Author details
- Name: Ethan Freedman
- Date: 4/26/26
- Institution: Columbia University School of Social Work, New York
- Course context: Board Development and Management (SOCWT712B), Prof. Jeanette Takamura
Acknowledgements
In introducing the following work, I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory on which we learn, work, and resource from at Columbia University School of Social Work is land of the Lenape and Wappinger indigenous peoples. Let us commit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that have dispossessed the Lenape, Wappinger, and other indigenous people of their lands.
I would also like to acknowledge Professor Prof. Jeanette Takamura and their facilitation of SOCWT712B. With Prof. Takamura’s lecturers, recommended readings, and my additional thoughts – this piece took form. Moreover, all my peers in class who contributed to discussions and building ideas that related to the present topic. With these acknowledgements, I present my following work.
Governing What Others Won’t
Acquaint Education is a digital platform centering human connection in forms of sexuality, intimacy, sexual wellness, and ethical relationship, as a matter of public health and digital rights. Its work domain is also the kind that gets organizations deplatformed, defunded, and legislatively targeted. I am developing it as a student in CSSW’s Leadership, Management, and Entrepreneurship specialization, and a topics course in Board Development and Management facilitated by Prof. Jaenette Takamura positions me to take my understanding of organizational governance and apply it to a personal praxis project upon graduation. Every governance framework I encountered was immediately applicable to a real organization I am actively building. The boards studied this semester, and governance modes analyzed, taught me that governance strategies and people within an organization are pivotal to any entity’s success.
What This Praxis Mission Actually Requires
White (2014) draws a distinction that anchored the semester, reminding that stewardship thinking versus monitoring compliance are fundamentally different. A compliance board tracks whether benchmarks are met, while a stewardship board asks whether the organization is protecting its reason for existing. For my praxis project, Acquaint Education, a compliance board follows metrics that often associate success with financials, while a stewardship board would ask whether the praxis platform is actually making conversations about human connection less stigmatized and more accessible to those most harmed by their absence. With a mission of reframing human connection alongside a vision of advancing global understanding of human connection and health through interdisciplinary research, policy analysis, and ethical innovation – a stewardship board is bound to notice when the mission is eroding before the metrics notice.
What SIECUS Teaches About Governing in This Field
For a majority of this course, I spent my time analyzing SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change, largely because it is the closest institution that is analogous to what Acquaint Education is working toward. Founded in 1964, SIECUS has survived more than sixty years in precisely the kind of context and politically hostile terrain Acquaint Education is entering. Their governance surfaced both clear lessons and meaningful caveats to apply to my praxis of board governance.
What SIECUS does well is their commitment to dismantling “systems of power and oppression which perpetuate disparate sexual and reproductive health outcomes" (SIECUS, n.d.). This shows up in their leadership composition, centering LGBTQIA+ people and people of color in a policy space historically dominated by whiteness and heteronormativity. Their coalition model with SisterSong, Advocates for Youth, and the National Coalition for Sex Education Advocates extends accountability beyond the board itself. Their participatory approach of co-developing advocacy with youth and educators reflects stewardship governance in practice to highlight accountability and responsibility to the community.
It is also worth noting where Acquaint Education diverges from the SIECUS model in ways that create distinct governance demands. SIECUS operates primarily through policy advocacy and coalition building, and its governance challenges center on mission alignment, legislative strategy and movement accountability. AcquaintEd is building digital infrastructure that introduces a different set of board level concerns. With technology and digital spaces comes risks of deplatforming, AI ethics in sexuality contexts, content moderation at scale, and data governance in a field that is routinely targeted by platform censorship. A board governing a digital platform for research, policy development, and coalition building in a domain that is routinely targeted by platform censorship has to be fluent in these specific risks. The issues of politics and sexuality are important, but AcquaintEd extends beyond this programming. Moreover, this fluency necessitates building measures into the composition and onboarding from the start.
There is also an instructive caveat where, despite youth being hte primary constituency of sex education reform, youth voices are absent from SIECUS governments. BoardSource (2021) found this pattern across nonprofits, where organizations advocating for communities are not structurally accountable. Altaha et al. (2023) name the importance of equity, but remind that it is the structures capable of supporting equity that have capacity to interrupt oppression. SIECUS showed me that strong PROP rhetoric can coexist with a governance gap that leaves the most affected community outside the room where decisions are made. For my own praxis project, the communities most harmed by the absence of education around human connection need actual governance power from the start.
Board Composition, Power, and Structural Accountability
Meier’s (2019) competency mapping framework helped me to think about board composition as a design problem, as identifying what expertise is needed alongside whose perspectives are missing are equally important. For AcquaintEd, this means clinical and legal expertise coexist alongside lived expertise from people navigating intimacy in digital spaces, queer and trans communities, and people being excluded from health education. It also means accepting that recruiting in this field is harder than the governance literature acknowledges. The subject matter of this praxis project carries professional risks for members in mainstream institutions. Being an early stage project is an advantage as these structures can be embedded from the ground up, rather than retrofitted into a governance culture that has already calcified around different norms.
PROP runs through all of this, as a board can reflect strong diversity and still concentrate real decision making in credentialed expertise compared to lived experience. This was found in SIECUS’s board structure, and AcquaintEd must utilize PROP from the start. There should be aspects of reserved governance seats, compensation equity, and formal community accountability mechanisms. A board capable of holding the founder accountable is proof that the vision is structural, when mission drift is possible under a personal agenda.
