From the Vermont Digger: The state of Vermont decided to go the "preferred provider route" to supply mental health services to our communities. This meant that the state gives a large amount of state money to private nonprofit agencies with boards made up of local people (often friends of agency administrators), who never talk to counselors or team members. Only they sit at the table with state funders.
Ewww! Certainly not high praise about boards and their relationship to staff. And maybe this is just perception and not reality. Or maybe it is reality and maybe it's ok that the staff feel this way. Maybe.
I'm of mixed opinion. A board has only one staff: it's executive. From the perspective of this writer, that staff is certainly not doing their job either communicating up or down (if staff are to be viewed as "down" and board is to be viewed "up" and purely metaphorically. But yes, communication must certainly be both ways to achieve harmony assuming that goal or better, achieve mission. Really, what we have here is a "failure to communicate" and there certainly lies one answer. But the relationship between a nonprofit and its contractor, that's a whole other story.