Nonprofit Board: How to Build a Diverse, High-Impact Board of Directors

‍Podcast episode transcript ↓

Josh:

Building a diverse, high-impact board isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s one of the most strategic moves a nonprofit can make.

When your board reflects a range of perspectives, skills, and lived experience, your organization is better equipped to lead with purpose and connect with the communities you serve.

But how do you find the right people, create a welcoming culture, and ensure your board is truly driving impact?

I’m Josh with Anedot, and welcome to Nonprofit Pulse where we explore trends, insights, and resources that help nonprofits accomplish their mission.

On this episode, we are joined by Chief Joe Allio and General Maryanne Miller on the topic of how nonprofits can build a diverse, high-impact board of directors.

Chief Allio is President of the Leaven Kids board and a 34-year veteran of law enforcement.

He’s held leadership roles in public safety, pastoral ministry, and community service, bringing a unique mix of experience in crisis response and nonprofit leadership.

General Miller is Vice President of the Leaven Kids board and is a retired 4-star U.S. Air Force General, the only Reserve Officer to reach that rank.

With over 39 years of military leadership, she brings deep expertise in strategic operations, global logistics, and mission-driven governance.

Hi Joe and Maryanne, thanks for joining us on Nonprofit Pulse.

Chief Allio:

Great to be with you.

General Miller:

Thank you. Great to be with you Josh. It's awesome.

Why building a diverse, high-impact board matters for nonprofits

Josh:

Yeah. So excited about our topic today.

We're going to be talking about the importance of having a diverse and high impact board.

And so many nonprofit leaders are looking for resources on board health, board management, how to recruit for your board, best practices. So excited to talk about this topic today.

Maybe just starting out, why does having a diverse and high impact board matter so much for nonprofits?

And really, how does it help the organization?

General Miller:

You know, when you look at our board, the experience that the group brings, I mean, we've got diverse, we’ve got CEOs from major business, Dennis Muilenburg, we've got the chief of staff of United States Air Force.

We bring in people who throughout their life have had great challenges, right? Many diverse challenges in finance and in the business model.

And, we have not only defense, but emergency services, business education, government sectors, all a diverse group of people coming together, to really serve the least of these.

It's important to have that depth and breadth of experience because as we grow and as we want to go out there and serve more of these children, it's important that we have a board that's gone through a lot of different issues.

You know, to bring a perspective that boards can get so tunnel vision because their main focus is the mission.

You need a different perspective to come in and offer a different lens, so to speak, offer a different direction at times.

And then just helps through all the different diverse issues that may pop up.

They're that sounding board for us, that advice, that sounding board and that experience that helps us navigate through some of the issues that we could come across as we try to grow across the country and serve the least of these in very challenging neighborhoods.

So it's critical to the business success.

How nonprofits can find the right board members from diverse backgrounds

Josh:

Yeah. And there are many ways that folks find themselves on boards or nonprofit leaders find board members from volunteers or, donors, to even just local community members.

Talk to us, what are some practical ways that nonprofits can really find and attract board members that have diverse backgrounds and perspectives, but are also the right fit?

Chief Allio:

Yeah. You know, Josh, that’s the key, it is all about the right fit.

So we just celebrated our 15 year anniversary, and the board has and well, I'm sure we'll talk about this later.

We started as a board that was a church committee. So everybody like minded, everybody with what the general just said kind of the same focus, not very diverse.

And since then, it's grown to include people from just about all walks of life, business and public sector.

But they have in common this real servant leadership mindset, which is key to our nonprofit.

We need those who are in the law field and those who are in finance and those who ran operations at refineries.

They help us think, but they all have to have this heart that says, we want to serve this particular group of people that we're focused on.

And so how we find them, which is always a challenge, it's unique that we would have, the former chief of staff of the Air Force as an advisory to our board and active that, you know, most boards aren't going to have that, that are small nonprofits, like we are.

So, in my circle that I swim, I've been in law enforcement for 40 years.

I have a whole group of people I see all of the time. In my church world, I have people I see all the time in my community.

And that circle I have crosses with the circles of General Miller and others in the small end of the circle, they come together.

