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Leadership and Governance Training

Leadership represents the most important resource in a community model.

Board training works when it answers a question the board is already asking.

Generic governance training — the standard curriculum on roles and responsibilities, delivered to a room that did not ask for it — produces polite attention and very little change. Training here starts instead from an assessment of the board's own governance capacity, so that the agenda addresses the gaps this board actually has.

The board completes a self-assessment covering its governance functions. The results identify where confidence is low, where practice and policy have drifted apart, and where compliance requires attention. Those findings set the training agenda, and the board sees them before the training begins — which is usually where the useful conversation starts.

The sessions that follow are customized to those findings. Depending on what the assessment surfaces, they may address financial oversight and budget performance; the working relationship between board and staff; board composition, skills gaps, and recruitment; meeting management, reporting, and how decisions actually get made; bylaws, terms, and conflict-of-interest and whistleblower policy; the board's role in fundraising; or the evaluation of the chief executive.

Training can be delivered as a full-day retreat, as two half-days, or distributed across several regularly scheduled board meetings.

The purpose throughout is capacity rather than compliance. A board that leaves understanding why a practice exists will keep it. A board that leaves having been corrected will not.