What the LME Specialization Prepared Me to Hold in Tandem
Building this board requires all three of what at CSSW trains for in the LME specialization. Leadership means holding a vision ahead of institutional consensus and building a board that carries it without constant validation. Forbes Business Council (2023) frames onboarding as the first real moment of governance culture formation, and for AcquaintEd that means communicating the mission clearly enough that board members can defend it when they are spearheading its mission. Management is about building a durable structure. Millesen and Carman (2019) and Harrison and Murray (2015) found that missing self assessment consistently predict dysfunction, and Garecht (2017) makes clear that bad board syndrome is a structural failure over individual failure. Entrepreneurship means governance capable of operating in uncertain and adversarial terrains without losing coherence. This is a requirement that has to be built into the board's culture from the start, too.
Building for a Future that I Cannot Fully See
Shen and Cannella (2019) show that over reliance on any individual leader creates institutional fragility. A board’s job is partly to protect the mission beyond the person currently lead stewarding it. There is a temptation as a founder to build governance around continued personal involvement, but that is a process of building organizational dependency, and not building an institution. A board with the authority and relationships to carry this mission forward without the person who starts the organization is proof of the authenticity of what is being built. In a field still establishing itself as a domain of public health and human rights, building with that longevity in mind is a necessity for strategy and long term sustainability.
Theory into Practice: Governance and Board Development as Praxis
Praxis is the recursive relationship between reflection and action, and is not actively spoken about in the LME specialization. It is almost unspoken in its relevance. The present course on Board Management and Development is one of the most direct experiences of praxis I have had at CSSW, because every governance framework I engaged with was immediately accountable to an organization I am building. Stewardship, composition PROP, succession, these are not topics I want to store for later or possible circumstances. They are decisions that I am already interested in pursuing within the context of Acquaint Education. The SIECUS analysis made concrete what the literature theorizes, and that is the notion that even well aligned boards can leave the most affected communities outside governance entirely. This ultimately undermines the human rights commitments the organization publicly holds. The literature names the risk, and an organization like SIECUS makes it real.
What praxis means here is more specific than simply applying frameworks to practice. It means that building AcquaintEd is teaching me things about what governance actually requires that no theoretical model is able to anticipate. The board governance literature tells me that self assessment can predict effectiveness. It posits that building an organization in a field where the subject matters is treated as taboo means board assessment must include questions that governance checklists never intended to ask. These are questions like if board members are fluent enough in platform censorship to govern digital strategy? Do they have the relationships in the communities we serve to know when the mission is drifting? Are they comfortable enough with the subject matter to speak publicly in defense of the work when it inevitably comes under attack.
There is something specifically important about praxis as a social work orientation, rather than a general learning principle. Social work has always insisted that values without practice are incomplete, and that practice without values is a lack of direction. In the LME specialization, that means learning to build organizations that carry social work’s commitments of equity, community accountability, and anti-oppression into structures that can survive beyond individual intentions. Governance is where the survival of an organization is tested, and the board I build for AcquaintEd – or any praxis project – will institutionalize the values of this work. Praxis, in the social work sense, means building something I remain accountable to, not just something I created.
The insights I am leaving this course and CSSW with are not only about what good boards do, but what it takes to build something capable of upholding human rights in practice and in principle. SIECUS has been doing this work for many years, and this marker of success is largely about the structure of SIECUS and their internal systems. Durable human rights work requires governance built to hold even when holding is hard. I walk away from this course with this perceived opportunity of understanding how to build organizational architecture intentionally from the beginning.
Human rights are written into mission statements, but they are upheld or abandoned by the governance structures stewarding that mission. It is about who sits at the table, what accountability looks like in practice, and whether an organization can hold its commitments beyond the enthusiasm of its inception. Building the board of Acquaint Education or any praxis project is the work in itself. The board we build is where we find out whether we actually mean what we say about justice, human rights, and the communities we exist to serve.
References
- Altaha, N., Byers, D., & Jordan, L. (2023). PROP: Power, race, oppression, and privilege. PROP Collective.
- BoardSource. (2021). Leading with intent: BoardSource index of nonprofit board practices. BoardSource.
- Charan, R. (2011). The three phases of a board’s evolution. In Boards that deliver: Advancing corporate governance from compliance to competitive advantage (pp. 3–13). John Wiley & Sons.
- Forbes Business Council. (2023, October 3). 15 essential steps when onboarding a new board member. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/10/03/15-essential-steps-when-onboarding-a-new-board-member/
- Garecht, J. (2017, October 3). 6 ways to avoid the bad board syndrome. NonProfit PRO. https://www.nonprofitpro.com/post/6-ways-to-avoid-the-bad-board-syndrome/
- Harrison, Y. D., & Murray, V. (2015). The effect of an online self-assessment tool on nonprofit board performance. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 44(6), 1129–1151. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764014557361
- Meier, C. (2019). Strategic board composition: A matrix approach. Nonprofit Quarterly.
- Millesen, J. L., & Carman, J. G. (2019). Building capacity in nonprofit boards: Learning from board self-assessments. Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, 5(1), 74–94. https://doi.org/10.20899/jpna.5.1.74-94
- Sener, A., Varoglu, A. K., & Aren, S. (2011). The relationship between board characteristics and organizational performance. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 2(14), 56–68.
- Shen, W., & Cannella, A. A. (2019). Power dynamics within top management and their impacts on executive compensation and firm performance. Academy of Management Journal, 45(6), 1173–1189.
- SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change. (n.d.). About us. https://siecus.org/about-us/
- White, B. J. (2014). High aspirations and strong results: The bookends of great governance. In Boards that excel: Candid insights and practical advice for directors (pp. 9–25). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
- White, B. J. (2014). Understand the role: Stewardship thinking. In Boards that excel: Candid insights and practical advice for directors (pp. 27–50). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.