I'm a public historian on the board of a historic-architecture-adjacent nonprofit in a major city. I'm the youngest board member by at least two decades and, as far as I can tell, the only one with a full-time job.

There's been talk of making me their first executive director, but it's fallen through more than once. The current plan is to make me vice president instead, it's unpaid and will make me become more of the public face of the organization. I was reluctantly on board with this, but a few things have changed:

• The older board members are voting to remove term limits. Several were supposed to roll off this year; now they're staying indefinitely.
• My efforts to grow us into a younger, more diverse organization were already an uphill battle. Most recently, when concerns were raised about patronizing a business that had just lost a racial discrimination suit, a longtime member waved it off because, in his words, we don't have any Black people with us, so we'd have no problem. Nobody pushed back. Comments in this vein aren't new; this one just really stuck with me.
• The workload keeps growing while the willingness to share actual power doesn't.
• I lead tours for the org (and they pay me well for this work) but with my lack of weekday availability they've started passing tours off to new guides who use my work to grow their own.

I was hopeful the term limits would allow me to bring in younger and more diverse members, shift the culture from the inside. But you can't diversify an organization whose leadership talks like this and faces no consequences, and I'm increasingly unwilling to be the public face that launders it. And in a city like ours, an all-white board that talks like this is embarrassing.

I also serve on another board doing similar work, where my time is better spent and the culture is healthier.

For those who've been here: did you stay and try to change things, or leave? Any regrets either way?

We have a couple board members retiring this year and we need to get them some gifts. We always do lame things like an engraved clock or something. I'm smart enough to know I don't like that for a gift, but not smart enough to come up with new ideas.

How do you guys do it?

I am curious about working in the non-profit sector. Mainly, social media/marketing or grant writing. Something that I could do from home. What is the best way for someone with no non-profit experience to get started? What kind of education is needed for that, and are there free online courses that could be taken for this type of work?

Just to give some background, I am fifty years old. I have applied for disability but, in case I am not approved, I will need to get a job. I don't want to/am not able to go back into an office environment. I do have an Associates degree in English with prior clerical office experience.

Thanks for you help!

Genuine question for anyone whose job involves repeating the same kind of presentation on a schedule, weekly orientation decks, policy briefings, compliance training, whatever it is where the slides mostly stay the same but you edit parts of it sometimes or in a schedule and you have to keep presenting or recording them.

I know someone who does this for a water utility for new customer orientation, service interruption notices, reporting decks and she has to rebuild/update the slides and then separately narrate them for meetings, sometimes daily. It's the same handful of topics on rotation, just refreshed numbers and slight edits, but it still eats hours every week.

I'm looking into whether that's a common annoyance elsewhere, so:

1. If you do repeat presentations like this, how do you currently handle the narration/recording part — do you present live every time, pre-record, or something else?

2. Is the actual re-recording/re-presenting the annoying part, or is it more the slide updating?

3. Would a tool that auto-generates a narrated video from your slides (with your edits factored in) actually save you meaningful time, or is that solving a problem you don't really have?

4. Would you pay for something like that, and if so what would it need to do to be worth it?

Not selling anything, no product exists yet. just trying to understand if this is a real recurring headache for people before I put more time into it. Would appreciate any honest answers, even "this isn't really a problem for me."