When federal pressure forced mission-driven organizations to question their equity commitments, most boards defaulted to legal risk language—and missed the harder questions.

Keeping the community at the center requires boards to look past familiar and comfortable strategies, even when doing so creates friction, costs a gift, or demands change no one is quite ready for.

Boards struggle with engagement and diversity because they recruit from the same insular networks, reinforcing a cycle of limited perspectives and overextended members. The issue isn’t effort—it’s a structural pattern in how boards source and select people.

By redesigning the board recruitment process to center relationships and shared purpose, organizations can build early buy-in and create a broader leadership pipeline beyond filling board seats.

To survive and evolve from board-staff conflict, nonprofits must proceed with clarity and intention by analyzing root causes, addressing what needs to change, and resetting in meaningful ways that strengthen relationships and the organization as a whole.

Rochelle M. Jerry, CFRM, answers a reader’s question about how leaders should think about the role of AI in their processes.

AI is being adopted across the nonprofit sector. The urgent question is whether nonprofits will shape how AI is governed, funded, and constrained, or whether those decisions will be made primarily by vendors, markets, and states.

In today’s issue of Ask a Nonprofit Expert, Cheretta Clerkley, MBA, of BoardSource, addresses a reader’s question about the appropriate levels of staff involvement on the board of directors.