You pictured it as a graph when we do the work of Leaven Kids. But in my day to day life that circle is broad.

And so we as board members are always looking for the opportunity to give that elevator speech.

You know, just that, hey, what's new with you? Oh, I got to tell you what's going on. Or let me post a video about what's going on.

We're looking for that person whose heart kind of leaps towards it, and goes, that's unique. I've never heard of that.

And then we have to be prepared to share with them who we are and what we do.

Because what will you find as good leaders, want to know that who you say you are is who you truly are and what you say you will do, you actually will do.

Because they don't want to invest their time in looking under the hood and saying, I know what they say they do, it doesn't appear it's true.

So the board is active, but I'll tell you, we have a CEO of CEOs for Leaven Kids, Mark Lillis.

And he is not shy about everywhere he goes talking to leaders, mayors, council, elected council people, chiefs of police, business leaders about who would be a good fit for our board because those people know our work, because we're committed never to be in a place where we're not connected to community.

So our community knows our work. And that plants a seed of who might be on our board.

So all those things come together and allow us to meet people who might want to join us, and then they do.

Josh:

So it sounds like it's really an all board project, whether that's board members speaking with their networks.

Your CEO Mark, also keeping in mind, who he's meeting, who he's talking to, any other creative areas that y'all have kind of drawn people in to that pipeline of potential board members?

Chief Allio:

Some of the outreach work that we do, by the nature of it, it draws people in.

Well, if we do a fundraising gala, there will be people there that come because they're generous people.

They may or may not know much about what we do, but we tell the story. They meet some of the kids and they see it and they're like, oh, this is what they do.

The more times we can be in the presence of people who don't know about us, the more opportunity we have to gain people of interest.

So it's more than our network. It's the people outside the network who learn about us through, it's more than marketing.

It's just who we are. It’s living the life of a nonprofit.

Josh:

Yes. And tapping into that impact side of who's being impacted?

Who are the parents of those being impacted or those who work with people who are being impacted.

There's so many connections to a nonprofit’s work when you start kind of diagraming out all the connections there.

What to look for when assessing gaps on your nonprofit board

Josh:

So thinking about kind of assessing the current board, for nonprofit leaders, how can they take a good look at their current board to figure out what's missing in terms of skills, experiences, or representation?

How should nonprofit leaders go about that?

General Miller:

Yeah. You know, the focus, I think is, is kind of broad, honestly.

To look through a microscope it’d be what's the mission and who is good at supporting whatever mission you're doing?

I'm on the board of a helicopter company. We do search and rescue, and we take crews out to platforms.

Oil platforms, so to zero in on that particular mission, who has aviation experience, who has mission in oil and gas, who has mission in emergency services?

So, it centers first through the microscope on the mission, and then you got to step back and look at what is really going to make a difference and make this successful?

So when we go look at Leaven board members, we zero in on we serve the least of these.

So a person has to have a heart for the least of these.

But then once we start talking about the mission and we bring in what is unique about us, which is the fact that we go to them, we serve them where they are.

That's a unique place to serve, right? Where there are very few nonprofits do what we do.

So when we start talking about the differentiation between us and someone else, you see a peak of interest in someone else, and you understand where is their heart? Is their heart for the children, is their heart to serve the least of these and be a part of this organization?

We're automatically drawn to the people who really understand the underlying point of what we do.

It's not so much the, what's the stock market price and how is our stock doing? That's important for certain businesses.

For us, our stock is the children, right? And how do we get people who really have a heart for what we're trying to do for these folks?

And so we zero in like I said, first on, they have to be piqued by the, they understand that this serves the children and then understand, be piqued by the fact this serves the least of these.

What's our differentiation? We go in and we serve them right where they are. We get a perspective, but not only how they do at school, but we get to see their family.

We get to see them playing with their friends. We get to see. So we get to see an all encompassing, you know, an all encompassing view of this child's life for 2.5 hours a day. And that's precious.

Not too many people get that. The parents don't even get that. The parents don't get to see them in the school environment.

So, it's important that boards look at the big mission and then zero in on what is going to be the differentiator.

