Section 1. Organizational Structure: An Overview

• What is organizational structure?

• Why should you develop a structure for your organization?

• When should you develop a structure for your organization?

 

 

What is organizational structure?

By structure, we mean the framework around which a group is organized and coordinated. Organizational structure helps clarify how the organization works: how people become involved, how leadership and governance are established, how decisions are made, how responsibilities are distributed, how information is shared, and how people are held accountable for the roles they accept.

Structure may be highly formal, with written bylaws, defined positions, committees, and reporting relationships, or relatively informal, with responsibilities shared among a small group. Most organizations fall somewhere between these extremes, and their structure may change as their purpose, size, responsibilities, staffing, and community relationships change.

Why should you develop a structure for your organization?

• Structure gives members clear guidelines for how to proceed. A clearly established structure helps people understand their responsibilities, how decisions are made, where authority lies, how information is shared, and how disagreements or concerns can be addressed.
• Structure can strengthen connection and shared responsibility. It helps participants understand how their work fits into the organization's larger purpose and how different roles contribute to common goals.
• Every organization develops some form of structure. Even groups that describe themselves as informal will develop patterns of leadership, decision-making, communication, and work. When those patterns remain unstated, authority and expectations can become unclear. Making important parts of the structure explicit can improve transparency, accountability, and participation.
• Structure can help an organization meet legal, ethical, and financial responsibilities. Incorporated nonprofits, organizations with paid staff, and groups managing grants, contracts, confidential information, or significant resources may need formal governance, financial controls, conflict-of-interest procedures, and other policies.

When should you develop a structure for your organization?

It is useful to think about structure early in an organization's development, but structural planning should remain proportionate to the organization's actual needs. A new neighborhood group may need only a few clearly defined responsibilities, while an incorporated nonprofit with employees, grants, programs, and a governing board may need a much more formal structure.

Structural development can occur alongside the organization's other work rather than replacing it. As your group grows, adds staff, assumes new legal or financial responsibilities, expands its geographic reach, or changes its mission or strategies, review whether the existing structure still supports the work effectively.

Elements of Structure

While the best structure for a particular coalition or organization depends on its purpose and circumstances, several basic elements are usually present.

These include:

• Some form of governance and decision-making authority
• Rules, policies, or agreements by which the organization operates
• A distribution of work, responsibilities, and authority
• Communication and accountability processes

Governance

Governance identifies who has authority to make which decisions and how those decision-makers are accountable to the organization's mission and community. Depending on the organization, governance might rest with a board of directors, a membership body, a steering committee, a coordinating council, elected officers, or another formally designated group.

Governance is different from day-to-day management. A governing body may establish mission, strategy, major policies, financial oversight, and executive accountability while delegating routine operations to staff, committees, volunteers, or a chief executive.

Rules by which the organization operates

Another important part of structure is having clear rules, policies, or agreements for how the organization operates. Some may be contained in bylaws or formal policies, while others may be working agreements adopted by a committee or membership group.

Depending on the organization, these may address:

• Membership and participation
• Leadership selection, terms, and succession
• Meeting procedures and decision-making
• Financial oversight and authorization
• Conflicts of interest
• Confidentiality and privacy
• Accessibility and participation accommodations
• Codes of conduct, grievances, or conflict resolution
• Delegation of authority

Informal expectations can be powerful even when they are not written down. Periodically examine whether unwritten rules are creating confusion, concentrating power, or making participation more difficult for some people.

Distribution of work

Every organization also has some distribution of work. Responsibilities may be formal or informal, temporary or ongoing, and carried out by paid staff, volunteers, board members, partner organizations, consultants, or community members.

Roles should be clear enough that people know what they are responsible for, what authority comes with the role, whom they coordinate with, and where to go when they need a decision or additional support. Work should also be distributed realistically so that the organization does not depend continually on a few people carrying an unsustainable workload.

Several broad functions are important to many groups:

• Envisioning desired changes. The organization needs processes for developing and revisiting a shared vision. This may involve people directly affected by the issue, organizational leaders, community partners, staff, volunteers, and others with relevant perspectives.
• Carrying out community and organizational change. People need responsibility for implementing programs, policies, advocacy, services, outreach, or other work connected with the organization's objectives.
• Planning and coordination. Someone or some group needs to connect the vision with strategies, objectives, action plans, resources, and timelines and help coordinate work across different parts of the organization.
• Supporting the people doing the work. Organizations need systems for obtaining resources, maintaining partnerships, communicating with the community, supporting staff and volunteers, meeting legal and financial responsibilities, and sustaining the work over time.

Common Roles

Every group is different, so the names, authority, and responsibilities attached to particular roles will vary. The terms below describe some common possibilities rather than a required model.

