A conversation with Generator Generations

What power do boards have? Generator’s Lead Producer Kristina Lemieux used this prompt to launch a conversation around what we know (and what we think we know) about boards of directors, and what is possible when we look at alternative ways of operating.

Present at the Zoom discussion this blog post was based on: seven community members (Eva Barrie, Robyn Breen, Jacqueline Costa, Rohan Dhupar, Brock Hessel, Brendan Howlett, and Kaitlyn Riordan) and Generator’s staff team (Annie Clarke, Sedina Fiati,… — Present at the Zoom discussion this blog post was based on: seven community members (Eva Barrie, Robyn Breen, Jacqueline Costa, Rohan Dhupar, Brock Hessel, Brendan Howlett, and Kaitlyn Riordan) and Generator’s staff team (Annie Clarke, Sedina Fiati, Kristina Lemieux, and Keshia Palm).

Over the past few months we’ve been inviting our community of program alumni to ‘Food for Thought’ conversations, exploring topics related to transformation, opportunity, and growth—much like we’re doing right here on our Learnings + Explorations blog. One of the big topics we’ve been exploring is boards of directors (Kristina got us started on the blog in October with We’re going to talk about boards a lot—here are some introductory frameworks to get us started). This post is based on a discussion that took place over Zoom in October that we called ‘Board Governance: What is it? What is possible?’

Why boards?

Boards of directors of non-profit organizations in Canada have a fiduciary duty, tasking them with the responsibility to act in the best interests of the organization by overseeing the resources of the organization in line with its stated mandate. There may be additional external oversight if the organization has charitable status and/or is operating beyond the financial threshold at which public funding bodies require an annual external audit.

It’s important to note that many of the reasons why our boards are the way they are stem from the requirements of public funders.

The relevant acts for organizations incorporated in Ontario, BC, and at the federal level, all say that compensating board members is permitted for non-profits (this is not the case for registered charities); the funders, however, expressly forbid it. As a result, one of the givens we work with in the non-profit sector is that individual board members are volunteers—a fact that inevitably dictates the amount of work and engagement it is reasonable to expect from them.

Boards are often held up as forces for accountability. But what kind of accountability are we talking about exactly? Financial accountability is achieved by an audit—having boards as additional oversight is arguably redundant. Accountability to the funders is provided through reporting—if you’re awarded money for programming, you need to provide evidence of that programming being carried out. You probably do similar forms of reporting to donors, sponsors, even audience members. But what about the more nebulous form of accountability that many of us crave so deeply: accountability to community?

Towards community accountability

“The more involved artists are in an organization, the easier it is to support them,” says Sedina Fiati, Generator’s Training Consultant. She offers the example of the outbreak of Covid-19: institutions were too cut off from artists to understand how to best support them in a crisis. Artists are often intentionally held at arm’s length from an organization’s governance: an artist who sits on your board is an artist who’s no longer easy for you to hire for a project—that would constitute a legal conflict of interest. Sedina challenges this premise: if artists are both engaged by an organization and involved in the decision-making that goes into it, “why is that a bad thing?”

We want organizations in our community to be accountable to their mandate, to their values, and to their community—but we don’t feel like that’s happening. So if boards are failing to achieve that accountability, what happens if we take it out of their job description? Kristina asked the group:

“How do you want to create systems that hold organizations and leaders accountable?”

She asked folks to reflect both as leaders and as community members, and emphasized the importance of identifying the community they want to be held accountable by.

Brendan Howlett adds that an accountability structure would optimally include people who are inside the organization’s operations and those who are not. “So in the case of Generator, if you want to be accountable to the people who have gone through your programs [Generator Generations], you also need to ask: who are the people who are not participating in Generator Generations, and why?”

Dreaming of alternatives

Seeing an organization’s programming is not the same thing as seeing their mandate. Accountability to the community you’re working in would mean moving beyond quantitative measures—Did this program happen? How many programs did you run? How many people participated? What was your box office revenue?—to investigate the qualitative.