And seeking those kind of board members that help take that business to the next level.

Josh:

I love that. And just thinking, over the past several years, there's been a kind of a growing focus on having nonprofit boards really reflect to some degree, like the communities in which they're serving.

That's been a kind of a growing trend.

The best way to align your board with the community you serve

Josh:

What would you say to nonprofit leaders on really how to make sure that your board reflects the communities that are being served?

And I know that's difficult at times. There's certain challenges with that. But how would you advise nonprofit leaders around that?

Chief Allio:

That's a good question, because almost all industry is faced with the same challenge today.

And it's a difficult one to meet in almost every industry. So it's not unique to nonprofits.

I would say, what I want to say to a nonprofit leader is take that pressure off yourself, and ask yourself, what's my mission?

What am I called to do? If I'm drilling wells for water in sub-Saharan Africa and I'm a U.S. based nonprofit with an NGO there, I’d probably not going to reflect very well that community right?

Because I don't live there, I don't have the lack of water that they have.

My first board that I served with was the Batten Disease Support and Research Association Board.

So the only other board I've ever been on, and it provided support in research for children dying of a rare disease.

100% of them who got the disease died of the disease. And, two of my six children did.

You can imagine everybody on that board, reflected the community we were serving, right? Because we were connected.

Now, rehabilitation service. There's a number of groups where that really applies.

Like if you came out of maybe a life of addiction, got on your feet, and you felt great empathy, well you go back, you reflect the board and there's real value in that.

In what we do, we at Leaven Kids find the children in apartment complexes who have the greatest poverty, surrounded by the most violence, and we embed ourselves with them.

On our board, there will be people who have grown up in poverty and people who have seen violence.

But probably no one on our board is growing up as these kids are, so we won't reflect them in the same way.

So then the question becomes, really where I started and where I'll probably end with every question is, where is your heart related to the people you serve?

I would say if the pressure is to reflect and you’re having somebody who looks like or lives like, and they're checking a box to be on a board because it's good for their resume.

You want the one who doesn't reflect them, who has a heart for the people that you're serving.

So I think it depends uniquely upon the type of nonprofit whether you will or will not reflect the people that you're serving.

The key is they are people, right? The greatest example to us, Mother Teresa, wasn't born in India, right?

Where she spent all those years serving, but, her heart of service and her love for humans, that didn't matter who you were, she was going to minister to you, right? So we have that example.

And I think we do get caught up sometimes, you know, I'm in law enforcement, so this issue comes up all the time.

Get caught up on that over the heart of the human side. I say go with the heart of the human.

And if you can reflect, there's great benefits to it. I mean, I just don't know how to make that happen.

I don't think we in any sector have become good at that yet.

Josh:

Yeah, and that's understandable. I mean, it is tough when you're solving really challenging problems in communities that are very challenged.

How to have the local representation there. Especially in the early years, incredibly difficult.

What helps new board members feel welcomed and involved

Josh:

So switching gears a bit and kind of looking at new board members, who have come on the board, how would you advise nonprofit leaders to really make those new board members feel welcome? Feel safe?

Psychological safety is something that has been, I think trending in the past ten years as people just think about how they lead people and relate to others within their organization.

And I think boards are specifically challenging around that, especially for new board members.

How would you advise nonprofits to really make sure that new board members feel welcomed and encouraged as they start giving their time and talents to the board?

General Miller:

Yeah. I'm on two boards and getting ready to start another one here, I think in the next month or so.

And it will be interesting that the dynamics of every board is different. So, some boards are very professional.

You know, I'm a hugger. So when I go up and, my first board meeting with this one company, I certainly didn't hug people.

But by year two, we're hugging each other because we kind of realized, hey, it's more than just the business because you understand where everybody is in the scheme of business, once you get on the board.

And as a new board member, you try to make the right impact at the right time, saying the right things at the right time, holding back at the right time.

I mean, you really got to get it right in order to understand, what is your specific purpose on that board?

Because everyone has a different purpose. We get some people that are cyber experts. Some people are financial experts, some people are aviation experts.

And you need every single one of those different types of people. But to welcome someone to the board, let them do their thing.

