Board Governance 101: The Value of Youth Board Service

Greater New Orleans Foundation’s Nonprofit Leadership and Effectiveness Program is partnering with The New Orleans Youth Alliance to encourage and prepare youth for nonprofit board service. The topics covered in this youth-only workshop include:

• The nonprofit sector’s purpose and structure
• The role of governance in nonprofit organizations
• The Board of Director’s legal, fiduciary, and ethical duties and responsibilities
• Individual board members’ role and responsibilities

This session will explicitly review the common assumptions and barriers that prevent youth from serving on boards, and the value of inviting youth to sit on Boards of Directors.

Participants in this workshop will be eligible to participate in the Foundation’s matching program, which will connect trainees to nonprofit board service opportunities. This session will be held on Tuesday, October 18^th from 5:30-7:30 pm via Zoom. This session is free, but registration is required.

Please Click here to register.

This workshop is intended for youth who are interested in serving on a nonprofit board. If you are currently serving on a nonprofit board and you and your organization want to deepen your knowledge of nonprofit governance, we have a Board Governance Series for more advanced learning. The series is typically held in the spring and fall. Please contact Kristen Craig (kristen@gnof.org) to be on the notification list for the series.

About the Trainer

Makiyah Moody helps organizations ask and answer critical questions about how to deliver on their missions more effectively. A skilled facilitator and governance specialist, Makiyah launched Kairos & Heart LLC in August 2021 after realizing that being and doing are different and she wanted to explore different design choices for partnering with organizational leaders.

For five and a half years, Makiyah sharpened her consulting skills at La Piana Consulting, a national management consulting firm. Prior to joining La Piana in 2016, she directed governance initiatives for the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, was founding executive director of the New Orleans regional office of Leading Educators and held various roles over six years with the KIPP Foundation.

Additionally, she was a 2013 participant in the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change Racial Equity Leadership Development Seminar, is a Pahara Institute NextGen Fellow, an Executive Scholar with the Center for Nonprofit Management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and a BoardSource Certified Governance Trainer.

Prior to graduate school, Makiyah was a Civil Rights Investigator with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, an experience that vividly confirmed the disparate impact of structural racism. She is most energized by the opportunity to work with organizations that support underinvested communities and people of color, and that advance democracy and racial equity. Past clients include The Funders Network, Race Forward and the Center for Social Inclusion, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, YWCA, The Children’s Defense Fund, Supermajority, Deaconess Foundation, The Endowment for Health, and Raikes Foundation.

Makiyah spent over a decade working in education reform, where she honed her skills in organizational strategy development, community engagement, and fundraising. Makiyah has an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a BA in Hispanic Studies, magna cum laude, from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she served as a trustee from 2014 to 2019.