Friday Share! Are You Ready? Navigating Board Service

Board service is often framed as a milestone rather than a strategic choice. This interactive session, hosted by CWIP's Programs & Capacity Building Committee, reframes board service as a professional development opportunity and a practice of mutual stewardship, helping participants clarify why they want to serve, what effective board service actually entails, and how to assess readiness and fit before saying yes. 

More details to come!

Registration:

• Members: Free!
  
• Non-members: $15
  
  

Speakers:

Rena Henderson Mason
Founder & Chief Engagement Officer
Bold Agenda

Rena leads Bold Agenda, a firm focused on empowering leaders to embrace change, push bold ideas, and build high performing, diverse, inclusive teams through a range of cycles. She helps facilitate the critical generative and strategic discussions and decisions that help transform an organization, its leaders and culture. She focuses on the key levers of better governance, courageous leadership, strategic planning, and a more inclusive and equitable approach. Her specialty is coaching Board Chairs and CEOs through growth, leadership transitions, strategic alliances, restructuring, turnaround and crises.

Since most of Bold Agenda’s work is with boards and executive staff, Rena spends a lot of time understanding and deconstructing power in an organization to encourage and support shared leadership in practice, structures and processes. Also, our collaborative approach to consulting and facilitation has always centered those leaders whose vital voices are frequently not heard. She has a particular interest and experience in working with founders and founder-like leaders as they engage their boards and understand the issues that arise in these situations.

Previously, Rena spent over 20 years helping scale businesses in the food, real estate, publishing and investment banking industries. Rena has an MBA from Harvard Business School and Bachelor’s in Finance/International Management from Georgetown University. She is a BoardSource Certified Governance Consultant, an ICF-certified coach and expert facilitator, in person and virtually. She serves as a Board Trustee for Calumet College of St. Joseph and is a member of the Chicago Foundation for Women’s South Side Giving Circle. 

Eli Marsh
Consultant
Organizational Strategy, Operational Design & Capacity Building

Eli is a strategist, facilitator and operations consultant who bridges the gap between vision and action. She brings a systems-minded, relationship-driven approach to strengthening internal infrastructure, clarifying strategic direction, and building the capacity needed to implement and sustain meaningful work. Eli’s portfolio spans nonprofit, philanthropic, and small business ecosystems to support leaders in designing programs, aligning organizational practices with purpose, developing effective board cultures, and building the strategic frameworks and operational scaffolding that make growth possible.
She has supported a range of values-aligned work, which has included strategic planning and community engagement initiatives with Kimberly Casey and Associates, outreach coordination for Chicago’s universal basic income pilot program, and driving operational, programmatic, and strategic initiatives for Ware Realty Group and The Ellevate Group. Formerly the Director of Social and Community Impact at Chicago Foundation for Women, Eli has led grantmaking strategies, facilitated community-driven collective giving models, grew the nonprofit board development program, and spearheaded equity-forward initiatives to strengthen nonprofit ecosystems. 

Eli holds dual master’s degrees in International Affairs and Sociology of Conflict from the American University of Paris and l’Institut Catholique de Paris. She serves on the board of the Charter Oak Foundation and the Steering Committee for Philanthropy Together’s WE GIVE Summit.