By Archana Chandra, Anu Prasad and Amit Chandra
How Senior Professionals Can Optimally Serve In Non-Fiduciary Roles
Leading an Indian Nonprofit can often feel like a high-stakes game of snakes and ladders. One day you are scaling impact, deepening reach, moving toward the top of the board. Then one roll of the dice later a regulatory shift, a funder pivot, a sudden leadership exit, pulls the ground from beneath your feet.
Despite best intent, progress is rarely linear, it is often many steps forward and back. In these moments, the Founder / CEO often finds herself standing alone, or with a few committed members of her leadership team holding the weight of both the mission and organization. These moments can be both exhausting and lonely, often in periods of limited structural support.
Most nonprofit boards in India are compliant but not catalytic
We don’t mean to be sensational, nevertheless with the collective experience of observing over 500+ organizations as leaders, board members, and funders we will make a bold contention. Across the sector, governing boards ensure accountability but rarely enable possibility and provide deep and sustained expert guidance to CEOs and her team. They increasingly do a good job at asking the right questions to help organizations stay safe but not necessarily take big leaps forward.
Perhaps much of this is because a large percentage of Board Members in the sector simply don’t have the bandwidth to go beyond executing their fiduciary responsibility. If you are reading this and are either a professional who doesn’t fit this mold or a CEO who has witnessed the opposite, please consider yourselves as exceptions and count your blessings.
Rather than lamenting this endlessly, we want to propose an alternative. One that we feel will, in short to medium term, address this huge issue and over the longer-term change norms. The idea isn’t new but is powerful and underutilized: the advisory board. We propose building Advisory Boards not as a symbolic group of respected names on a website, but as a deliberate brain trust, one in which each individual brings one or more specific expertise to the table – strategy, networks for fundraising or penetrating key domains, technology, human resource management, operational excellence, vertical domain capability, marketing \ PR; essentially a set of issues that matter the most to the organization in its phase of growth.
The Two-Tier Model: Combining Responsibility with Foresight
In proposing the scaling of this approach, we recognize that all Governing boards operate within huge legal and fiduciary constraints. With both moral and legal obligation, they are rightly deeply focused on compliance, risk management, financial issues and oversight. This is time-consuming, and often builds a degree of formality between Boards and Teams. We have witnessed this creating a few issues. It leaves little room for deep exploratory thinking; prevents board members being partners to leadership in critical problem-solving; and third, it ends up being a deterrent for professionals who want to otherwise serve a cause and offer their expertise, without taking on this burden.
A 2025 study by ILSS and Antara Advisory proposes a two-tier model: the Governing Board as gyroscope holding stability, compliance, and accountability, and the Advisory Board as its complement, bringing flexibility, strategic support, and fresh perspective.
The study found near-universal agreement that advisory boards are a structural innovation worth pursuing. Three findings stood out: 46% called building one an act of deliberate curation; 42% said a courtship period was essential before extending an invitation; and 46% stressed that composition must evolve as the organisation does.
The Advisory Board Centre’s State of the Market 2025–2027 report identifies three global trends shaping this evolution: aligning advisory boards with broader organisational governance; using their expertise to support confident leadership decision-making; and balancing short-term action with long-term strategy in uncertain environments.
The Good Governance Toolkit by Axis Bank Foundation draws on thirty-two nonprofits to offer practical self-assessment tools, including a Founder/Board readiness checklist, Board self-assessment, and Board composition matrix.
From Compliance to Strategic Capability
Like in a high-performance automobile, critically dependent on both the brake and accelerator to be able to race effectively, these two structures will reinforce each other; one grounding the organization, the other helping it navigate what lies ahead. Advisory boards will help expand what an organization needs desperately to realize its aspiration and full potential. The senior professionals in these roles will provide access to expertise that would otherwise be unaffordable or simply unavailable, and enable focused engagement on high-stakes challenges without bureaucratic friction.
Jai Vakeel Foundation’s experience illustrates this well. During a leadership transition in its seventh decade, an advisory board was built alongside the governing board to bring in specialized expertise. A finance professional helped understand the true cost per child, strengthening both decision-making and fundraising. A brand expert led a full rebranding effort, repositioning the organization for stakeholders. These were transformational contributions, made possible because the advisory structure created the right conditions for engagement.
At ILSS, through work with over 500 organisations, the realisation has been clear: founders in the social sector need a circle of trusted advisors who can walk with them. They need people willing to be honest critics and steadfast champions. The ILSS board, in its functioning, serves both these roles, becoming a trusted friend and guide for leadership.
At A.T.E. Chandra Foundation, advisers like Nimesh Shah, Deepak Satwalekar, Venkat Krishnan, Luis Miranda, and Govind Iyer have materially shaped our thinking on community engagement, programme design, and capacity building for the sector. Even for a grant maker, the right advisers make a measurable difference.
Checklist For Designing an Effective Advisory Board
- Start with gaps, not names – Identify what the organization lacks before reaching for familiar faces- a common and avoidable mistake.
- Optimize for skill and values, not prestige – Most NGOs chase the same small pool of names. Bet on committed professionals who will grow with you, just as you ask donors to.
- Invest in a courtship period. Sustainable engagement connects both head and heart, don’t rush the invitation.
- Design for flexibility – Hold a minimum bar on commitment, but stay flexible around it. Quality engagement deepens over time. We have seen that quality engagement over time, shapes longer term commitment. Advisory boards offer senior professionals a meaningful way to contribute meaningfully without the rigidity of formal board responsibilities.
- Treat it as a living resource, not a standing committee – Don’t obsess over periodic meetings. This is a group of different expertise aligned to evolving needs, use it accordingly. As understanding and commitment grow, some members can be drawn into Governing Board meetings or convened in smaller groups.
From Isolation to Enabled Leadership
We recognize that the challenges nonprofit leaders face today are too complex to navigate alone. At the same time, opportunities are emerging for NGOs to aspire and leapfrog in terms of their impact and scale. Well-designed Advisory Boards will help bring constructive critics into the room when needed, but more importantly, champions with expertise when belief is required. This will leave Governing Boards the job of ensuring accountability but provide NGO leadership the catalysts for driving change. In a sector defined today by both challenges and opportunity, that distinction is no longer optional, it is existential.
Archana Chandra is CEO and Board Member, Jai Vakeel Foundation and Research Centre. Anu Prasad is Founder-CEO, India Leaders for Social Sector. Amit Chandra is Co-Founder, A.T.E. Chandra Foundation
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