A corporation, whether for-profit or nonprofit, is required to have a governing Board of Directors. To explain, a corporation can operate as a separate legal entity, much like a person in that it can own bank accounts, enter into contracts, etc. However, the laws governing corporations require that a non-profit corporation ultimately is accountable to the public. That accountability is accomplished by requiring that each corporation has a Board of Directors that represent the public.

Members of a governing Board have certain legally required (fiduciary) duties, including duties of care, loyalty, and obedience.

New members will need to familiarize themselves with the current operations of our organization. In our busy world, you as a new board, may not have the time to get to know everything.Some board members may specialize in certain areas, report, and summarize back to the board as a whole. New Board members may choose to focus on any of these areas, but may have access to all available information upon request.

The phrase "governance" often refers to the Board's activities to oversee the purpose, plans, and policies of the overall organization. This includes establishing those overall plans and policies, supervision of the CEO, ensuring sufficient resources for the organization, ensuring compliance to rules and regulations, representing the organization to external stakeholders, etc. The nature of Board operations and governance depends on a variety of factors.

Governing Boards can have a variety of models (configurations and ways of working). For example, "working Boards" (hands-on, or administrative, where Board members might be fixing the fax one day and strategic planning the next), "collective" (where Board members and others in the organization usually do the same types of work; it's often difficult to discern who the Board members actually are), "policy" (where Board members attend mostly to top-level policies). All of these models are types of governing Boards.