25 Jan, 2023

Create Your Board of Directors Balance & Alignment Plan

By |2023-01-23T22:47:22-05:00January 25th, 2023|Categories: Strategic Planning & Sustainability|Tags: , , , |0 Comments

Find balance AND alignment.

The decisions your board of directors makes not only influences your organization’s growth, but impacts how your staff does its job. When a board can’t function, it’s due to one or more of these issues. When these issues arise, it’s time to develop a plan for addressing them.

I’ve been increasingly interacting with board members in my consulting projects. I sit on a few boards myself. These experiences illuminated for me how difficult the nonprofit model can be, and how difficult it can be to make the key parts of a nonprofit–board, executive director, and staff–move smoothly like a wheel.

Speaking of wheels, I considered whether this blog post should focus on balance or on alignment. In fact, when I Googled “balance vs alignment”, I came across multiple articles around tires. This article explains the difference between tire balancing and tire alignment:

“It’s easy to get tire balancing and alignment confused. After all, they both sound like they would do the same thing. But in reality, they are very different services. In the simplest terms, tire balancing uses weights on your wheels to keep your vehicle from vibrating, while an alignment keeps all of your wheels pointing in the same direction for safety and performance.” 

Within the context of boards of directors, individual and collective skillsets, networks, ability to fundraise and speak on behalf of your organization, and ability to choose the best leader to serve as executive director are the balance. Their personal identities and values, ability to engage with staff and other stakeholders, and ability to understand how their decision making impacts how staff are the alignment.

It can be a delicate process to develop a plan to increase balance and alignment within your board and between your board and staff, but with intention, commitment and support, it’s possible.

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17 Aug, 2022

Let’s Build a Partnership

By |2023-03-22T19:17:12-04:00August 17th, 2022|Categories: Strategic Planning & Sustainability|Tags: , , |0 Comments


Recently, the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) published data on the 2022 pass rate for the ASWB licensing exam. The analysis concluded major disparities in pass rates for Black test takers, older adults, and other marginalized groups.

The data were published as a result of years of advocacy and pressure from the National Association of Social Workers, schools of social work, other social work organizations, and individual test takers. Previously, data on pass rates were never released.

I’ve shared my experience with preparing for the licensing exam before, and while majority of test takers pass this exam on the first try, questions about the fail rates were enough to warrant looking into this. Lack of social work licensure can result is loss of job opportunities for many social workers, so it makes sense to explore why these disparities continue to exist.

This is an example of bringing together a group of individuals who care about an issue, and work together to address it. Test takers, professors, licensing exam prep experts, exam test question writers, and more were all needed for this process.

Part of my role as a facilitator includes facilitating partnership meetings.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies a partnership as “organizations that share a common focus and combine resources to implement joint activities, avoid[ing] duplication of effort, ensuring synergy of resources, and enhanc[ing] overall leadership.” From my viewpoint, this also includes individuals who may not be part of an organization but hold a significant amount of knowledge, power, and connections.

Partnerships may develop in response to an emerging issue (such as disparities in test taking scores) and ideally, you’re bringing together individuals that care about the impact of this emerging issue.

A tricky aspect of building a partnership includes understanding the partnership’s purpose and selecting the appropriate individuals and organizations. Every entity mentioned in the licensing example plays a pivotal role in how students prepare for this exam and how the exam is written and administered.

Another aspect of building a partnership is understanding that, while everyone cares deeply about the issue, they have their own ideas for addressing it.

So, how do we bring together various important perspectives to reach a common goal? Here are seven questions to consider for building a partnership:

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