Reflections From Leading the Board of a Small Music Nonprofit
My first and only experience being president of anything 🎶
From 2020 to 2025, I sang in a choir. Well, more like 2022 to 2025, since the covid pandemic started almost immediately after I joined the choir in February 2020, and singing activities during that time were… more logistically difficult. In the fall of 2022, during my second full choir semester (we organize two concerts a year, one in June and one in February), there was a general assembly at which we had to elect the board of the nonprofit organization that manages the choir for the next year. I was elected as a generic administrator. A year later, I was elected to the position of treasurer. A year after that, I was elected president. I quit at the time of the general assembly of October 2025, and then, a bit burned out by the whole thing, I quit the choir in December. I meant to write about the experience at the time, but life got in the way, so here we are. Tonight is the concert I was supposed to sing in. I’ll attend, as a spectator.
The first thing to know about being an (unpaid) member of a nonprofit board is that nobody wants to do it. In the paragraph above I said I was “elected” three times. You might imagine a dramatic election campaign ending with a suspenseful tally of the votes. Nothing could be further from the truth. The way these elections work is that:
The general assembly happens on an October Wednesday, to the annoyance of everyone because it shortens practice time;
We choose someone to lead the assembly, usually someone who knows the procedure and is therefore able to expedite them;
We discuss various matters about the past year, the finances, etc., then get to the election part;
Some members of the outgoing board have already committed to keep doing it, or to accept a different role (e.g. becoming president), and they announce that they are running (or they have arranged for a colleague to suggest that they run);
Nobody runs against them;
They are elected unanimously without a vote;
Some people who were talked into joining by a member of the outgoing board announce that they are running (or they have that member of the board suggest that they run);
Nobody runs against them;
They are elected unanimously without a vote;
Some newcomers that nobody expected to volunteer announce that they are running;
Nobody runs against them;
They are elected unanimously without a vote;
At this point there usually are a few roles that still have nobody running for, which the person leading the assembly points out;
An awkward moment of silence happens;
If lucky, go to (j) and recruit some more volunteers;
If less lucky, somebody randomly suggests someone who they think might be a fit;
That person may decline, if so go to (n);
That person may accept, everybody claps and most are secretly relieved that they’re not on the board;
If there are still roles to fill, go to (m);
If not, we have a full board! At least 2-3 members out of the 9 new members wonder what they got themselves into, and will most likely quit within a few months, triggering a by-election.
I joined the board by being the relative newcomer that somebody randomly suggested at step (p). I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into, but I was unemployed, had plenty of time, and figured it would be a way to become friends with other singers faster.
Then a year later, the treasurer was leaving and no one wanted to take the job it, so I volunteered. I became the holder of the login codes to the organization’s bank account.
Then a year later, the president was leaving and absolutely no one wanted to take the job, so I volunteered, even though that was half-hearted and I actually would have preferred to leave the board altogether.
It was my first time being president of anything. It was my first time being the formal leader of anything, actually. I had no idea what I was doing.
Fortunately, previous office holders made the job very easy for me. Much of how the choir functions was well-documented, and I could ask some of the “elders.” The outgoing president, a woman my age, also happened to be the most senior singer, having been in the choir more than 10 years and on the board most of those years. It also helped that the people singing in a choir of contemporary classical music tend to be smart, educated, competent people on average. So the board, I am told, was much better run than most nonprofit boards.
My tasks were to organize the monthly board meetings and make sure every object-level task was attended to, preferably not by myself. Those object-level tasks involved email communication with various collaborators, negotiating the agreement with our choir director, organizing the concert, printing sheet music and concert materials, managing the choir membership, etc. etc. Most of the time, I could simply copy-paste the meeting agendas and task spreadsheets from exactly a year prior, and coast on the accumulated experience of my predecessors.
For the most part, it was fun. I joked that I accepted to become president for the prestige. It was probably mostly in my head, but I did feel it. It’s kind of nice to be in charge. And I did become closer friends with many people.
Like I said, almost everyone in the choir, and therefore the board, was smart, educated, and competent, and that made my job easy. But there were exceptions. It’s challenging to deal with someone you just can’t rely on. You want to give them tasks, but then you do and they don’t do them, which annoys everyone else since they have to do the tasks and everything gets done later. So you end up pretending they’re not part of the board. I had to nudge someone to leave the board because they were just making life worse for everyone.
Another challenge is that very few people remain on the board more than 1-2 years. I stayed 3 years, which is exceptional longevity. When I became president, only I and one other person carried over from the previous board. Such turnover means a lot of lost organizational memory. Documentation helps, but managing the documentation is tedious and we all procrastinated on this particular task.
Turnover also happens at the level of choir membership. There’s a Ship of Theseus effect: literally no member of the choir at the time of its founding, in 2010, is still in it. I wonder how it feels to be president of some really old organization that has lasted centuries. There’s something cool about carrying the torch.
I realize now that for almost all my time in the choir, I was also on the board. Almost immediately after I quit the presidency and board, I quit the choir — maybe being on the board was the thing tethering me to the organization? I think that, towards the end, I did actually enjoy the management more than the actual singing.
I think I did a good job. The worst thing that happened was a “woke” controversy about a particular piece we were singing that most people thought was disrespectful of the Sami culture of northern Scandinavia. But everything else went fine! I didn’t, like, bring a new vision to the organization or whatever, but that wasn’t my role. I was carrying the torch.
When I left the presidency, our choir director was pretty disappointed. I guess that”s further evidence that I did a good job. When I left the choir, he was disappointed again. I’m sorry. I’ll be back!
Before joining the board, I didn’t really know how a choir works, as an organization. Things just seemed to magically happen. I was focused on practicing the music, so I didn’t pay attention. It was eye-opening to see what it actually means to manage a small nonprofit. I think I didn’t really know how any organization works.
Mostly it’s just a lot of Gmail, a Google Drive with lots of documents and spreadsheets, and a bank account. And some legal documents that were drafted a long time ago.
Now that I think about it, so much of the world runs on boards like this. For major organizations, especially organizations that make money, sitting on the board can be a prestigious paid job. But there are a lot of small nonprofits running on unpaid labor. Thus, it is good to remind oneself that a lot of the world exists thanks to labor of love, mostly hidden, mostly performed because somebody has to and no one else will. I recommend being this person, at some point in your life. It feels pretty good.
This is so heartening! I love the idea of tiny groups of passionate people holding the torch for one another and being juuuuust organized enough to do it. 🥰
Thank you for this. I've mostly been self-employed, once managing one or two people, and now occasionally hiring another freelancer; rarely have I been an employee or member of an organization. Then, I served on two boards and worked so closely with another I might as well have been a member. Extrapolating from those experiences helped me understand viscerally just how easily and quickly things in a bureaucracy can fall apart, from the smallest to the largest (say, a corporation or a national government).
Among the lessons I learned is that all boards have a culture, and those cultures can be good or bad; collaborative or combative. Great boards are wonderful. Critically, though, if a board drifts from the mission of the organization, all may be lost. If there was an institutional memory of better days , the holders of those memories are not around. Sounds dire. Boards can get better if they put in the work, but like any patient they have to want to get better.