Board Recruitment Recommendations: Expanding Board Diversity

Peacemakers’ Alliance exists to increase the human agency, literacy, and nonviolent conflict resolution skills of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons. For this project we hope to develop our board, as we are in a transition period of growing and restructuring our organization. As we strive to advance equity within the system-impacted community, we must also strengthen our own racial equity capacity within our organization. We are committed to bringing more formerly incarcerated people on staff and into positions of leadership, including our Board.

Board Recruitment & Development: Some areas that we are looking for a volunteer to help us with are:
-Assessment: Evaluate our need, current Board and staff to best decide steps moving forward, and which skills/ expertise should be prioritized. This might include feedback from stakeholders: leadership, staff, donors, and board members.
-Recruitment: Determine the best avenues for board recruitment
-Onboarding: Help with suggestions about bringing in new members as far as training, mentorship, creating community and centering organizational values and goals. Create benchmarks for board governance and practices.
-Increase board diversity: In addition to better representing the community we serve, we are looking for guidance on finding members that bring a mix of complementary skills, backgrounds and experience.

We look to create organizational transformation that creates sustainable changes to support social justice. We are in the process of transitioning from a fiscal sponsor to our own independent 501c3, and as part of this transition, we are looking to recruit, onboard and develop our Board. For our organization, a well-developed board is representative of the people we serve–a catalyst for organizational success that helps us forward our mission and create positive change for our participants and our community. In addition to advancing our mission, we are prioritizing representation, strategic leadership, resource mobilization, community outreach, stakeholder engagement, governance oversight, and collaboration. Partnering with us will help advance our mission, promote social justice, and support our community.

We are preparing for this project by working closely with our current Board and reaching out to our staff as a whole for input and feedback. We have empowered staff, volunteers and participants to participate in leadership and program development. The lived experiences of staff and their desire for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion is a material resource for the communities we support. Leadership development and training will help hone our leadership team’s skills and communication to better lead and build our organization through a racial equity and trauma-informed lens that best aligns with our mission and work. To this end, we believe it will also help us in our process of Board development and transitioning to more members who have been directly impacted by the system we are working to dismantle.