If there needs to be guidance right away, like, I haven't run across this, but I can imagine if someone comes in, is overly zealous or the chairman may pull someone aside and give him a little nudge here and there, all something that I've heard of other board’s. chairmans do.

But I think, it's welcoming the board member, understanding where does that person fit? There's the normal storming and norming that happens in a board.

Because everybody’s trying to push around and figure out where do you sit?

But as a new board member coming in and just laying your value down where it's most needed, and holding fire when you need to hold fire.

Yeah. You know, making sure that you don't do it for ego sake, but you do it for business sake, and you do it for the value of the business.

All the things that go around in your head before you speak at a meeting.

And the thing is, in bringing a new board member on and then welcoming in a board member, if you go back to bringing a new board member on, we spend a lot of time understanding the dynamic and the personalities of that board.

You may not fit in a certain board because of the personalities.

You've got to figure that out in the interview process, and you've got to ask tough questions in the interview process, not only the person being interviewed, but you have to ask tough questions to the board, because you don't want to get stuck on a board that you do not want to be a part of because of 1 or 2 people or a dynamic that you just don't want to be a part of.

So it is a tough decision.

Then, hopefully you work out all those things, make the right decisions, and then by the time you want to welcome that board member, that process is now a big sigh of relief because we know we've vetted this person absolutely right?

And now we can open our arms to them and say, yeah, come on in. Let's add value right away.

Let's hit the ground running, because there's a lot of work to do, whether it's profit or nonprofit, that same vision of how you interview someone, ask the tough questions, you want to get all that done and out in the open before so that the greeting process of bringing them on the board is just a natural.

I guess that’s a way to go about it.

How to build a board culture that encourages unique perspectives

Josh:

I love that. Yeah. And just thinking about our topic today, we're talking about how a diverse board can help increase impact and create a high impact board by having different experiences and perspectives.

But that comes with challenges, especially when you think around culture.

Because, the less aligned individuals are on their perspectives, that doesn't necessarily mean disagreement, but just how they see things or how they've experienced things professionally in their professional career or in other board work.

There could just be alignment issues there. And I want to really dig into that.

How can nonprofits really create that board culture that facilitates unique perspectives and encourages that trust of no, we want to hear what you have to say.

Please, tell us where you think we might be going sideways on this decision. How do you create that culture on a nonprofit board?

Chief Allio:

People want to be valued, right? They are on the board because they have a unique perspective. And that's how we were drawn to them and they were drawn to us.

So after the vetting work is kind of done on our end and their end, which General Miller just described.

We have an onboarding process where we're not winging it, where we really want someone to understand, once they agree and we agree, well, there is another step and that's letting them get a real view of who we are and how we work.

So the onboarding process is really specific to allow them to take a look with the folks who are in operations at how we function, how our money is taken in, how we protect it, how we're good stewards of it, how we provide training to our staff.

They get all the operational side, and then they get some time with a couple board members to talk about the history of the board, where we came from, where we're at now, how the board functions.

So onboarding I would say is key. So far, everybody who has gone through onboarding has stayed with us.

And they felt better about the organization after than before because they had much clearer focus.

Then, we're a working board, which means every board member is on a committee.

So, you know, some boards, you come on the quarterly and the CEO presents to you the work that he wants you to give your approval to, or she wants you to give your approval to.

You nod, you sign, and it moves. That's not the board that we are.

We're a working board, and I suggest this for any board that is that you have committees that look at the key aspects of what we do from the mission, vision, and stewardship lens, which we have as a board.

And so we have a finance committee, an operations committee, a marketing committee, a personnel committee. And so their perspectives are brought to bear in those individual committees.

The CEO does a good job. He'll normally run it by the personnel committee where he's going to put people in what committees, does a really good job of putting people where their skill sets are.

And just by being on that committee, they feel valued because they have a voice in the direction of the organization.

When we get to our board meetings, they don't need to be four hours where we go through every topic ad nauseam.

We learned to trust each other. And so when the board says, hey, this is a work we've done here, let me show it to you. Here's the decision we need to make.

