Past Reflections (Bill)

I had mentioned in class that I was on the board of a non-profit educational foundation in California for more than seven years. One might then have assumed I registered for this class in the expectation of returning to non-profit work. Not so. I enrolled in this class because it fulfilled the last remaining requirement for me to obtain my MALS degree in May. I had no idea what to expect from the class; not the exercise of granting $5,000 to a local non-profit nor reading the remarkable literature leading to this activity.

            What I hadn’t told the class was how frustrating and disappointing my time on the board of the educational foundation had been.  Although we contacted several outside sources, our only funding came from a donation form included in every student’s “back to school” packet sent out at the beginning of the school year, which raised only $10,000 to $15,000 each year. We obviously couldn’t afford to hire.an executive director or any staff at all, so board members had to perform clerical and accounting functions, so my first few tears on the board, I served as treasurer (I’ll revisit this later). Without a well-thought-out mission statement, we struggled to determine how to spend the funds we had, and did so as a committee. Lacking a clear mission statement impeded fund raising and recruitment of new board members as some members resigned, weary of the time invested in foundation activities with so little to show for it.

            I technically left the board for the same reasons most members did, but remained connected  as sort of a consultant. After five or six tears a board that originally had more than fifteen members had shrunk to three, with a late volunteer becoming president. When the president stopped calling for board meetings, the foundation became mortibund because there was no process to determine what to do with the money in the foundation bank account. The accounting firm that had done our 990 filings had been dismissed, but as a former treasurer, I was still a signatory on the bank account. So I was asked to look at the bank records, only to find that the president had been using the foundation account as his personal piggy bank to the tune of $20,000 or so. I turned the bank reords over to the school district so they could provide them to their attorney and decide what action to take.

            From this dismal experience, I’m disinclined to want to be involved in any further non-profit work. But from this class, I have learned how the foundation should have functioned and maybe have survived. A good mission statement would have helped the foundation overcome some its deficiencies and get off to a better start, and that’s why I volunteered for the mission statement committee in this class.