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.

Notions of leadership are evolving, particularly as the nonprofit and philanthropic sector considers what it takes for individuals, organizations, and communities to drive systemic change in pursuit of racial equity and more effective outcomes for all. Leadership is not static, and it doesn’t sit with one person. Instead, leadership is about building collective power to influence and change organizations and systems to operate in just and liberating ways that enable all individuals to thrive.

This tool, shared from RoadMap and Strategies for Social Change’s Leadership Transition Toolkit, maps out five primary stages in the leadership transition planning process. This tool helps organizations anticipating leadership transitions have a sense of what to expect through each part of the process.

Fresh Lifelines for Youth’s (FLY) board made important choices to ensure its next CEO, Ali Knight, could hit the ground running as the nonprofit's new leader. Here Board Chair Mark Donnelly and Board Vice Chair June Wang share the board’s approach to the nonprofit's leadership transition.

Visit BMP's leadership transition hub on the web.

Transitions in the top leadership of nonprofit organizations can be times of crisis or opportunity. Intergenerational and racial dynamics inevitably impact leadership turnovers.

As more Baby Boomers consider leaving long-term jobs and even organizations they founded, other long-term leaders will look for new ways to contribute while making space for new leadership.

Their resources provide information on how to facilitate just and equitable leadership transitions to better serve your organization and mission.

Building Movement Project (BMP) presents Move The Money: Practices and Values for Funding Social Movements, a set of resources geared towards grantmaking institutions eager to expand and deepen their support of organizations, networks, and leaders involved with social change movements. Move The Money consists of four videos and accompanying discussion guides with reflection questions that highlight the perspectives and experiences of movement leaders and funders, and builds on the wave of ongoing efforts that encourage the philanthropic sector to invest in movements.

While the field has been tracking the dearth of Black leadership at the top for quite some time now, we have not looked enough at how we do executive leadership transitions, which is overdetermined by what we call “best practice.”

The number one responsibility of any board—for-profit or nonprofit—is effective management of the senior executive, especially a new one. Yet, nonprofit leaders often report to Bridgespan that their boards fall short of that goal. Here are five ways nonprofit boards can more effectively onboard and support their new CEOs.

Nonprofit leaders have long called for funders to provide more multiyear general operating support (multiyear GOS) grants. These grants provide nonprofit organizations with stability and position them to grow their impact by enabling nonprofits to plan, to flexibly use resources where they are most needed, and to do the long-term work of addressing systemic and complex social issues.

Choir Book: A Framework for Social Justice Philanthropy is a guide to support you and your philanthropic organization in aligning your grantmaking practice with social justice values. It defines core values, individual competencies and actions that support values-aligned practice to create a comprehensive framework for effective social justice philanthropy.

A resource to help foundations think in a systematic way about how they can promote listening and feedback across the many dimensions of their work.

Many organizations are creating and disseminating knowledge about the practice of philanthropy, but does that information actually influence how funders operate?

The Ford Foundation commissioned Milway Consulting to look at 12 independent initiatives aimed to influence how grantmakers and others engage in philanthropy and identify what advanced and prevented the adoption of good practice.

This is an archive of many webinars presented by Nonprofit Quarterly on this topic.

This quick overview of some basic transition considerations and list of handy resources comes from the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative, built on learnings from their work in supporting executive transitions.

Are you and the organization ready for transition? Use the list below to assess the transition readiness of both the organization and yourself, plan and prioritize next steps.

Nonprofit staff leaders, boards, consultants, and funders continue to struggle with the question of how to design and execute executive transition processes that:

1. reflect equity and justice values

2. engage staff and community beyond the board of directors

3. attract and support incoming BIPOC leaders

4. allow for emergent interpretations of how executive leadership looks and acts

Watch the recording of this conversation that interrogates executive transition "best practice." Which practices might we keep and reimagine? Which can we let go of? What should we add to the transition model to center the needs and realities of incoming BIPOC leadership especially?

The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project is a five-year, peer-to-peer funder initiative to address the inherent power imbalances between foundations and nonprofits. At its core, trust-based philanthropy is rooted in a set of values that help advance equity, shift power, and build mutually accountable relationships. No matter where a foundation starts its trust-based journey, to fully embody this approach grantmakers rely on trust-based values to guide four key dimensions of their organization’s work: culture, structures, leadership, and practices.

This workbook introduces key leadership concepts, reflective leadership questions, inspirational and thought-provoking quotes, as well as resources you can use to deepen your leadership practice.