Case Study

Discuss this case study and the questions that follow with your board.

The board of the Farmdale Elder Center, a Nebraska nonprofit that provided local senior citizens with a variety of recreational programs and activities, was about to begin its quarterly meeting. Paula, the longtime chief executive, was eager to hear feedback on her plan for consolidating and trimming programs, confident that board members would be pleased with her recommendations.

The board chair had asked Paula to think “outside the box,” analyze the multitude of programs, and come up with suggestions for keeping the popular, cost-effective ones, eliminating others, and considering new ones to meet unsatisfied needs among Farmdale’s constituents. Paula and her staff had worked overtime to survey local elders, conduct peer research, analyze programs with low attendance, brainstorm ideas for new programs, and write a compelling plan that addressed the board’s concerns. The plan had been mailed to board members two weeks ago.

At the board meeting, Paula was shocked to hear members’ comments. They were reluctant to eliminate their pet programs, ones they had originally recommended, or programs that had been there for years. Paula felt completely blindsided; How had this happened? There was so much in the plan that was fresh and forward-looking, but no one had even mentioned these things. After the meeting, she called the board chair and said, “I feel like we’ve just wasted an enormous amount of staff time for an initiative that had no support. Why did we do this?”

Questions

• What should have happened before the board meeting?
• How could the chair have managed the meeting better?
• What should Paula do now?

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