Reimagining Governance for Nonprofit Organizations, Networks, and Coalitions

There is growing interest and urgent need for reimaging governance and innovative approaches and models which are more responsive and accountable to the communities they serve, while addressing racial equity and class. As current traditional hierarchal models of governance often lead to dysfunction and disconnection to communities, new approaches are increasingly being adapted by nonprofits and coalitions across the U.S. This advanced workshop will focus on some of the leading-edge governance frameworks and applications and how you can connect and engage your communities more directly in your governance. These frameworks include: Community Engagement Governance,™ (an innovative governance framework in which key constituents and key stakeholders share in racially equitable shared/distributed governance decision-making), BoardSource’s Purpose-Driven Board Leadership (grounds board decision making in community wisdom and pays attention to the ecosystem), Network Governance (governance with multiple organizations), and Liberatory Governance (focusing on racial equity and shared power between a governance team and staff). 

Register here

Learning Objectives

This highly active virtual workshop will focus on hands-on experiential activities to increase learning and dialogue about these new approaches to governance.  Through this 3hour workshop, board members and executive directors will:  

• Increase their understanding of the foundational principles for some of the new governance frameworks and strategies to engage your communities more directly in your governance process. 
• Learn about the benefits and challenges of these frameworks from case examples of nonprofits and coalitions who are experimenting with some of these new approaches to governance. 
• Explore ways to apply some of the guiding principles of these new approaches to the governance of their own organization, coalition, or network. 
• Develop a plan to bring back their learning to their board or network/coalitions 

Target Audience

This is an advanced level workshop and is limited to board members, executive directors, and senior staff that work directly with boards, coalitions, networks, or other governance systems. Board members with their executive director are strongly encouraged to attend together as a team. As this workshop will offer very different ways of thinking about governance, we encourage participation by those who have an open mind and are interested in experimentation. As the session will be highly participatory, we are requesting all participants to use their cameras for the full workshop.   

About the Presenters

This session will be led by Judy Freiwirth with Nesly Metayer.

Judy Freiwirth, Psy.D., Principal of Nonprofit Solutions Associates, has been consulting and training nonprofit organizations for over 30 years, especially those that focus on social change through movement building and coalitions, immigrant rights, and which serve communities of color.  She is nationally known as a thought leader and trainer in new approaches to governance and has been a keynote speaker and trainer at many international, national, and regional conferences. She is a certified BoardSource Governance Consultant and Trainer and is the key developer of Community-Engagement Governance™, an innovative governance approach which uses a racial equity lens and engages constituents and other community stakeholders in shared governance. Her practice also focuses on strategic planning, racial equity initiatives, leadership transitions, organizational restructuring, program evaluation, and community-wide change initiatives. She serves an TSNE affiliated consultant and as a consultant with RoadMap Consulting. She also served as the co-coordinator of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management’s New England Racial Equity and Capacity Building Initiative, which focused on building the racial equity competencies of consultants and other capacity builders. She has published numerous articles for The Nonprofit Quarterly and is a chapter author for the book Nonprofit Governance: Innovative Perspectives and Approaches. She is currently serving as the Chair of Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership. She holds a doctorate in psychology, specializing in organization development.    

Nesly Metayer has over 20 years of experience in management development with a special interest in POC-led organizations. As an organizational development consultant and now Principal at EquiLead Consulting Group dedicated to advance transformational processes and racial equity, Nesly partners with organizations to design, implement, and evaluate participatory practices of inclusion and deepen organizational culture towards social accountability and equity outcomes through training, strategic management processes, community renewal, executive transition and organizational change. As a practitioner in the field, Nesly has been the executive director of Youth and Family Enrichment Services (YoFES), responding to racial disparities of children in Boston. Before joining YoFES, Nesly spent six years at Tufts University as senior manager for community engagement, leading the implementation of an innovative program to respond to the disparity of child obesity in America. Nesly has initiated and implemented various capacity building projects aimed at reinforcing the management capacity of many organizations in Greater Boston. As a practitioner-scholar, Nesly’s research agenda focuses on the factors associated with the effectiveness of mission-based organizations. Nesly Metayer earned an undergraduate degree in business administration, a graduate diploma in administration from the National School of Administration (IIAP), a master’s in sociology from University of Caen, France, and a doctorate in administration from Paris –Sorbonne University. He is currently working on his last paper for the Doctor of Management in Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.