Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus knew the keys to success: the folks in the orange aprons.

“Bernie always believed in talents,” Yoni Kaiser-Blueth, program director of the Jewish portfolio at The Marcus Foundation, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “If you just look at what Bernie built at the Home Depot, the secret sauce is understanding that leadership drives culture.” Marcus “invested in the associates, and then everything else stemmed and fell from that.”

With this in mind, The Marcus Foundation, established by Marcus, who died in 2024, and his wife Billi, has partnered with Leading Edge to offer the Board Leadership Accelerator, a $1.1 million program running from 2026-2028 that will train over 1,500 board members from over 60 Jewish nonprofits. In total, the initiative will assist 5% of the estimated 30,000 Jewish nonprofit board members nationwide.

“In the Jewish organizational world, a lot of our focus tends to be on elevating professional leadership, and it’s missing a huge ingredient,” Kaiser-Blueth said. “There needs to be healthy boards. That creates a symbiotic relationship. When organizations are functioning at their best, [the organization’s] director, professional staff and boards are working in real partnership.”

The Marcus Foundation’s investment in Leading Edge, formerly known as the Jewish Leadership Pipelines Alliance, stretches back to the nonprofit’s birth in 2014. The foundation is rooted in supporting leadership, as seen by its $38 million investment in Hillel talent, which included board members, in 2016.

After piloting a smaller version of the Board Leadership Accelerator last year, which focused on JCC and federation boards, Gali Cooks, president and CEO of Leading Edge, recognized the demand for a larger program and pitched the idea to The Marcus Foundation. “Now is the time to support these leaders,” she said to the foundation, and it jumped to help.

“There’s a big hunger for board members to engage in this kind of leadership development,” Cooks told eJP. “Board members are notoriously not prepared for these roles.”

According to a 2024 Leading Edge study, only 40% of Jewish nonprofit CEOs said that their board sets clear annual goals and objectives, just 15% said their boards regularly evaluated their progress towards goals and only 36% said that board members were held accountable for fulfilling their roles and responsibilities. Additionally, 66% of CEOs said their boards had no long-term or emergency CEO succession plan. Often, board members didn’t know their roles and responsibilities.

“Board members really want to do good work,” Cooks said. “They find their board service very meaningful. They don’t know what they don’t know.”

And not knowing trickles down, she said. “It’s the professionals and the board members who have to carry us forward. The board looks at the fiduciary health, the oversight of the strategy, the creation of the strategy, hiring and firing and holding accountable the CEO. The professionals in the professional leadership make that happen. And if the board is weak or not equipped, just like if the professionals are ill equipped or weak, that is going to lead to a less effective organization, and we can’t afford that right now.”

The Board Leadership Accelerator begins by having the entire agency take inventory of itself, with the CEO, the board and staff each doing surveys, which take approximately 15 minutes. From these surveys, goals are set and a plan is made, with training and workshops on topics such as board culture, strategic planning, data-driven change, board member pipeline development and fundraising. Each organization receives 10 hours of coaching by development and governance experts, capped off with a second evaluation via survey to see if the organization met its goals and to set new ones.  

The program, organizers say, will help boards clarify expectations, strengthen leadership, cultivate a healthy leadership culture and improve decision-making. While each organization will have its own tailored plan, there will be overlap between nonprofits in workshops and training that may be attended by many organizations. At the program’s end, nonprofits should be prepared to create goals and monitor their progress on their own, at least every other year, using Leading Edge’s surveys, which will be freely available.

It doesn’t make sense that board members are thrust into leadership roles without training, Alicia Oberman, senior advisor of board leadership at Leading Edge, told eJP. Nearly half of all board chairs are new, according to the Leading Edge 2024 study.

Board members serving on public boards often make up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for their work. “You pay them crazy amounts of money, and you expect them to be able to do the job of the oversight and management of the CEO and working with executive teams. Some of our [Jewish nonprofit] organizations are [worth] tens of millions of dollars… When board members are not properly equipped to do their job, A, it doesn’t work well at all for the professional team, but, B, what ends up happening is the ultimate stakeholders suffer, and that’s the tragedy.”

Oberman ran similar initiatives during her time as founder and CEO of Boardified, which was acquired by Leading Edge in 2022. Often, board members are afraid to admit that they are lost because everyone else seems confident. They have imposter syndrome. It’s common for Oberman to receive calls from board members saying, “I literally have no idea what I’m doing, and I don’t understand why anyone thinks that I do.”

For Cheryl Cook, CEO of Avodah and co-chair of the Board of Jewish Social Justice Roundtable — both of which are participating in the program — having a well-running board “is the superpower of an organization.” Every year, Cook uses Leading Edge surveys to take inventory of Avodah. Recently, the results of one survey revealed that many staff members didn’t understand how the board works, so Cook invited the board chair to meet staff and answer questions. Cook hopes to learn to better take inventory of her organization’s strengths and weaknesses. “Sometimes it’s very small things,” she said about the outcomes of surveys. “Sometimes it’s bigger things. It also helps us know where we’re flying.”

Originally, Leading Edge aimed to recruit 50 organizations to participate in the program, but the demand was so great that it is now serving 63.

“Board members are going to go from one organization to another,” Kaiser-Blueth said, so there is a “ripple effect of training board members, wherever they are at this moment in time. They’re going to move on. They’re going to have an opportunity to put their footprint on other organizations.”

Every board member gives “your time, your treasure, your talent,” Cooks said. “Any one of those is a gift, so let us get you ready.”