Civic Engagement and Your Board

Building community requires strategic commitment

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After growing up in inner city St. Louis during the 1960s, Linda S. Campbell says she’s never forgotten what it was like to live in a community “without a sense of civic power and without a voice in the democratic process.”

It is why now, some 30 year later, one of her goals in life is to help communities build their capacity to give voice to vulnerable and underserved populations. And she thinks nonprofit organizations and their volunteer board members have a vital role to play in making that happen.

Campbell is a consultant for the Building Movement Project (BMP), an organization that works to promote activism in the nonprofit community, and she currently works with BMP’s Social Service and Social Change project in Detroit. She is also a trainer for the Alliance for Children and Families’ Civic Engagement Training Institute (see companion sidebar).

Campbell spends a fair amount of her time working with and advising nonprofit boards on a wide range of governance and strategic issues, including civic engagement. As part of that work, she says she has identified numerous reasons why nonprofit boards need to strategically embrace civic engagement.

The first is to build the capacity of community institutions, most notably those in the nonprofit sector, to give voice to community concerns. This, she says, can create powerful allies when a nonprofit organization needs support for initiatives that are aligned with community needs.

The key here, she adds, is ensuring that there is alignment between the organization’s vision and that of the community. The board fits into this picture because it is charged with establishing the organization’s vision and mission statement.

Campbell, who earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of Michigan, says that when the community—which she defines as an “amalgamation of predominately allied nonprofit institutions”—shares the organization’s vision, and when the community has power and a voice, it will raise that voice on behalf of the organization.

“Building the capacity of the people it serves is why nonprofit organizations exist.”

Accordingly, it makes sense for a nonprofit organization to build that capacity.

“Building the capacity of the people it serves,” says Campbell, “is why nonprofit organizations exist. It is not about perpetuating the organization.”

This is not always understood, she adds. “I’ve worked with a lot of well-intended boards, and while they open up their hearts and pocketbooks, they often fail to look beyond the frames of their own organization.”

Campbell urges boards to adopt a greater vision, one that encompasses the community as a whole. That, she says, is the key to better organizational outcomes and impact because it ensures alignment, which generates critical community support for the organization.

The second reason why boards need to embrace civic engagement is because nonprofits are uniquely placed and qualified to build community capacity, Campbell says.

“Alliance members are on the frontlines,” she explains. “They have established very strong relationships with others in the community, both individuals and other nonprofits. This makes them qualified and positioned to lead the change process.”

A civically engaged community builds an agenda that should be reflected in the strategic plans of its institutions …

Campbell continues, if engaged nonprofits have established standing in the community, credibility, and track records of accomplishment, plus the alignment of vision, then they have a great opportunity to lead the capacity-building process.

Finally, the third reason is because, as Campbell told one board member who asked why his agency needed to be active in civic engagement, “You (nonprofit boards) can’t afford not to be.”

A civically engaged community builds an agenda that should be reflected in the strategic plans of its institutions, she explains. In other words, the community’s nonprofits provide services and programs to further that agenda.

From a practical perspective, adds Campbell, the community will want to support the agency’s agenda, and a civically engaged community can move the agenda in ways the agency staff can’t.

Agency staff wishing to promote the agency’s agenda may be viewed as hired guns with limited credibility, says Campbell. Whereas constituents and volunteers, often in far greater numbers than an agency can muster from its staff, can mount more aggressive and ultimately more credible campaigns in support of a change process.

For Campbell, St. Louis and the 1960s are long gone. But her passion and commitment to empowering underserved and underrepresented populations continues.