by kthigpen | Sep 21, 2026
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.”
by kthigpen | Sep 5, 2026
Illustration by Abigail Giuseppe
It’s been almost two weeks since Dolly Parton died, and I still find myself getting emotional about it.
More emotional, frankly, than I expected to be.
I wasn’t the kind of Dolly fan who listened to her music every day. I never got to see her in concert. I didn’t have some life-changing encounter with her or a story about meeting her backstage somewhere.
And yet, her death has hit me harder than the deaths of some people I actually knew.
I’ve been trying to figure out why.
I think part of it is simply that Dolly was always there.
For my entire life, she has been this constant, warm presence somewhere in the background of American culture. The big hair. The rhinestones. That unmistakable laugh. The smile. The music. The self-deprecating jokes. The ability to be completely over the top and somehow still feel completely genuine.
In a world that increasingly feels angry, exhausting and divided, Dolly seemed to occupy this rare little corner of it where kindness was still allowed to be uncomplicated.
She was bright without being fake.
Successful without seeming cruel.
Confident without needing to tear anyone else down.
And when everything around us felt a little too heavy, there was something comforting about knowing Dolly Parton was still out there somewhere being Dolly Parton.
Maybe I didn’t realize how much I depended on that.
There is another part of this that feels more personal.
Dolly and I both grew up poor in the rural South. Her circumstances were certainly harder than mine, but there are pieces of her story I have always understood instinctively.
When you grow up in a place where opportunities can feel limited, it can be hard to imagine a life much bigger than the one immediately in front of you.
Dolly did.
And then she built it.
Through an almost ridiculous amount of talent, hard work, determination and sheer force of personality, this girl from the mountains of Tennessee became one of the most recognizable people on Earth.
But what I admired most wasn’t simply that she became famous.
It was what she did with it.
She gave back. She created opportunities. She encouraged children to read. She supported people when they needed help. And somehow, despite becoming enormously wealthy and successful, she never seemed embarrassed by where she came from.
She carried it with her.
For those of us who grew up poor in the South and eventually found our way into rooms we weren’t necessarily raised to believe we would occupy, there was something incredibly powerful about that.
You don’t have to erase where you came from to become something more.
But I think there is another reason this loss has affected me so deeply.
Dolly Parton made people feel loved.
Not tolerated.
Not conditionally accepted.
Loved.
Growing up gay in a part of the South where being gay was — and in many places still is — frowned upon, unconditional love can feel like a surprisingly scarce resource.
You learn early that there may be conditions attached to people’s affection.
They love you, but they don’t understand “that part.”
They love you, but they wish you were different.
They love you, but maybe you shouldn’t talk about it.
They love you, provided you make yourself a little smaller and a little easier for them to accept.
Dolly never seemed interested in that kind of love.
She repeatedly made it clear that LGBTQ+ people deserved the same dignity, happiness and acceptance as anybody else.
No wink. No qualification. No theological footnote.
Just love.
And I think that’s one of the reasons so many LGBTQ+ people have loved her right back.
She saw us.
For people who spent portions of their lives wondering whether the world would ever fully accept them, Dolly Parton — this enormously famous woman from rural Tennessee — essentially looked at us and said: You are fine exactly as you are.
More than fine, actually.
You deserve to be happy.
You deserve to dream.
You deserve to become whoever it is you hope to become.
Maybe you had to grow up gay in the South to completely understand how powerful it was to hear that from someone like her.
So perhaps that is what I’m grieving.
Not simply a singer.
Not even really a celebrity.
I’m grieving a presence.
A reminder that kindness can coexist with ambition. That you can become wildly successful without becoming hardened. That where you begin doesn’t dictate where you end. That being yourself — loudly, colorfully, unapologetically yourself — can actually be one of your greatest strengths.
And maybe most importantly, that loving people doesn’t have to be complicated.
I didn’t realize how much I would miss Dolly Parton until she was gone.
I suspect a lot of people are discovering the same thing.
But I also have a feeling that Dolly is one of those rare people who won’t ever feel completely gone.
The songs will still play.
The movies will still make us laugh.
Children will continue receiving books because of something she started.
Dollywood will still sit there in the Tennessee mountains.
Someone somewhere will put on rhinestones when the world feels a little too gray.
And generations of people who never had the chance to exist on this Earth at the same time she did will still discover her and hear that voice for the first time.
Maybe that’s the reward for living a life as big and generous as hers.
Eventually the person leaves.
But the light doesn’t.
And something tells me Dolly’s will be around for a very long time.