They’re also well valued because we go, yeah, we agree with you. So I would say onboarding and committee work, being a working board is really helpful for people to feel like they're not just showing up and going home and asking, what am I even on the board for?

And the last thing is a bit of, give them opportunity to receive some training themselves.

Bring some voices into the room. We just had Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of Boeing, come on the screen and give us a really great life lesson about leadership.

And so you also value them by allowing some voices to come into the room. International speaker Rick Rigsby, if you haven't heard him, Josh, you should look him up and listen to that guy.

He learned more from a fourth grade dropout than anyone else in his life.

Lessons from a Third Grade Dropout: How the Timeless Wisdom of One Man Can Impact an Entire Generation, great book, by the way. You might want to read it.

Yeah. So when those people come into the board, you can't help but feel valued. That our CEO does the work to say, hey, not only is your work valuable, but so are you.

Here's some encouragement from somebody who's a leader. So all that kind of wraps around making people excited about being part of what we're doing.

Barriers to board diversity and how nonprofits can move past them

Josh:

I love that, and just thinking about our listeners who may be thinking, okay, I'm sold.

This is the year that we really lean into our board, our board health, who's on our board, our board culture.

What would you say are some challenges that these listeners, these nonprofit leaders are going to face as they really take that next step and even further steps into recruiting new members and increasing that diversity of perspective and thought?

General Miller:

I think the challenges, it's just getting it right.

The board is the absolute most critical part to provide the vision, to provide the foundation of what your nonprofit is all about. And if you get that foundation wrong, you are going to struggle and you're going to take precious energy that you need somewhere else, and you're going to be focusing on a place you don't want to.

A personnel problem with the board, a hassle with someone on the board, someone who's not the person that you thought.

So there's energy and chaos around that. You absolutely do not need that. And so it is so critical from the very get go, that you really do the vetting process correctly.

You understand the character of the individual that comes into your board. Character is by far the most critical things.

We talk about the heart. In our business of Leaven Kids, absolutely, the primacy of what we do, along with that goes the character of the individual.

So, if we know that if a person's prudent, they make great decisions.

We know that if someone treats other people with dignity and respect, that a person with great character does that no matter who it is.

No matter what goes on in that boardroom, they treat them with dignity and respect, even if it's an issue they want to get after and take care of it.

It's the way you go about that that can actually heal that situation and make that person actually fit in the end.

So it's all about the character of the people that we bring in.

We look, do they have the courage to speak up? I'm on a board that none of us are afraid to speak up.

That's rare. That's rare, you know. Do you have the courage to speak up when the going gets tough and to say, hey, I think we need to make a totally different direction?

That's a virtue of prudence, or of courage.

Do you have the self-control? I've been in boardrooms where things can get so emotional that people actually lose the self-control.

What you don't want to do is then get in a bickering match between two people or have to break something up like that because boardrooms can be very emotional.

And, there's a lot going on, in some cases, multi-millions of dollars decisions right then and there.

You've got to be able to advise the executive team in the right way. And so self-control is absolutely critical to that process.

So it's really the character of the person that we bring in. If you focus on that and get that right, there's not anything that can be thrown at you that you will not get through, in the way you need to.

For in our case, the children and the mission that we do and serve. So, you can't get the people saying wrong or so much else unravels.

How Leaven Kids built a stronger and more diverse board

Josh:

Thinking about Leaven Kids and just some of y’alls success around your board, could you share a story around how you all have successfully built a board with diverse backgrounds and different professional skill sets?

We have, as you mentioned, Chief Joe, your background in law enforcement and General Miller, yours in the military.

Maybe just share a story around how that's really had an impact on the organization's work and health.

Chief Allio:

Yeah. Interesting. I always think of the same story, and I always share it with onboarding.

And so since this nonprofit grew out of a church committee, where a youth director saw a vision for what we're doing today in a neighborhood that was so poor and overcome by violence that it doesn't actually exist anymore.

It got bulldozed and zero footprint homes got built there. That's what it was. And he saw it.

And so he and Mayor Harry Price, the mayor of Fairfield at the time of the Great Recession, said, hey, we're going to do this and we're going to take over an apartment and we're going to tutor kids where they live.