What would it be like to centre the people who are working on the projects, and their experiences with your organization?

“The people who are the most engaged are artists,” Sedina says, “partly out of love, partly out of desperation.” (And this can extend to all those who work on your projects—the production team may or may not identify as artists, but you better believe they’re just as engaged as those who do!)

So how do we make space for those voices to impact the way your organization works, and integrate feedback into production processes? Sedina suggests sending out a pre-rehearsal questionnaire so that you can begin a process with access needs in mind. Kaitlyn Riordan wonders about sending out a survey at different points throughout the process as a way of actively checking on how you’re doing on your values. Whether you’re managing a staff team, production team, creative team, or some combination, you can allocate time and money for feedback in your contracts, and identify what folks will be evaluating from the outset.

One of the models that was suggested to support community accountability was membership. If you have a membership, you can consult with them! Kristina references the long-standing model of the artist-run centre, which is prevalent among independent galleries in the visual arts sector. The first step? Defining who your membership is, or could be.

“Clear terms of engagement and incentive,” Brendan emphasizes, are key to any governance model. If you’re looking at taking accountability off the board’s plate, and/or redefining what accountability can mean for your organization, clarity and intentionality will serve you well. The questions we kept coming back to in this discussion were Who do you want to be accountable to? and How do you create systems that support community accountability? The ideas above are just a beginning!

One of the areas non-profits tend to lean on boards for? Fundraising! The Generator board put a ton of work into our summer fundraising party, Wrecked, in June 2019. Left to right: Sedina Fiati (staff), board members Elenna Mosoff, Claire Burns, and… — One of the areas non-profits tend to lean on boards for? Fundraising! The Generator board put a ton of work into our summer fundraising party, Wrecked, in June 2019. Left to right: Sedina Fiati (staff), board members Elenna Mosoff, Claire Burns, and Quinn Harris, with Kristina Lemieux (staff) and Mikaela Demers (seated).

What do we want to keep?

In the current/dominant model, there are certainly ways in which the institution of the board of directors provides value to the organizations it serves, and to the individuals who serve as directors. Brendan talks about how rewarding he’s found some of his work with boards; he sees them as a potential avenue for meaningful involvement from non-artists. They can “help us make sure we’re not exclusively making art for other artists,” he says.

Kristina has found that boards can, at times, be a useful place for organizational leadership to go for emotional and professional support; for better or worse, they’re the closest thing the non-profit sector has to the clinical supervisor model (whereby social workers have access to someone with context for their profession, who can offer some support and function as a sounding board).

Boards may also operate as a place for leaders to consult as they make decisions. But the question then becomes who should leaders be consulting before making decisions? Is it the board? Their peers? The staff team? The broader community? All of the above?

Where do we go from here?

It feels as though there’s great interest in moving away from positioning boards as the arbiter of organizational accountability, towards a model that emphasizes accountability to community. In one sense, there’s already room to play around with different models—when you start to unpack it, the intrinsic power that boards have is actually pretty limited—but in another, there are very real obstacles that prevent us from subverting the systems and norms that are already in place. Funders are certainly the source of many of these norms, and it stands to reason that we would see a much greater diversity of governance (and accountability) models if certain requirements were changed. Advocating to policy-makers for the removal of the compensation prohibition for boards (and, while you’re at it, the requirement to have a board in the first place) is a great start. Other obstacles come from a place of scarcity, or at least perceived scarcity: limited time and resources to experiment and make change happen.

And yet, if nothing else, 2020 taught us that there’s room to dream bigger, to demand better, and to move with intention. Questions about governance and accountability aren’t so different from the bigger questions we’re asking each other right now: what does it mean to be in community? What is the role of an artist? And how can there be space for those who want different things, and for institutions that support different ways of working? No one on this Zoom call had all the answers—but if you do, we’d love to hear them: info@generatorto.com.

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