Board Fundamentals: Purpose-Driven Board Leadership
What does it truly mean for a nonprofit board to lead with purpose—and how can that orientation transform governance, partnerships, and community impact?
Join us for an engaging and reflective session as we welcome executive leadership coach and author Anne Wallestad for a conversation on purpose-driven board leadership. Drawing from her widely recognized framework, The Four Principles of Purpose-Driven Board Leadership, Anne will guide participants through practical insights and thought-provoking discussion designed to help boards lead with greater clarity, courage, and intention.
Please RSVP for this virtual event here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/voU7y2h2SLWMGkDAxf4CXA#/registration
Nonprofit boards are often pulled between organizational needs, operational oversight, and strategic direction. This session challenges participants to reframe board leadership by centering a deeper guiding question: What is our true purpose in the ecosystem we serve?
Together, we will explore the four core principles of purpose-driven boards:
The conversation will also highlight collaboration as a governance strategy, exploring how boards can work collectively across organizations, networks, and systems to address complex community challenges more effectively.
This session is designed for:
Anne Wallestad is an executive leadership coach focused on helping social change leaders turn their attention to themselves so that they can do more good in the world. Working primarily with nonprofit and foundation CEOs and executive directors, Anne serves as both a coach and advisor, helping leaders bring intentionality and focus to their leadership practices and serving as a safe, confidential space to discuss thorny board, staff, and strategic issues. Anne is a graduate of Georgetown’s Leadership Coaching Certification Program and a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation.
Prior to launching her coaching practice in 2022, Anne spent nearly 25 years as a nonprofit executive, including almost a decade as President & CEO of BoardSource, a globally-recognized nonprofit focused on strengthening the board-staff partnership within nonprofit organizations and foundations. While at BoardSource, Anne transformed the organization’s programmatic and business model – a change that resulted in BoardSource being named a Top 10 Finalist for the prestigious Drucker Prize for Innovation. These structural changes made it possible for BoardSource to dramatically expand its leadership role in the social sector, leveraging its unique role to challenge boards to lead with purpose and center equity. She is the author of the widely-disseminated article, “The Four Principles of Purpose-Driven Board Leadership,” which makes the case for board-level change that centers purpose, ecosystem, equity, and community voice.
A native Midwesterner, Anne moved to Washington, DC in her mid-twenties to build a career working to create positive change in the world. In 2019, Anne and her wife relocated to Baltimore, which has become home. Anne is passionate about urban renewal and reinvestment, racial equity, LGBTQ equality, and all that it takes to create sustainable communities where all can thrive. In her personal time, she enjoys traveling, reading, listening to records, exploring Baltimore's food scene, and being in the company of interesting and curious people who stretch her thinking and make her laugh.
We hope you’ll join us for this timely and meaningful conversation.
RSVP for this virtual event here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/voU7y2h2SLWMGkDAxf4CXA#/registration
