Who’s Afraid to Join a Board?
Somewhere along the way, joining a board started to sound less like an opportunity to serve your community and more like agreeing to a second job with no paycheck, too many emails, and at least one meeting that absolutely could have been an email.
And, to be fair, sometimes that reputation has been earned.
Still, I’ve noticed something increasingly concerning: it is getting harder to convince people to serve on local boards.
Whether it is a nonprofit, professional association, neighborhood organization, arts group, chamber, school-related committee, or some other civic organization, the story is often the same. The same handful of people keep raising their hands while everyone else slowly avoids eye contact.
Part of the problem is time. People are busy. Work bleeds into evenings. Family responsibilities are real. Burnout is real. And after spending an entire day bouncing between emails, Zoom meetings, Slack messages, and calendar reminders, the idea of voluntarily adding another recurring meeting can feel slightly unhinged.
But I also think boards themselves deserve some of the blame.
Too many organizations have built a culture where volunteering means endless meetings, unclear expectations, unnecessary bureaucracy, and the occasional mysterious committee that has somehow existed since 1987 but no one can explain what it does.
If we want people to serve, we have to make serving worth their time.
That means being clear about expectations before someone joins. It means shorter, better meetings. It means giving board members meaningful work instead of busywork. It means allowing people to contribute according to their skills rather than assuming everyone must volunteer the same way.
Most importantly, it means creating an environment where new voices are genuinely welcomed.
Organizations cannot say they want younger leaders, more diverse perspectives, or new ideas and then greet every suggestion with, “Well, that’s not how we’ve traditionally done it.”
Nothing sends a prospective volunteer running faster than discovering their job is apparently to preserve decisions made before they arrived.
There is also a larger reason this matters.
Local boards are one of the foundations of civic leadership.
They are often where people first learn how organizations function, how budgets work, how decisions get made, how competing perspectives are reconciled, and how to build consensus around something larger than themselves.
Today’s committee member may become tomorrow’s board chair, nonprofit executive, planning commissioner, school trustee, councilmember, community organizer, or civic leader.
But that pipeline only works if people are willing to step into it.
So organizations need to rethink how they recruit volunteers. Stop asking people to simply “join the board.” Ask them to help solve something. Give them a mission, a clear role, and a reason their participation matters.
And for those who have been asked to serve and immediately thought, “Absolutely not, I value my free time,” maybe reconsider.
You do not have to become a professional board member.
You do not have to serve everywhere.
But your community probably needs you somewhere.
Because civic life does not magically sustain itself. Someone has to show up.
Preferably before the meeting gets to “other business.”