More and more nonprofits are diverging from the traditional “executive director” hierarchy and exploring co-leadership as an opportunity to share power and plan for their organizations’ futures.

As anticipated leadership transitions continue to accelerate in the nonprofit sector, groups are looking internally at who leads and how to make leadership more equitable, effective, and impactful. Rather than replace a single executive director or CEO with another, boards are looking at alternative leadership structures: hiring co-directors, implementing leadership teams, and experimenting with new ways staff members can perform leadership functions. These nontraditional structures can be both rewarding and challenging for funders to support, both during the transition and moving forward.

For the past ten years the Building Movement Project has addressed leadership in the nonprofit sector by focusing on generational shifts, multigenerational leadership and new ways of leading. In each of these areas, the question we are most often asked by younger generations is whether we can provide them with new models of how to run/lead organizations that do not concentrate authority and responsibility in one top person. We believe these models exist but they are either unrecognized or embedded within traditional looking hierarchies. We also believe that highlighting different leadership structures will offer organizations examples for effective ways to operate that can increase impact.

A wave of nonprofit leadership transitions is upon us. The COVID-19 pandemic, a deep economic recession, and an era of racial reckoning are leading to a number of nonprofit leaders in a variety of fields and movements in the United States to step down. Their successors, many of them BIPOC and female, have the vision and new ideas to rejuvenate their organizations and constituencies, and to reach for social and racial equity in ways that were hard to imagine just a few years ago. As these new leaders step in, major funders have to step up to offer responsible financial and other support.