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Lissa Jones-Lofgren: It took about four board meetings before we were able to land on what we wanted to do concretely. It was wonderful. The board wasn’t surprised that the change was necessary, but they were surprised by the idea that we had to do something very radical in order to sustain the mission in a new way. So it was wonderfully refreshing that, even though the tendency is to want to protect what we’ve always done, [paraphrasing the late journalist] Sydney J. Harris, “We love change and hate it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.” And that’s what most people want.

The board was able to find the courage to say, we need to think about this in a transcendental way, and we need to resist the temptation to stay the same. So I really want to give them their props, so to speak. The most important relationship in my practice, in over 25 years, that I’ve ever seen in a nonprofit is between the CEO and the board chair. And I would tell you that I knew the board chair very well from other work a long lifetime ago, and that if we hadn’t had that trust already established, I don’t know that things could have gone down as quickly as they did.