Not having any idea that 15 years later a nonprofit would have been born.

And so, the director at the time and now our CEO, Mark Lillis, he realized as we were being asked to expand, like, hey, it's going so well there, could you move it across town to another complex and another complex?

So we needed to form a nonprofit.

And, in his study and his understanding, he said, we need a more diverse board.

So he brought on two people to the church committee, which was the first board, and it was a school principal who was running a school in a place of poverty.

I was a police sergeant at the time. And so I was involved in the community.

And it was a little awkward because we were the only non-church members on the board.

But I'll remember when the day we were going to bring our third on and he was, a officer in the military, Travis Air Force Base in charge of logistics, moving, you know, millions and hundreds of millions of pounds of equipment all over the world.

At our meeting, we were told that there were 2,000 pencils donated to Leaven Kids. We spent an hour discussing where should we store them?

Should they go to the centers? When do we replace them? When they're at 50% used or 60% used?

And I was thinking, we're going to lose this person. He's not going to want to be on this board, because the only thing a board member should want to know about 2,000 pencils is who donated them.

So if I see that person, I can say thank you, right. The operations folks deal with the pencils, and that's not our job. We don't get in the weeds on operations. They do.

Fortunately, he stayed with us and he helped us to see that that isn't part of what a nonprofit board does, that isn't board work.

That was kind of the beginning of us, slowly, our board has term limits so that you can rotate off and bring fresh members in.

So we always stay fresh. So that was the beginning of some more training on the role and the mission of what is a nonprofit board actually do.

Just through attrition, one church member stepped off of one person of the community came on. And, you know, 3 or 4 years later, we look like a completely different board.

And now we had people who ran finance at a major corporation in our region, helping us look at our books. How we did money and how we fenced money and how we were stewards of money.

So it all started with 2,000 pencils and literally when do we replace them, you know, 50%, 60% to a place now that, the board really understands what their role in their function is.

It's been great. I was able to ride this rail from that day until I reached my first term limit. And then I stepped off for a year or two, and now I'm back on.

So I've been able to see the the difference.

What a difference a diverse board with a lot of different backgrounds brings to keep you healthy, really to keep you healthy and keep your eye on what's most important, which are those children.

Closing thoughts

Josh:

I love that. I love that thinking of resources.

Our mission here on Nonprofit Pulse is to provide trends, insights, and resources that help nonprofits accomplish their mission.

So just think about resources, maybe both of you could answer, any resources out there that you would recommend to our audience around board health, board impact, board diversity?

Chief Allio:

I'll jump in and say that I don't read any books on nonprofits. I don't read any books on boards.

I love to read books, historical accounts of leaders. Whenever somebody writes a book of General Maryanne Miller, I'll buy the first copy, because that’s kind of how I learn about leadership, from humans.

But I'll tell you what I do every day and this won't fit everyone's agenda. But I think it could.

I read in the book of Proverbs, the proverb of the day. So today is the 29th of the month.

And so if you're not a person of faith, you might think, well, I'm not interested.

But if you go to secular sources, you'll find that Solomon was one of the wisest men who ever lived and he happened to write 31 chapters. So it kind of follows the month perfectly.

And so every day I get up and I say, what kind of wisdom can I get from one of the wisest men who ever lived? And I read the proverb of the day.

In today's on the 29th of the month, right in the middle, there's a sentence that says, where there is no vision, the people perish, or the word is in the Hebrew, unrestrained, the bumpers, the rails, that vision give us.

When it's not there, people go off the rails. Now, I thought, boy, that's true.

You know, I'm serving as a police chief and interim in the inner city, and we really have to be focus on that vision.

So I would encourage and I've been doing that for 20 years now. Somebody recommended it to me. It never gets old.

I've never had a day where I thought huh. There's so much in every chapter that I just try to walk away with one piece.

I challenge nonprofit leaders, go to Proverbs tomorrow. Even if you're not a person of faith, don't worry about it.

And read it, Proverbs 30 and take one truth and say, if I applied that today, would I be better?

Would my family be better? Would my nonprofit be better? And you're going to answer yes and give it a try.

