BVU Fellow Jennifer Goings Smith worked with NuPoint Community Development Corporation (Formerly Union Miles Development Corporation) on a year-long project to structure their Board of Directors. We recently caught up with NuPoint’s Executive Director, Roshawn Sample, to learn more about Jennifer’s profound impact.
How did your Fellow move your mission forward?
Jennifer has been instrumental in helping to bring structure to the organization’s Board of Directors. She has established approaches for board nominations, communication, training, committee formation, and file storage/sharing. Jennifer has brought skills in everything from technology and template development to communication, coaching, and facilitation.
For the board committees, she arranged the meeting agenda and other documents, and facilitated the working meeting with the board members so that the committees would be fully formed by day’s end. We self-selected into committees and identified the committee chairs, meeting dates, and our individual committee priorities to work on moving forward.
As for the board officer nomination process, Jennifer was the repository for nominations, held conversations with the nominated individuals to gauge interest in the positions, created the ballot and ran the election successfully. The end result was our newly elected 4 officers!
Would you recommend a BVU Fellow to other organizations?
I absolutely would recommend a BVU Fellow. Their breadth of knowledge helps organizations build processes and structures to support successful operations and growth. Fellows are a great way to mitigate the lack of human capital and expertise often faced by small nonprofit organizations.
The BVU Fellows program connects late-career professionals to nonprofit organizations for strategic capacity-building projects. To get involved, please contact us!