Cause Strategy Partners | BoardLead: Growing Leaders through High-Impact Nonprofit Board Service

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Robert B. Acton, Principal & Founder

At the heart of any successful nonprofit organization lies influential board members equipped with the knowledge, skills and experience needed to help nonprofits achieve their missions. Nonprofit organizations are led and guided by governing boards with directors who pledge their time, wisdom, and resources to ensure that their organization’s mission is fulfilled.

At the same time, leading companies and professional services firms across the globe are recognizing nonprofit board service as an important community engagement and leadership development activity for their executives and employees. Yet, despite these noble goals, it can be challenging for talented professionals to identify a board that is right for them and start strong with sufficient governance training and support.

To address this opportunity gap, Cause Strategy Partners created BoardLead, the firm’s signature program that connects talented, diverse professionals from partner companies to nonprofit board opportunities. “Our objective is to elevate and transform leadership in the social good sector by connecting thousands and thousands of dedicated professionals to causes at the center of their passion, with wrap around training and support. Connecting talent to purpose is what we do best,” states Robert Acton, principal and founder of Cause Strategy Partners.

Acton has more than two decades of experience leading and scaling nonprofit organizations both as a chief executive and board member. “We built an innovative, national-scale approach to recruit, place, train and support professionals from top companies, including those outside of the c-suite who are chomping at the bit to serve their community,” explains Acton.

Our objective is to elevate and transform leadership in the social good sector by connecting thousands and thousands of dedicated professionals to causes at the center of their passion, with wrap around training and support. Connecting talent to purpose is what we do best

In their first five years of operation, BoardLead has placed 582 professionals on the boards of more than 300 nonprofits in 13 cities. According to Acton, “We are just getting started.”

In addition to BoardLead Cause Strategy Partners offers a host of other services such as concierge board placement, strategic consulting to HR/Talent and Corporate Social Responsibility teams, and nonprofit board training. Acton and his team of 16 share their governance expertise across the globe by delivering keynote addresses focused on leadership in the social good sector.

As a Certified B Corporation that has established partnerships with national and international foundations, Cause Strategy Partners has an extensive client base comprising major names including Google, JPMorgan Chase, United Airlines, Macquarie Group and PwC, to name a few.

To enable fast scale, Acton made an early decision to invest heavily in technology that could support every step of the process, ensuring that his team of consultants could focus their time and energy assisting nonprofit partners and board candidates, rather than routine program management. Through that combination of technology and their team of experts, Cause Strategy Partners is efficiently driving talented and diverse professionals onto the boards of nonprofit organizations.

Renowned firms like PwC are using BoardLead to create leadership opportunities for their diverse professionals who are eager to grow their impact on the communities where they live and work. PwC’s Responsible Business Leadership team partnered with BoardLead to better position the firm’s professionals to accelerate their development, retain and cultivate top talent, and strengthen the nonprofits they partner with across the country.

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Company
Cause Strategy Partners

Headquarters
New York, NY

Management
Robert B. Acton, Principal & Founder

Description
Cause Strategy Partners helps social good organizations achieve their missions fueled by great leadership, great strategy and, most importantly, great results. The company’s flagship program, BoardLead, elevates and transforms leadership in the social good sector by partnering with top companies, professional services firms and foundations to recruit, place, train and support talented professionals for high-impact nonprofit board service. To strengthen the board service experience and position high performing professionals early on to step into board leadership roles, BoardLead also provides the BoardLeaders it places with a year of good governance training and three months of one-on-one individualized support.