A new guide reframes board service and volunteerism as a powerful driver of change and leadership.
Jackson Cooper, assistant professor of arts administration in Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, has published “Nonprofit Boards For Dummies,” a practical guide co-authored with governance expert Caitlin Pontrella that reframes board service and volunteerism as a powerful driver of change and leadership.
Released Oct. 5 by Wiley & Sons and the global Dummies brand, the book is a beginner’s guide to understanding how nonprofit boards operate, create change and impact their communities through the full arc of governance work: roles/responsibilities, board recruitment and onboarding, fundraising activation and risk management. Cooper draws from his range of experience serving on boards and government commissions in North Carolina, New York, and Washington State, most recently as a political appointee and Advocacy Chair for the Washington State Arts Commission and President of the Board of Directors for ARCADE (Architecture and Design) magazine.
“Most people join a board because they care about a mission, and then spend their first two years just trying to figure out what they’re allowed to do,” Cooper says. “We wanted a book that gets out of the way of that and gets people to the part where they can actually drive change.”
Cooper’s own path to the project runs through more than 15 years as a nonprofit executive and fundraising strategist, including roles as executive director of the nonprofit film archive and distributor the American Genre Film Archive, fundraising leadership roles at Pacific Northwest Ballet, Mary’s Place, the Arboretum Foundation, Friends of Waterfront Park Seattle as well as founding Artful Living Consulting. He’s spoken on boards and fundraising for the League of American Orchestras and Theatre Communications Group conferences. He’s also working on a book on sustainable fundraising and one on Shakespeare in movies, and published the children’s book “A Kids Book About Kindness” in 2025.
“The book is a shared curriculum in building community,” Cooper said. “All types of boards have an immense responsibility to use their role to be a catalyst for change. We hope that this book provides the first step in that journey.”
“Nonprofit Boards For Dummies” is available now from Wiley and major booksellers.