A colleague once told me about a hundred-year-old organization with a budget of over $200 million that started with one mission: to help orphaned children. Over the decades, some mission changes made sense, and child welfare practice evolved, with the mission evolving with it.
Then recently something else started happening. Every time a large, multi-year government contract came up for a program the organization didn’t have, they would go for it, and if they succeeded, they changed the mission to fit it. Not because the need changed, but because the money did.
She told me that the board rarely, if ever, pushed back. Leadership brought the changes, and the board rubber-stamped them, meeting after meeting. They simply followed leadership’s goals with little pushback. Prior to board and committee meetings, leadership would ‘sell’ the idea to individual members one at a time, she said, stifling debate before it could happen in the boardroom as a whole.
A graduate professor of mine had a name for what happens when a mission gets stretched so wide it justifies anything: a McMission. Broad enough to cover any program, yet specific enough to mean nothing. “We’re here to do good” isn’t a mission. That’s how nonprofit leadership, with the board’s acquiescence, grows for growth’s sake, all the while saying this new thing “falls within our mission.”
That’s only half of it. The same board that will stretch a mission wide enough to catch a new contract will just as easily let it shrink the moment the contract ends or the program becomes less advantageous. The mission isn’t guiding the programs. The budget is guiding the mission, expanding to take in money and shrinking to shed whatever no longer pays enough.
Organizations like these are also often happy to cut programs and the people they support if government contracts end or priorities change. She told me the leadership of her organization had cut low-performing financial programs without a second thought about how this would truly affect the lives of the people those programs supported. How did this get past the board, I asked?
Well, it seems the board was used to rubber-stamping what leadership wanted. On occasion, they would ask what would happen to the people who had been in the program, and they were simply told that other nonprofits would be stepping in.
Let’s look back at a bullet from my September 2025 post, “What Your Nonprofit Board Is Actually Legally Required To Do”: Mission ownership: the board adopts and revisits the mission so it guides the work, not merely decorates the letterhead.
In rubber-stamping leadership, growing budgets for programs outside the organization’s preapproved public mission, and cutting programs that fit the mission with little concern for what would happen to the participants, boards are not fulfilling one of the core reasons they exist.
Yes, missions should be revisited when necessary, but the process should be specific and thoughtful. In this way, the board safeguards the organization’s work and makes clear that it is on guard against leadership overreach. That is what I believe the IRS is looking for and what mission ownership is.
My colleague confessed that because the leadership “rubber stamp” board at her organization had increased the organization’s budget and program list, it had become almost impossible for her to quickly explain to new board prospects and other funders exactly what the organization did. Her elevator speech was taking way too many floors to give.