Board member job descriptions help board members fully understand and carryout their roles and responsibilities. Use this template as a starting point for creating your organization’s board member job description.
Refer to the below templates for board meeting minutes. You’ll also find suggestions on how to record certain situations and discussion (i.e. late attendee, amendments).
Use the template below as a starting point for your Nondiscrimination Policy.
Use the below sample document to help your board members understand where they are fulfilling and falling short of board responsibilities.
Source: Washburn Partners
Organizations exist in complex environments that include the board itself, the staff, its customers, clients, donors, and other stakeholders; the organization’s traditions, values, and history; its economic, social, competitive and regulatory environment; and so on and on. The organization’s executive serves a key role in carrying out the board’s directives while balancing these numerous – and often conflicting – interests and pressures.
The board of director’s oversight role brings a fundamental tension to the board/executive director relationship. Who is ultimately in charge? There are no firm guidelines about where board oversight leaves off and executive management begins. In this grey area, struggles for power and authority often emerge.
Conventional wisdom emphasizes the importance to a nonprofit organization of its core leadership: a healthy board chair-executive director relationship. Organizational effectiveness is at stake when this relationship is weak, or worse, dysfunctional. While such an assertion may seem intuitively correct, there is a lack of empirical work that explores the dynamics of this key relationship or its influence, if any, on the nonprofit organization.
Boardsource.org strongly recommends that one of the ten responsibilities of a board is self-assessment. Think of a highly functioning board. A common denominator is likely that it is a board that is aware of it strengths and weaknesses with an eye towards ongoing improvement.
This article provides detailed information on board committees.