Will Butler has served on a number of community boards and said he often saw many of the same people at board meetings. And so when he was in a roundtable discussion about things Macon needs, he shared an idea that he said “was just in my heart and on my mind.”
“I’m thinking that, well, if I’m on the same board as these people, where’s everybody else?” said Butler, who is chief operation officer and director of events for Pilot International. “On boards you want those who have excellent credentials and educational background and who are leaders in the community. But what about those people who have the great ideas, who get overlooked?”
The informal roundtable discussion led to a more formal conversation with a number of Macon’s leaders. Then came more planning and eventually a free initiative for community members to get trained on how to serve on a nonprofit board. The aim is to add a more diverse representation to local nonprofits.
The Board Diversity Workshops, which are hosted at Washington Memorial Library, will start its next series of workshops this Saturday. The free classes are on the third Saturday of the month, so this session will run Jan. 18, Feb. 15 and March 15. Each session runs from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
“The point of the class is just to … equip people to serve on a board, whether that is founding their own board, joining a board that’s already in progress, or just understanding what a board is like,” said Rebecca Lowrance, the Business and Nonprofit Center reference librarian who manages the program.
The three workshop sessions cover six modules tied to nonprofit service and will include things like the roles and responsibilities on nonprofit boards, essential documents, board culture, business models, finding funding, designing meetings, managing public relations and transparency. Participation in the workshop is free through support from the Knight Foundation.
“We wanted to open that up to all of Macon, or, you know, all, all people who had a desire to serve on boards, to do that board training,” Butler said. “Whether it’s a local church organization board or whether it’s a corporate business board, I think that people from all walks of life can add value.”
Participants are required to attend all three sessions to graduate. Lowrance said if students miss a module, they can always pick it back up again the next session, which will start in September.
“My last cohort, I had two students that had already founded their own nonprofits, they were … the founders and the executive chairs of their boards, so they were already serving,” Lowrance said. “But I had a couple of other students that had never really worked with a nonprofit before, and one of them actually got a job with a nonprofit.”
The program is in its third year and Butler has stayed involved by meeting participants and attending the graduations.
“When we started the program, we initially thought that it would be an entry level program, that we would have participants who really had a desire to be on boards, but had never participated on boards,” he said. “In the first class, it was just a diverse group of people. We had people who were at the UGA Business Center, we had people who were starting their own companies, who were already CEOs or chief operating officers, or who had had a lot of experience being on boards and just wanting to know a little bit more.”
Butler said the knowledge of the program has spread primarily by word of mouth.
“It just fills my heart with pride and pleasure that I’m able to have a program to give back to the community, especially at the Middle Georgia Regional Library,” he said.
The program is housed under the Middle Georgia Regional Library’s Bank and Nonprofit Center or BANC at Washington Memorial Library. BANC is a resource for community members looking for assistance with things like financial literacy and starting their own business.
You can register to participate in the Board Diversity Workshop here. There will be another session starting in September.
