From the classroom to the board room: How a unique program makes the learning "come alive"
by Paul Fraumeni
Hannah Cinel can sing. In fact, she has a degree in music from Wilfrid Laurier University.
But she didn’t really know about the tremendous challenges facing the performing community until she started studying at U of T Law.
As she entered her second year of study in 2020, Cinel enrolled in the Faculty’s Not-for-Profit Board Governance Externship program. That’s the official name for what is usually referred to as OnBoard. It’s a year-long credit course – shared with the Rotman School of Management – where JD and MBA students apply their burgeoning legal and business skills to work with not-for-profit boards of directors.
Cinel, 24, was placed with the Dancer Transition Resource Centre (DTRC), an organization that assists professional dancers to, as its mission states, “help dancers make necessary transitions into, within, and from professional dancing careers.”
“Working with DTRC has been a great fit just because of my background with the arts,” says Cinel. “The live arts are hurting now because of the COVID pandemic and watching the DTRC grapple with these problems and see how they can best support artists has been very inspiring, to say the least.”
And the hands-on exposure to how a board of directors works has helped what Cinel has learned in the classroom take on a tangible relevance.
“It's been really great seeing concepts from the classroom come alive when I'm sitting in a board meeting and I see topics and issues from an organization being discussed. If I can make those connections, it really animates the coursework and animates my experience in the externship.”
OnBoard was an existing program at Rotman. Law’s involvement began with a desire by Dean Emeritus Edward Iacobucci to have the Faculty establish more active working relationships with other faculties at U of T. And the Faculty – as is the case throughout the post-secondary sector in all disciplines – wanted to enhance students’ real-world experience in the legal profession.
“So we approached the business school and asked them if they would be interested in expanding their course to include law students,” says Kim Snell, who was manager, experiential education at the time. “The idea was to create an interdisciplinary classroom. It would have specialized components for the business students and specialized components for the law students, but together they would have this enriched interdisciplinary experience.”
About 10 second and third-year Law students are admitted to the program each year. Students attend a series of class meetings and labs offered at Rotman facilities. During the class meetings, students learn about governance, project framing and scoping, structuring working relationships with mentors, conducting governance research, and delivering effective presentations from U of T professors and professionals in various fields from outside the University.
The heart of the program is the pairing of each student with a not-for-profit board. Over the course of the year, law students work on a legal governance issue of relevance to the needs of each organization.
Hannah Cinel’s project with the DTRC is focused on conducting the organization’s annual board evaluation. She has distributed a survey to board members and will analyze “how the directors feel about the performance of the organization and of themselves through the past year. And then I will combine it with legal knowledge and corporate governance knowledge and I will report on what the board is doing well and present recommendations for how the board might be able to run more efficiently.”
Third-year student Brian Huang is working with the board of the John Howard Society of Ontario (JHS), which assists people in re-building their lives after having been incarcerated. His project with JHS this year is to examine how to connect the organization's chapters, which are all separately incorporated entities, under the larger JHS umbrella.
“My work is to look at certain oversight mechanisms that can work between these organizations. So, for example, how do we keep one organization accountable when they are separately run, they're autonomous, and they are separately incorporated?”
Huang, 25, is already seeing important benefits to his future legal career from the OnBoard experience.
On the one hand, he values the education he is receiving about how a board works.
“Being able to interact with this board, having gone to the board meetings, via Zoom, understanding the role of the chair and the directors, how different committees are formed and their purposes – these are all experiences that directly translate to developing skills for my legal career, whether it’s working with boards of directors of corporations or with other not-for-profits.”
And he believes there is value in lawyers learning about areas of law that they might not practice in.
“Being a part of this profession comes with significant responsibility, and part of that responsibility is knowing how the law affects people and communities on the ground. Particularly in the context of a global pandemic, learning about troubling problems within the criminal justice system and the approaches non-profit organizations are taking to resolve them was another eye-opening experience for me through this work with the JHS.”
Snell, who is now director, student programs and a lawyer, agrees, noting that “traditionally law students and young lawyers have not been exposed to board governance. We think this is an important area. So part of the goal of this course is to allow early eyes into that possibility. I think one of the ripple effects of it is, can we get young lawyers and law students interested in board work such that you might consider volunteering early in your career and building your skill in this area? And having this set of skills is also attractive to future employers.”
Dr. Maureen Kempston Darkes (JD 1973, LLD honoris causa 1996), a 2020 distinguished Faculty of Law alumni awardee who currently serves on the boards of Canadian National Railway, Brookfield Asset Management, Irving Oil, Enbridge Inc., and Canadian Olympic Committee says participation in the Not-for-Profit-Board program is an excellent opportunity for students to gain an understanding of the role directors play in the governance of organizations and the division of responsibilities between the board and management.
"It provides students with valuable insight into how decisions are made and how to influence those decisions," says Kempston Darkes. "Understanding the division of responsibility is an important lesson for lawyers in their legal practice.
"This experience will serve them well as they develop their future careers."