Over the next couple months, Generator is going to unpack and share the thinking we’re doing and steps we’re taking in this time of immense transition and opportunity for our organization, and for the live performance sector as a whole. We’re chronicling this process in this blog, which we’re calling ‘Learnings + Explorations.’ Our goal with these sharings is to be as transparent as possible about our decision-making and path forward, as well as to offer opportunities for cross-institutional learning.
Kristina at the Generator office, back when we were humans who worked out of offices! #throwback
One of the areas we’ll be writing about is boards of directors. I’ve been the Lead Producer at Generator since 2017, and I have over two decades of experience with board governance. I have several topics planned around boards, and this initial blog post will serve as the primer for what comes next. If you want to know more about boards, I encourage you to check out the links at the end of this post and the Board of Directors page on ArtistProducerResource.com. If you have a specific question, please reach out (you can email me at kristina@generatorto.com) and I’ll make sure to incorporate it.
At any given time between the ages of 19-39 I sat on at least one board of directors, and often reported to 1-3. Currently, I sit on none and report to two boards directly, as well as others indirectly. A large portion of my professional career in my 30s was dedicated to being a consultant to leaders and boards around the transition from friends and family/cheerleader boards to policy/governance boards—i.e. the process of increasing the professionalism of the board and creating and maintaining clear guidelines between management/staff and the board. In all these cases the size of the non-profit (sometimes charitable) arts organizations were under $750K operating budgets.
Over time, I realized that no matter how much we planned, established policies and procedures, and went on retreats to help us learn and work the ways we wanted to, the fact remained: boards members are distracted kittens who are only paying attention 30% of the time, even when they are sitting in the same room as you— even less when they are not. I’m being a tad hyperbolic here, but in my 20 years’ experience working with boards, I have found that at best they support and don’t get in the way of leadership, and at worst you get what we are currently seeing all over Canada’s arts community—massive sector-wide failure to be leaders. I have lost my faith in this model, but what it really comes down to is:
The nonprofit/charity model is inherently patriarchal and capitalist and therefore colonial and racist.
![The first meeting of the Carnegie Foundation in 1911. I know - women! Not what you were expecting. But don’t get too excited, that’s his daughter and wife on the right. We call this a ‘Friends and Family’ board, folks! [Wikipedia Commons]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5565ecede4b0df78d78d2b36/1601931727139-2TEP62153IESWILYUXRS/Carnegie+Corporation+1911+board+meeting)
The first meeting of the Carnegie Foundation in 1911. I know - women! Not what you were expecting. But don’t get too excited, that’s his daughter and wife on the right. We call this a ‘Friends and Family’ board, folks! [Wikipedia Commons]
The charity model comes from the success of capitalism. Rich white guys, who were also super religious, began to feel bad about all the financial success they were having—plus, they had to pay taxes on all those profits. Their social and religious backgrounds were steeped in a sense of social responsibility, volunteerism, and altruism. So they created a system that allowed them to do all of: appeasing their rich-person guilt by helping those who can’t help themselves; looking and feeling good about their actions in support of the “social good”; and providing themselves tax breaks. But of course, the people who were actually interested in doing the work of helping those who can’t help themselves as their profession couldn’t possibly be trusted to manage these dudes’ money (oops, I mean the money they graciously parted with because of altruism/tax breaks), so naturally a system had to be set up to oversee the management of that money. This system was designed to ensure that those doing the overseeing would be acting out of the best interest of that money—oops I did it again, I mean the best interests of the people that money is intended to serve/improve the lives of. And, tada, we were gifted the non-profit, volunteer board structure.
The idea that we need the board to oversee fiduciary duties (especially for organizations with budgets under a million that are already being independently audited on an annual basis) seems ridiculous to me, but funders still love this model and see it as necessary—though that is changing...slowly. Very slowly.
I have taken some creative license here (no distracted kittens were harmed in the making), but if you want to learn more about where the charitable model has come from, have a look at these books and links:
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