By Chai Lee, Program Director, Boards & Commissions Leadership Institute
For too long, confusing rules and closed-door processes have intentionally kept power from the people most impacted—shutting out Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color from decision-making, as well as women, queer folks, disabled folks, low-wealth folks, and other historically marginalized and oppressed people. But we don’t have to stay locked out. We can cut through the confusion, claim our seats, and make governing work for us.
Boards are places where ideas can shine through and snowball into greater public policy. After all, the Minneapolis task force created to look at earned safe and sick time helped transform statewide public policy into paid family leave.
Boards can goad public opinion and change laws. Hubert H. Humphrey made a name as Minneapolis mayor by creating the first municipal civil rights boards to investigate local white supremacists for discriminatory pay and hiring practices against non-white and Jewish people. The outcome sparked the first civil rights laws at the city level. And it propelled the Humphrey name into national politics.
Board service can ignite your leadership journey. Many people use it as a springboard to launch public office bids. Once you get on a board, you encounter more opportunities to join other boards and commissions, being recognized with higher-profile roles. As an elected official and even an appointed official, you can get the political and legal privilege to sit as a member on another board or committee. For example, a member of the St. Paul City Council can sit as an ex officio member of the St. Paul Port Authority Board.
In the ongoing peace negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza, President Donald Trump’s proposal includes a nebulous “Board of Peace,” led by himself to oversee a technocrat who will govern the future peaceful transition of Gaza. In this way, boards have control over life and death in the greatest form of state power: the exercise of legal arbitration in the field of war.
Now more than ever, BIPOC folks and others shut out of the decisions that shape our lives must get the tools we need to serve in government. This is why, through 12 cohorts and counting, our Boards & Commissions Leadership Institute trains future generations of equity warriors to serve on public bodies.