By Debbie Gardner
debbieg@thereminder.com
If the board of directors of your favorite local nonprofit looks more like the community it’s trying to serve than it once did, you can probably thank Attorney Ellen Freyman.
Freyman and her nonprofit organization, OnBoard, are skilled matchmakers of sorts – helping to bring together qualified individuals interested in sharing their talents with boards of directors looking to fill vacancies.
At OnBoard’s recent bi-annual event, which took place Oct. 8 at the Basketball Hall of Fame in downtown Springfield, the organization helped bring together more than 45 non-profit organizations looking for volunteers and 100 individuals interested in serving in a career fair-style matchup of skills and needs.
But Freyman’s work wasn’t always done on such a grand scale.
It started with an observation, and an idea.
Recognizing a need
Back in the 1990s, Freyman said she noticed something missing on the boards of directors of most local non-profits, including the Springfield Chamber of Commerce, which she was interested in joining.
There were few, if any women.
“I saw the mix of boards was not a mix of the community,” Freyman explained to PRIME “My experience was that they were all white men.”
It wasn’t, she said, that these organizations didn’t want to add qualified women to their boards of directors. It was more a situation where the types of people these boards wanted to add weren’t a part of board member’s networks.
“It was an issue of the membership of [the] boards – mostly white men – did not know people outside of their community to bring onto the boards,” Freyman said. “When I sat down with them, [board members] were certainly welcoming to have me submit names and resumes of women who were interested in being involved and who were qualified.”
She enlisted the help of three other local professional women – Barbara Wallace, who worked in banking, Eva Thompson, a financial services planner, and Nancy Piccin, a local journalist – and began helping boards of directors find qualified candidates to fill vacancies.
“Initially it started out as one-on-one matching,” Freyman said.
For example, Freyman and her cohorts helped put a woman on the board of United Bank, and aided the Springfield Chamber of Commerce in including women as board members.
As the requests for help grew, Freyman realized she needed to start raising money to continue the group’s work. In 1996 she made her corporate matchmaking idea official, incorporating her all-volunteer staff as a 501c3 non-profit organization, and OnBoard was born.
Soon it became clear to Freyman that women were not the only group missing from many boards of directors, and when Wallace, Thompson and Piccin each left the organization to pursue other interests, she broadened the scope of her placement service to address the issue of diversity.
“The YMCA, say, was looking for someone with financial experience, so they would come to me and I would find a woman, or a Latino, or an African American that was an accountant or a bank executive and suggest the names, and they would meet and see if there was a fit,” she said.
That kind of matching soon proved to be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what boards of directors are looking for in candidates.
“It can be age, geographic, there are a lot of needs boards have,” Freyman explained. “The goal of OnBoard is that for all organizations, their governing bodies are representative of the people they serve.”
A full service match-up
As word spread about the help Freyman could provide to boards of directors, “the process became labor intensive,” she said. About 10 years ago she hit on the idea of hosting a job fair-like event “where individuals can come and meet with organizations looking for qualified volunteers.”
The concept was so successful; OnBoard has made the one-night match up an every-other-year event.
Freyman said she and her volunteers also became aware that though they were increasing diversity on the governing boards of local non-profits, not every board was prepared to work with diverse members.
“We also work on training the organization so they understand what it means to be culturally diverse,” she said.
In addition, OnBoard works with potential board applicants to help them understand what’s expected of them should they be selected to fill a position.
The Oct. 8 event, for example, was expected to draw individuals who had never served on a governing board before, Freyman said.
She expected to “share a lot of knowledge about what it means to be a board trustee and a board member” with attendees during the evening, Freyman said.
On the years OnBoard does not host a matching event, Freyman said the organization focuses on offering workshops to help boards with diversity issues and individuals prepare for the roles they might be filling. Freyman said partnering with other non-profits, and soliciting sponsorships from businesses in the community helps OnBoard fund the programs that they provide.
And despite the advantages of technology – Onboard maintains both a website at wwwdiversityonboard.org and a Facebook page where interested individuals and organizations can get up to speed on what the non-profit has to offer – Freyman said filling spots with the right people is still often through one-on-one email matchups at this point.
“We’re working on making the website interactive so organizations can say ‘we are looking for someone with these skills’ and individuals can post their skills [where] organizations can go online and review them,” she said, adding that OnBoard is also working on developing a more efficient system for tracking where and when they have helped organizations fill vacancies.
“We’re trying to do our full event online so we are able to get surveys and feedback and find out our results,” she said.
Has all the personal time – and work – been worth it? Freyman said yes.
“It’s been fun. It’s great, it’s being a matchmaker,” she said. “When the matches work it’s great and very rewarding for organizations that are appreciative of having people on their boards that they otherwise would not have encountered.”
