Reviewed by Mary Case

Katherine Tyler Scott has written a gentle book, a labor of love as she says in her introduction, aimed at developing the capacity of nonprofit leaders to care for and commit to American communities. She supports a world defined by others toiling in the field of nonprofits: the Relationship Age, an future characterized by cooperation, trust, meaning, interdependence, and information. This book is aimed particularly at nonprofit executives and board members looking for an adaptable leadership model, powerful in it's simplicity.

She focuses first and foremost on the concept of trust—holding ideas and others in trust as all nonprofit leaders do, as a reminder of the significance of relationships. She links caring, competence and character, altruism and authority, and trust and trustworthiness. Knowing the organization's founding and formative stories figures strongly in her formula for leadership. She holds that the capacity to give to others is shaped by a belief in abundance. This capacity for philanthropic action can be fostered through experience, education, and service and in the U.S. grows from three traditions: compassion aimed at alleviating human suffering, the principle of progress seeking to maximize human potential, and justice.

The second half of Creating Caring & Capable Boards details a process of preparing and nurturing trustees, a process Tyler Scott calls Depth Education for Trustees. She explains how to prepare for Depth Education, how to evaluate the board's readiness, assessment the organization, recover its history, understand the mission and the public it serves, and how to choose and build a future together. Forms and appendices are uniformly well designed and illustrative.

I recommend this book particularly to the executive director or board chair looking to coalesce a board for future action. If you are going into a fund raising campaign or big new project, or if you had a batch of new board members stepping up, Creating Caring & Capable Boards could be a great place to begin the dialogue needed to succeed at difficult projects. You could work through the concepts presented at an orientation session and use the book periodically throughout the year to create the board your organization deserves. As the truism goes: a good board is a victory, not an accident.