• An initial steering committee is often a temporary group that helps launch an organization or initiative. It may clarify the mission, develop an initial plan, identify resources, recruit participants or governing members, and help establish policies or bylaws when needed. It can dissolve or transition into another governance or coordinating structure once the organization has developed enough to determine what continuing structure is appropriate.
• A coordinating council or coordinating committee helps connect work across the organization. Depending on the authority formally assigned to it, it may coordinate activities, monitor progress, make certain decisions, or recommend changes in objectives and strategies in response to community input and organizational learning.
• An Executive Director, Chief Executive Officer, Project Coordinator, Program Director, or similar staff leader may be responsible for day-to-day operations. In an incorporated nonprofit, the governing board typically establishes the chief executive's responsibilities, provides oversight and evaluation, and delegates appropriate operational authority. The chief executive may supervise staff, coordinate programs and resources, support partnerships, and carry out organizational strategy.
• Task forces are groups formed around a particular issue, objective, or body of work. Some are temporary and dissolve after completing their assignment; others may continue for as long as the issue requires coordinated attention.

For example, a community safety coalition might have several task forces. One could focus on preventing and responding to intimate partner violence, another on youth and school safety, and another on reducing firearm injuries. All three may contribute to the larger mission of improving community safety, but each issue involves different people, systems, evidence, services, policies, and strategies.

The coalition can coordinate common areas of work while allowing each task force to develop approaches suited to the issue it addresses. Preventing intimate partner violence, for example, may involve survivor-centered services, healthy-relationship education, coordinated community response, housing and economic supports, and appropriate legal protections. Youth safety may involve schools, young people, families, mental-health services, violence-prevention programs, and other community partners. Firearm-injury prevention may require still other combinations of education, policy, safe-storage practices, health systems, and community action.

• Action committees work on specific programs, policies, practices, or implementation tasks within the broader goals of the organization or task force.

For example, a task force addressing intimate partner violence might include:

• A policy and coordinated-response committee. Members might include survivors or survivor advocates, public-agency representatives, legal professionals, health professionals, service providers, and others with relevant responsibilities. The committee could improve coordination, review policies, strengthen survivor safety and referral procedures, support appropriate accountability, and identify gaps in prevention or response.
• A services and support committee. Members could help ensure that people experiencing violence can find appropriate shelter, health and mental-health care, legal assistance, economic support, advocacy, and other services. The group might also identify service gaps and improve referral pathways among agencies.
• A communications and prevention committee. Members might include communications staff, educators, advocates, designers, journalists, and community members. The committee could develop accurate public information, prevention messages, digital resources, media outreach, and community education while protecting survivors' privacy and avoiding sensational or stigmatizing communication.

• Support committees help provide resources, systems, or specialized assistance that other parts of the organization need. Examples might include finance, fundraising, communications, governance, technology, evaluation, or volunteer-support committees.
• Community trustees, often called the board of directors or board of trustees, form the governing body of many nonprofit organizations. Board members should understand their legal and fiduciary responsibilities and collectively provide mission oversight, strategic guidance, financial stewardship, executive accountability, and attention to legal and ethical integrity. Board composition should reflect the perspectives, competencies, lived experience, relationships, and governance capacity the organization needs rather than being based primarily on status or prestige.
• Grantmakers and other funders may provide important financial support, but they are generally external stakeholders rather than part of the organization's internal governance structure unless a particular legal or partnership arrangement gives them a formal role. Funders may include foundations, government agencies, corporations, community foundations, and other entities.
• Support organizations are outside organizations that can provide technical assistance, training, evaluation, fiscal sponsorship, technology, legal expertise, or other specialized support.
• Partner organizations are other groups that share responsibilities, goals, populations, geographic areas, or interests with your organization and work collaboratively on some part of the effort.

Your organization may use only a few of these roles, especially at the beginning. Avoid creating committees or titles merely because other organizations have them. Each part of the structure should serve a clear purpose and have responsibilities that people can realistically carry out.

Examples of Structure

So how can all of these pieces be put together? The form a community group takes should be based on what it needs to accomplish, its legal and financial responsibilities, and how people need to work together -- not the other way around. The structures below are examples rather than models every organization should copy. They can and should be adapted to your group's purpose and circumstances.

 A relatively complex structure

Example - The Ste. Genevieve's Children's Coalition

The Ste. Genevieve's Children's Coalition is a relatively large community-based group. It has a coordinating council, a communications committee, and three task forces focused on adolescent sexual and reproductive health, immunization, and child hunger and food security. Each task force has action committees as needed.

For example, the adolescent sexual and reproductive health task force has a schools committee that focuses on accurate, developmentally appropriate health education and on supporting students who are pregnant or parenting so that they can continue their education. A health organizations committee focuses on improving young people's access to appropriate, confidential, youth-friendly health information and services. The communications committee helps provide accurate public information through local and digital media and includes people with communications, journalism, outreach, and design experience.

The coordinating council includes the executive director, appropriate staff or volunteer leaders, the communications committee chair, and representatives of the task forces. A board of directors provides governance, strategic and financial oversight, and accountability for the organization's mission.

In diagram form, a complex organization might look like this:

A medium-sized organization may have fewer committees or layers while still maintaining a clear governing and coordinating structure.

And in diagram form:

 

A small group may need very little hierarchy, but it still benefits from knowing how decisions will be made and who is responsible for particular work. Depending on its purpose, a small group might use consensus, consent, majority vote, delegated decision-making, rotating leadership, or another agreed-upon process.

