When a Board Member Says, “Psych!”
Yesterday’s New York Times had a fascinating piece about a tough situation faced by the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, an addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that is just about to open. It’s a story about the influence a deep-pocketed board member can have, the complex relationships between a nonprofit’s board and its staff, and the role a nonprofit can play in civic perceptions:
Rather than pledge to donate his extensive collection of contemporary art to the new institution — a move that some viewed as inevitable, given that his name was to be on the door — [philanthropist Eli Broad] said he had decided instead to keep it in his private foundation. Far better, he argued, to lend the 2,000-odd works to museums around the world than to risk their being largely relegated to storage in Los Angeles.
If the decision has not cast a pall over what has been billed as the museum’s breakout moment, it has certainly raised questions about its ability to execute an ambitious three-stage expansion plan that is being promoted by its director as a wholesale transformation of the institution. Suddenly the sense that Los Angeles was poised to rival New York and London as the center of contemporary art has given way to the impression that even its most prominent booster might not be fully behind the city and its largest cultural institution.
A lot of nonprofits, I’m sure, read the story and thought, yeah, we should all have such problems. After all, the Broad cost more than $50 million to build, and few nonprofits enjoy the luxury of having a billionaire sit on their boards. Yet the concepts of managing the board’s expectations and finding a diversity of members who can contribute, rather than relying on the whims of a single sugar daddy, have universal appeal.
I’ll put the question to you: How do you shepherd those unique relationships? And what do you do when that board member you’ve carefully cultivated decides to go his own way? | 501(c)
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POSTED IN: Boards, Fundraising, Worth a look
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