Reframing Governance III
This 2020 David Renz article published in the Nonprofit Quarterly posits that while we have been obsessively focused on our organizational boards, much of the real consequential action is occurring elsewhere:
I was intrigued with the growth of multiorganizational nonprofit initiatives emerging to address complex community issues and needs that outstripped the scale and significance of the usual forms of partnerships and collaborative initiatives, and, in particular, highlighted the emergence of a new level of governance integral to them. This phenomenon has continued to grow and elaborate exponentially as increasingly larger networks of public-serving organizations (nonprofit and governmental) — often labeled cross-sector collaborations or collective impact initiatives — emerge to address in new and more powerful ways the most complex and wicked of our communities’ compelling needs and problems. Further, fueled by the rapid expansion of a myriad of increasingly sophisticated digital technologies and applications, these initiatives have become nearly ubiquitous across all continents. But what does that mean for today’s nonprofits and boards and governance?
