Let’s preface this with two all-important caveats: I do not know what led to the Philadelphia Art Museum’s firing of Sasha Suda — who I’d met once, and was impressed by. And I have friends on the Board, not to mention stalwart Citizen supporters, like our board member Jennifer Rice and civic leaders like Leslie Anne Miller, Constance Williams, David Haas and Osagie Imasogie.
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That said, the sacking of Suda raises once again some worrisome questions over the state of nonprofit board leadership in our town. This feels a little like deja vu all over again. There was the mysterious jettisoning of Community College of Philadelphia President Donald “Guy” Generals early this year. The sudden shuttering of the University of the Arts — a national embarrassment. The stunning closure of Benefits Data Trust (BDT), the much-ballyhooed nonprofit that helped residents in need obtain public benefits. In these and many other cases that jump to mind, it seems like board leaders — and especially board chairs, where the buck ought to stop — run for the hills, failing to explain their actions or welcome accountability.
Earlier this summer, Citizen Editor/CMG Executive Director Roxanne Patel Shepelavy profiled Suda as a change agent, and her piece touched on the tensions between Suda and some on her board, many of whom declined to speak on the record. That piece and other public reporting also raised questions about her management style. This week, an Inquirer story appeared on the museum’s new much-maligned rebranding, claiming it had surprised board members. The piece suspiciously ran the night before Suda received an email from Art Museum Board Chair Ellen Caplan, telling her she’d been “terminated for cause” and wishing her well in her “future endeavors.”
Unsurprisingly, the tumult at the Art Museum was the talk of the room Wednesday night at the moving “Only In America” event honoring Amy Gutmann at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. One highly-respected nonprofit leader remarked upon the glaringly bad chronology: The email of termination was followed by a board meeting to, as she put it, “figure out why.” At the very least, that’s some bad optics.
Why board leadership matters … here
Why does this matter? Because nonprofits have arguably become the lifeblood of this city. According to an eye-opening recent Pew report, fueled by our eds and meds sector, they contribute $48.5 billion in annual revenue to Philly’s economic life, more than one-third of the city’s gross domestic product. Thirty percent of our neighbors are employed by nonprofits.
We’re talking real impact here. The demand for stellar stewardship is high. That respected nonprofit leader the other night made a keen observation, one I hadn’t thought of. When women CEOs or Executive Directors take the helm and try to change things here, they often meet a desultory end: Suda, out. Siobhan Riordan at the Free Library in the wake of George Floyd’s murder? Gone. Autumn Graves, who over a decade ago tried to take on a then-entrenched culture at Girard College? Off to spend time with her family. To be clear: I’m not saying these moves weren’t necessarily warranted — I don’t know. Maybe UArts had to close. But that’s the point: Open and transparent explanations from board chairs haven’t always been forthcoming.
When you contribute $48 billion to the local economy, you have a duty to be as straight with the public as any elected official. When you’re not, you make it easier for observers to assume your mission has been overtaken by other, more personal agendas.
That ought not to infer ill intent. When it comes to our nonprofit ecosystem, we should start with the assumption of goodwill on the part of those who serve. Board members are usually volunteers — they tend to be as mission-driven as their CEOs and staff. But that could be part of the problem. “I advise a lot of people about the duties of a nonprofit board member and the importance of serving on a governing board, yet too often people take the financial and leadership aspect of this volunteer role for granted,” Nicole Tell, executive director of BLBB Charitable, posted to LinkedIn back in the aftermath of BDT’s collapse.
Which gets us to mea culpa time: My entrepreneurial (some might say unfocused) tendencies would have long ago torpedoed this Citizen experiment were it not for the interventions of our board, especially now that David Cohen is our Chairman. I can’t get away with any shit — and that’s exactly the kind of oversight I need. No agenda, other than the furtherance of our mission.
In fact, our founding chairman, the late, legendary Jeremy Nowak, wrote a piece for The Citizen nearly a decade ago that presciently speaks to this moment. The failure of board oversight, he argued, is a surefire way to attain civic mediocrity:
The question is whether key decisions related to financial and reputational risk are discussed and approved by those charged with exercising independent judgment. Do conflicts of interest get properly disclosed and managed? Do board members have adequate information to make informed judgments? Quality organizations maintain a balance of power between management and governance, and they evolve through that tension. Governance is art as much as science, experience as well as law: Experienced directors and managers have a feel for the tension between oversight and operations and they make adjustments based on context. When the complexity of operations exceeds the capacity for a board to exercise judgment, problems fester.
Again, to be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of anything in our recent case studies — other than a lack of full-throated explanation, at least to the public. When you contribute $48 billion to the local economy, you have a duty to be as straight with the public as any elected official. When you’re not, you make it easier for observers to assume your mission has been overtaken by other, more personal agendas.
What should we do?
We focus on solutions here, so I’ve been wracking my brain. One major foundation head tells me that every nonprofit board should have multiple members with significant financial literacy skills — the ability to dissect a P&L and cash flow statement and interrogate managers based on what their trained eyes uncover. It could be required — a type of Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which demanded just such a level of transparent oversight of public corporations in the wake of the Enron scandal a couple of decades ago.
But I’m not sure the answer is legal so much as one of the heart. If you’re leading a nonprofit, maybe you ought to approach it as the labor of love it is. That means combining a seriousness of mission with oceanic curiosity and relentless empathy for those who you’ve designated as worthy of running your organization. It wasn’t in the nonprofit sector, but remember Pat Croce, the hard-driving, kinda wild part owner and president of the Sixers who had built a physical therapy empire before PT was even a thing? One of the many things about leadership I learned from him back then was that, if you’re a leader, firing someone you had hired was in and of itself your failure. Until he owned an NBA team, he’d never fired someone. I remember asking him, “What do you do, though, when someone is not performing up to the level you expect?”
The answer, he said, was clear as day: “You coach them up.” And when he did finally have to admit a mistake and fire his coach and general manager, he personally went before his rabid season ticket holders wearing a goalie mask – he was ready for their reaction. It was a public stand for taking personal responsibility, something we seldom see these days. It sure would be nice, when folks just don’t measure up, or when missions get sidetracked and have to be realigned, to see civic leaders reassure us by stepping up and saying, in effect: My bad. But we got this.
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Philadelphia Museum of Art Director Sasha Suda. Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.