And then 20 years from now, reach back out to me and say, hey, I've been doing that for 20 years. It really works.

Josh:

Love that. I second that as well. Yes.

General Miller:

Yeah. That's awesome. Two things came to mind.

For me, I get a book or I get a magazine every month, the National Association of Corporate Directors, NACD, and it's got great stuff in there. It talks about everything related to a board.

And you can just Google it, and you don't have to get the magazine.

You can just Google it and it'll tell you administration changes. What are the effects on profits and nonprofits?

You know what may this new administration has regarding ESG, regarding, you know, all the other things that are being contemplated these days.

So it's a great source for the business, so to speak.

But I think, you know, one thing that we can't forget is that boards do foundational work, whether you're profit or nonprofit, it's the most critical work you can do.

It's a people business, you bring the skills and all these different things to the table.

But in the end of the day, none of that matters if you cannot relate to the person sitting next to you and treat them with dignity and respect, nor everyone else in the room.

And so where do we get that virtue, right?

Pick up a book on virtue and learn about prudence and self-control and justice. And you know, all the things that are important, courage.

All the things that are important for you, as a member, as someone sitting on a board or someone having to come up, you know, you have a new business.

We have to now build a board. Where do we start? Where do we start? Right. So, good resources. But the Proverbs resource, that'd be number one.

I'd start there, but, yeah. Amazing stuff out there. And boards are amazing business. So it's work that has to be done and has to be done correctly.

Josh:

Yeah. That's great. And it just makes me think about, something you said earlier, General Miller, about character and character, it's always moving, right?

You're either growing in character or you're growing less in character and just thinking about the resources, as you mentioned, that of resources that help you grow in character, right?

Because that's going to help you be a better board member.

Have more influence, have more impact to those around you on your board and your community.

So thinking of the last question here for this episode, something we ask every guest on every episode.

And that is, if you are standing in front of 1,000 nonprofit leaders and can share one thing with them, one sentence, about today's topic, about the value of diverse and high impact boards, what would you say?

Chief Allio:

I would say, look to your left, and your right.

You're in a room full of people swimming upstream together, seeking some of the exact same resources, funding from the same sources, volunteers from the same sources.

People to attend your events from the same sources. Take a moment to get to know the other people that are doing what you're doing.

Find people who have a true heart for what they're doing, not for your work, but for their work.

Because there's going to be moments when you're swimming upstream that it is going to be very uncomfortable.

It's going to be very discouraging. You're going to hit some real deep lows.

And if you can have other people who know that and understand that, and their heart is so much for the people they're serving in their nonprofit, that they can remind you, they can know you well enough, even though you might be, competing for the same nickels, know you well enough to go, hey, you'll get through this low point because.

And they can remind you of who you serve and why you serve. What you do, what you do.

This isn’t an island ministry for any nonprofit where you're out there by yourself. You want to encourage and support others who are doing good work, always pointing each other towards leading with your heart, because there will be times you're not going to want to do another day.

And it's good to be reminded by somebody of what you do and why you do it. So something like that.

General Miller:

Yeah, great advice. You know, what I think of is nonprofits serve.

We are there to serve others and so my advice would be, it's never about you. It's always about people you serve.

So if you can't take that on, take your servant leadership position on with a sense of humility, then you're never going to be as impactful as you were meant to be.

Josh:

Yeah. Your level of impact is directly related to your level of selfishness, ego, and making things about you.

Chief Allio:

Yes, 100%.

Josh:

Love it. Love it. Chief Joe, General Miller, thank you so much for your time today.

This has been such a helpful conversation and as always, for our listeners, please visit the show notes at Nonprofitpulse.com to find resources, the show notes, and links to Leaven Kids and the leaders there.

Just again, thank you so much for your time today and for giving back to the nonprofit community.

Chief Allio:

Thank you. Josh.

General Miller:

Thanks, Josh.

‍Josh:

Hey, thanks for listening.

If you enjoyed this conversation, please share or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Also, head on over to Nonprofitpulse.com to sign up for our monthly newsletter, as well as check out all the links and resources in the show notes. We’ll see you next time.