The Best of the Board Cafe gives nonprofit board members just-in-time guidance to the issues at hand. Because board member's time is scarce, articles are "short enough to read over a cup of coffee."
Jan Masaoka is a leading writer and thinker on nonprofit organizations with particular emphasis on boards of directors, business planning, and the role of nonprofits in society. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of an influential online nonprofit magazine, Blue Avocado (www.blueavocado.org), with a remarkable 62,000 subscribers and often described as the second most read publication in the U.S. nonprofit sector.
Prior to Blue Avocado, she served 14 years as executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, a national consulting and training firm for nonprofits based in San Francisco. In that position she was named Nonprofit Executive of the Year by NonProfit Times in 2003.
Jan has written The Best of the Board Café (Fieldstone Press, Second Edition 2009), All Hands on Board: The Board of Directors in All-Volunteer Organizations (BoardSource), and her research work includes studies on executive director tenure, all-volunteer organizations, the nonprofit workforce, and nonprofit real estate needs. With Jeanne Bell and Steve Zimmerman she co-authored Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decisions for Financial Viability, released by Jossey-Bass in November 2010, and in the fall of 2011, Nolo Press will publish her book, The Nonprofit's Guide to Human Resources: Managing Your Employees and volunteers. She is a frequent keynote speaker and contributor to nonprofit journals.
Jan's community activities include serving as the Chair of the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center and as Founding Board President of the San Francisco Foundation Community Initiative Funds. She is a board member of New America Media and is an Advisory Board member for the Stanford Social Innovation Review and for BoardSource. Jan was a member of the Governance and Fiduciary Working Group of the Panel on the Nonprofit Sector convened to advise the US Senate Finance Committee. She served two terms on the Telecommunications Commission of the City and County of San Francisco, and was a member of the 2008 California Grantmaker Associations Diversity in Philanthropy Advisory Committee.
Jan has been named eight times as one of the "Fifty Most Influential People" in the nonprofit sector nationwide, and in 2005 she was named "California Community Leader of the Year" by Leadership California.
She lives in San Francisco and her fingers are tired.