A diagram of such a small group might look something like this, with each of the circles representing an individual member:

What type of structure should you choose?

First, consider how much formality your organization needs. Formality is not automatically better or worse. A loose structure can support flexibility and quick collaboration, while a more formal structure can clarify authority, protect resources, meet legal obligations, and coordinate complex work.

Conditions that may favor more or less formality in organizational structures
Condition	A looser, less formal structure may work when...	A more formal structure may be useful when...
Purpose and duration	The group has a narrow, temporary purpose or a short-term project	The organization has broad responsibilities or expects to operate for a long time
Legal and financial responsibilities	The group handles little or no money and has few formal legal obligations	The organization is incorporated, holds grants or contracts, owns assets, employs staff, or has significant compliance responsibilities
Prior relationships among members	Participants already have strong working relationships and responsibilities are easy to coordinate	Participants come from many organizations or communities and clearer roles and decision procedures are needed
Complexity of work	The group is responsible for a small number of straightforward tasks	The organization manages multiple programs, sites, committees, partnerships, funding sources, or areas of responsibility
Organization size	The organization is small enough for people to coordinate responsibilities directly	The organization is large enough that explicit reporting, delegation, and communication systems are needed
Paid staff	The organization is entirely volunteer and has few continuing administrative responsibilities	The organization employs staff and needs clear supervision, personnel policies, accountability, and separation between governance and management
Risk and confidentiality	Activities involve relatively low legal, financial, safety, or privacy risk	The organization handles confidential information, significant funds, regulated services, safety-sensitive work, or other substantial risks
Geographic or operational distribution	Members work together regularly in one setting and can coordinate directly	Work is spread across multiple sites, neighborhoods, organizations, or remote/hybrid teams and requires clearer coordination systems
Decision-making needs	Decisions are infrequent, low-risk, and can reasonably be made by the whole group	Decisions occur frequently, involve substantial resources or consequences, or require clearly delegated authority

Organizational structure is usually best developed through deliberate discussion among the people responsible for governing, carrying out, participating in, and being affected by the organization's work. Legal or funder requirements may determine some parts of the structure, but many decisions about roles, authority, participation, and coordination remain for the organization to make.

In your discussions, the following questions may guide your decisions:

• What is your common purpose? How broad is it? Organizations with broad missions and multiple activities may need more differentiated roles than groups formed around a single project.
• What kind of work does your organization do? Advocacy, services, organizing, research, grantmaking, education, mutual aid, and other forms of work may require different arrangements, but none automatically requires either a top-down or shared structure.
• Should your organization be centralized or decentralized? A coalition of independent neighborhood groups may need a networked structure with substantial local autonomy, while an organization responsible for one regulated service may need more centralized operational authority.
• How large is your organization? How large do you expect it to become? Growth may create a need for clearer delegation, communication, supervision, and governance.
• How large and diverse is the community or geographic area in which you work? Does the structure create meaningful ways for different communities, locations, or constituencies to participate?
• How long do you expect the organization to last? A temporary coalition may need only enough structure to coordinate the immediate effort, while an organization expecting to operate for years may need clearer governance, succession, recordkeeping, and financial systems.
• Is the organization entirely volunteer, or are there paid staff? If staff are employed, who supervises them? Which decisions belong to staff, which belong to the chief executive, and which remain with the governing board or membership?
• Should yours be a new organization, or should the work be housed in or linked with an existing structure? Sometimes goals may be better met through a partnership, fiscal sponsor, coalition, program within an existing organization, or another arrangement rather than creating a new independent organization.
• Who has authority to make which decisions? Which decisions require full-board or full-group approval, which can be delegated, and how will people know where decision-making authority lies?
• How will people directly affected by the issue influence the organization? Will they serve on the board, participate in advisory bodies, hold staff or leadership roles, join decision-making processes, or contribute through other meaningful structures?
• How will authority be checked and accountability maintained? Consider financial controls, conflicts of interest, evaluation, grievances, board oversight, transparency, and other safeguards appropriate to the organization.
• How will disagreements be handled? Establish processes for resolving conflict, raising concerns, reviewing decisions, and addressing conduct that conflicts with organizational policies or values.
• How will people participate and communicate? Consider in-person, remote, and hybrid meetings, language access, disability access, technology, documentation, and how information will move among boards, staff, volunteers, committees, partners, and community members.

In Summary

Organizational structure provides the framework for governance, decision-making, responsibilities, accountability, and communication. A useful structure should make it easier for people to understand how the organization works and how their responsibilities connect with its mission.

No single structure works for every organization. The appropriate level of formality and hierarchy depends on the organization's purpose, size, duration, staffing, legal and financial responsibilities, risks, partnerships, and the communities involved. Structure should clarify authority without creating unnecessary bureaucracy and should provide meaningful ways for relevant people -- especially those directly affected by the work -- to participate.

Think about structure early, but continue reviewing it as the organization changes. A structure that works well for a small volunteer group may no longer fit after the group hires staff, accepts grants, expands programs, or takes on new responsibilities. The goal is not to preserve a particular organizational chart; it is to maintain a structure that supports the mission, protects accountability, and helps people work together effectively.