If there's one thing that we can all agree on, it's that board members need to give, get, or get off the board. Right?

Maybe not, says governance researcher Bill Ryan. "Nonprofits do require funding, and governing does require nonprofit board members to think about funding," he says. "But all too often, this germ of truth mutates into a giant, fast-growing myth that ends up choking good governance to death."

This quotation is from a six-year-old article that caught my eye when it was reprinted recently in The Nonprofit Quarterly. It's short -- you can read the whole thing in about two minutes. But it's a healthy reminder that the first responsibility of the board is governance, not fundraising.

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