Giving Compass' Take:

• Nonprofit Quarterly explores the mechanics of nonprofit boards — and how they can be improved through leveraging networks and questioning assumptions.

• How can we develop more inclusivity and gender diversity among board members? In what ways might the data gathered here help create stronger trusteeships in the future?

• Here are ways that just one board member can provide checks and balances.

Nonprofits tend to think about boards in a way that assumes that they are nonporous entities—a kind of standardized form with few variations. But the opposite is true: nonprofit boards of directors are deeply influenced by any number of “silent” factors beyond whether they happen to adhere to commonly agreed-upon standards of governance.

Our research indicates that they are influenced by their geographic regions, the fields in which they practice, the social era (and theories of change) from which that field emerged, and the regulatory and funder-driven standards of that field, to name a few. This makes these entities far more of a cultural puzzle than previously thought. But these differentials are often plowed under when board development is approached by nonprofits, driving them further underground as silent informers of behavior.

The purpose of this article is to begin to unearth these, so that nonprofit practitioners can begin to question their own working assumptions about boards and why their board is the way it is and acts the way it does.

Read the full article about cultures of nonprofit trusteeship by Rikki Abzug and Jeffrey S. Simonoff at Nonprofit Quarterly.