I believe that change is a necessary task in making communities more effective or at least, better. I believe that to effect some change in communities members of these communities must come together and this coming together may then result in what we call nonprofits. Nonprofits in turn select volunteers to serve as their leaders and the IRS recognizes these leaders as, effectively, the surrogate "owners". These leaders or surrogate owners are known as the board.
Obviously not all the changes in a given community that nonprofit boards seek will satisfy everyone. Indeed, some choices nonprofit boards make will even offend portions of their communities. In many cases the portion that may be offended includes those with power, money, connections, etc. Those who have power may choose to support the direction and programs of the nonprofit, but if they philosophically disagree with the nonprofit's path they may withdrawl support or even try and hinder.
Why do I speak of this? In a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy blog entry, a community organizing group in Colorado and a national organization of religious women are profiled as folks who are basically being oppressed by their funders because of directions they have chosen. On the one hand, I want to shout aobut the unfairness of this situation, as the author of this blog has done. At the same time I want to say: hey, you hopefully knew the consequences of your decisions and as is true for every market decision, you can't satisfy every audience all the time.
The lesson: nonprofit boards must be mindful of the consequences of their actions. Mission comes first but mission first does not guarantee support from everyone.