You’re on the Board. Now What?
A workbook for new nonprofit board members.
You said yes to a nonprofit board seat. Nobody told you what the job actually is.
Somewhere between being flattered that they asked and sitting down at your first meeting, it becomes clear that no one is going to explain the rest: what you are responsible for, what you are allowed to ask, and what happens if it goes wrong.
This workbook is that explanation. It assumes you have never read a Form 990, that you have questions you are afraid will sound naive, and that you would like to be useful well before your term is half over.
WHAT YOU’LL WORK THROUGH
• What your three fiduciary duties (care, loyalty, and obedience) actually ask of you, in plain language
• Where the board of directors’ job ends and staff’s begins, and how to back out gracefully when you cross the line
• How to read a nonprofit budget and financial statements well enough to ask a real question
• What to say, word for word: disclosing a conflict of interest, asking about D&O insurance, admitting you got lost in the treasurer’s report
• Fundraising when you are not a salesperson
• A first-ninety-days plan and a checklist for protecting yourself as a director
• Six real board situations, an annual board self-assessment, and four ready-to-use templates
A SECOND HALF MOST BOARD BOOKS LEAVE OUT
Part II is written for the board chair or executive director running the orientation: session plans you can teach from, how to find what each new board member is actually for, how to move a flat “I’ll never do that” toward a first attempt, and what to do when a meeting goes sideways, which is almost always unclear roles or missing context rather than difficult people.
BUILT TO BE USED
Every chapter ends in space to write. The worksheets are free to download, so your board can reuse them with each new director. At 8.5 x 11, it lies flat and there is room to think.
Ideal for new board members, board chairs, executive directors, governance committees, and anyone building or rebuilding a small nonprofit board.
Merissa wrote this book to support your journey as a new board member – because she was a new board member once, and was not good at it.
Merissa took her first board seat at twenty-three, on an arts council in Kodiak, Alaska. She was not good at it. She came to meetings unprepared. She voted on things she did not understand. She served two years and contributed almost nothing, and at the time she could not have told you what the job actually was, because nobody told her and she did not ask. It took years to understand what a board loses when a
director does that, and how much of it was fixable with one good conversation in the first month.
Since then Merissa has been on most sides of this. She’s chaired a board, sat on an advisory board, run two nonprofits as executive director, and been the interim brought in when something went wrong. She has doubled an organization’s revenue over four years and raised staff wages while doing it, helped a
community in Alaska turn a food security problem into a food cooperative, found seed funding for it, and chaired its board through the early years. Most recently she incorporated a new independent school and opened its doors to students three months later.
The part that matters for this book is simpler than any of that. Merissa has been the director who did not read the packet, and the executive director watching a board not read it. Both of those are avoidable, and almost nobody explains how. That’s what this book does.
