservoirs of patience and steady mindfulness about the soil from which the roots of nonprofits derive nurturance are characteristics critical for successful navigation of this potentially treacherous terrain.
Enticement
Finally, an “enticement” warning: A recent New York Times article and video on the Times web site reported a story headlined “Federal Grant for a Medical Mission Goes Awry.” Two Times correspondents reported that, through the earmark process, Congress gave two decommissioned Coast Guard cutters to a faith-based group in California and directed that the ships be used only to provide services to islands in the South Pacific.
Instead, the nonprofit, Canvasback Missions, took ownership of the vessels and subsequently sold them off for badly needed cash to two different buyers. Congress was unaware that the ships were not being used for the purposes for which the earmark was intended.
There are many morals to this seemingly tawdry tale but the one emphasized here is that entanglement can easily lead to enticement, i.e. ethical dilemmas organically linked to a nonprofit’s relationships with government. Because political relationships are multi-faceted and fraught with undefined consequences, nonprofit staff and board members may well find themselves confronting very difficult choices that have strong ethical dimensions.
These occasions will introduce a crossroads of another kind, a point where, as the Oxford English Dictionary describes, “two or more courses of action diverge,” presenting a “critical turning-point” and some very tough questions for nonprofit board and staff members.
Concluding Exhortation to Nonprofit Board Members and Staff
Maintain awareness about the likelihood that, at some point, you may be confronted by this kind of crossroads, a place where two roads cross each other. Be prepared to make the kind of choice that enables you to wake up in the morning and know that you took the turn of which you would be proud if your story were published in the New York Times.
References
Harlan, Sharon L. and Saidel, Judith R. 1994. “Board Members’ Influence on the Government-Nonprofit Relationship.” Nonprofit Management & Leadership. Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter), 173-196.
Henriques, Diana B. and Lehren, Andrew W., “Federal Grant for a Medical Mission Goes Awry.” New York Times, June 13, 2007.
Saidel , Judith R. 1998. “Expanding the Governance Construct: Functions and Contributions of Nonprofit Advisory Groups.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Vol. 27, No. 4 (December), 421-436.
Saidel, Judith R. 1991. “Resource Interdependence: The Relationship Between State Agencies and Nonprofit Organizations.” Public Administration Review. Vol. 51, No. 6 (November/December), 543-553.
Saidel, Judith R. and Harlan, Sharon L. 1998. “Contracting and Patterns of Nonprofit Governance.” Nonprofit Management & Leadership. Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring), 243-259.
Author Identification
Judith R. Saidel, Ph.D. is Director, Center for Women in Government & Civil Society, and Associate Professor of Public Administration & Policy, Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York.