Board Development at Scale: Improving Nonprofit Governance Across the Jewish Community

Good nonprofits Boards do more than give money and rubber-stamp the budget; they provide energetic and strategic leadership. But most Boards don’t spend the time and effort to improve their performance. And Board development typically happens one Board Chair at a time, or one organization at a time, at most.

What if Board development happened across the whole Jewish community?

That is what is now beginning to unfold across more than 60 Jewish nonprofit organizations, where over 1,500 Board members have begun participating in a coordinated, multi-year effort to strengthen Board leadership, governance culture, and Board–CEO partnerships across the North American Jewish community.

The program is called the Board Leadership Accelerator, offered by Leading Edge with the support of The Marcus Foundation (established by the late Bernie Marcus, co-founder of The Home Depot, with his wife Billi). The Board Leadership Accelerator is the largest coordinated Board leadership effort ever undertaken in the Jewish communal field, and reflects a growing recognition across the sector: Boards are central to organizational performance, yet the community has invested surprisingly little in systematic, scalable approaches to Board leadership.

Too many Boards aren’t performing

National research from BoardSource has repeatedly documented gaps between expectations and realities for many nonprofit Boards. In Leading with Intent, a survey of nonprofit governance practices, nearly half of CEOs rated their Boards as average or below average on understanding Board roles and responsibilities. Leading Edge’s own research on Jewish nonprofit Boards echoes these findings, with many executives pointing to challenges around accountability, strategic governance, fundraising expectations, and planning for CEO succession.

Taken together, these studies indicate a nonprofit-sector-wide problem: Boards are being asked to perform increasingly complex governance work, but Board leadership development remains fragmented, episodic, and too often absent.

An experiment in scale and coordination

The Board Leadership Accelerator is testing the premise that governance can be strengthened more effectively when organizations across a whole community learn and improve together, using shared data, shared language, and shared infrastructure. Over a 24-month period (2026–2028), participating organizations are engaging in a common process that includes:

• Standardized measurement of Board experience and effectiveness,
• Cohort-based learning among peer organizations,
• Targeted coaching and in-depth follow-up programming, and
• Supportive consultations to help each organization create and implement a Board Development Plan.

All these interventions are being crafted with the Jewish communal context in mind, for maximum relevance to participating organizations. The program also includes repeated assessments and a full arc of support from early 2026 through early 2028. The goal is helping Boards clarify expectations, improve decision-making, strengthen leadership roles, and build healthier governance cultures, while building a core peer group of lay leaders who are passionate about Board performance across the Jewish community.

“This program is a huge step up in scale, intensity, and reach,” explains Gali Cooks, President & CEO of Leading Edge. “The Jewish community’s largest previous Board leadership initiative was the Board Member Institute, operated first by Boardified, which later became part of Leading Edge. That program trained approximately 200 Board members over several years. The Board Leadership Accelerator will scale that impact, in this pilot cohort alone. Many of those more than 1,500 Board members sit on multiple Boards, as well, so there is real leverage here. Best of all, it spans quite a spectrum in the Jewish community, from left to right and religious to secular.”

Can the Jewish community lead the way?

Leading Edge estimates that there are about 10,000 Jewish nonprofits in North America, with about 30,000 Board members, many of whom serve on more than one Board. The Board Leadership Accelerator’s pilot cohort (1,500+ participants) will therefore directly reach about 5% (1 in every 20) of Board members in the nonprofits serving the Jewish community. Assuming the program continues to future cohorts, the Jewish community may yet achieve an unprecedented level of Board training and governance quality, offering an example other sub-sectors and communities might want to adopt and adapt.