Morgan Lamphere, Senior Director of Marketing, Sales, and Communications at The Kendal Corporation, sits down with Jen Karsten, Governance Advisor, to talk about a role you won’t find at most senior living organizations.
Most people have never heard of a governance advisor, and even fewer know why a senior living system would have one. It’s a role that doesn’t exist in many places, which is exactly why Morgan sat down with Jen and let her explain it in her own words.
Let’s start simple. What does a Governance Advisor actually do?
I think of it as being a partner in process, not an expert with all the answers. A consultant gets hired to prescribe a solution. A board trainer delivers a session and moves on. A governance advisor walks alongside a board over time. My job isn’t to tell a board what to decide. It’s to help them build the clarity and the culture that let them make wise decisions together, and then own that direction completely.
There’s an idea from Quaker educator Parker Palmer that even a healthy community can’t feed on itself for long; it can only thrive with resources drawn from beyond itself. A large part of my work is helping boards know what elements they’d benefit from adding in and making sure they have easy access to them, from across the Kendal system and beyond it.
Governance support exists across senior living. What makes it different here?
In a lot of the field, governance support is about compliance, oversight, and managing risk. Those things matter everywhere, no question. But governance in the Kendal system starts somewhere different, from a conviction that how we make a decision matters as much as what we decide.
Every Affiliate has its own independent board, and each one uses consensus for decision-making. That commitment shapes everything. It means we’re intentional about how we listen to each other and honest that differences, and even conflict, make our decisions better when we handle them with care.
Quaker values sit at the center of that. How do they help when a board gets stuck on a hard decision?
When a group hits a wall, values stop being abstract and start being useful. In typical governance settings, where the board uses “Robert’s Rules,” they break an impasse with a quick majority vote. But a vote creates winners and losers, and a decision is usually “hard” precisely because people who care deeply see it differently. I’m not eager to recommend a method that leaves 49 percent of the room unhappy with something they care about.
In a consensus setting, being stuck just means the group hasn’t found the full picture yet. Nobody’s trying to change anyone’s mind. Instead, we put that energy into finding the option that answers everyone’s real concerns. It takes longer upfront, but you get that time back because decisions made that way tend to hold. When done well, everyone leaves the table feeling heard and believing the group found the best answer it could, together. It helps that we start with a bit of quiet, so people can set down their own agendas and ask the better question: Which path reflects what we actually share?
Consensus can make conflict feel like something to tiptoe around. How do you help groups treat it as useful?
I’ll gently push back on the premise there. I don’t think consensus causes that. People just come to board work with different comfort levels around conflict and different amounts of practice with it. There’s also a common myth that consensus means everyone being polite and agreeable. That has not been my experience!
Real consensus asks for honest engagement with the varying perspectives, including disagreements, in the room, so that concerns and blind spots surface before a decision gets made too fast. Smoothing things over early gives you false harmony and weak decisions. The work is to separate the energy of disagreement from personal friction.
I think of a board I sat with during a leadership transition, where two longtime members were each certain of a different path forward and were pretty dug in on their respective visions. The breakthrough wasn’t one of them giving in. It was the group slowing down enough to discover what both of them actually cared about and were worried about, during which time a third option was raised. It met the hopes and addressed the fears of these two and others. Though no one had this idea coming into the conversation, it was co-created by a slow-moving, thoughtful group. The decision got better because they slowed the pace and listened deeply just when listening, and being patient, became a lot to ask.
Sometimes, a dissenting voice holds a piece of the truth that makes the final decision stronger once it’s folded in. So, we can be helpful by being shaped by views different from our own. On the flip side, I’ve had to practice not taking it personally when my own idea isn’t where the group lands. When we all do that work (listening to understand the root of a person’s concern; letting go when my input has been received but isn’t leading the group’s direction), the emphasis moves from “me” to “we,” and the decisions really are better for it.
Every Affiliate is its own organization with its own identity. How do you support a community without making it feel the system is dictating?
Autonomy and connection aren’t opposites to me. They balance each other. The system exists to serve and connect the communities, and the differences among them are a big part of what makes the whole thing vibrant.
The support comes with a lot of humility and respect for local context. My role is to ask good questions, share what I’ve learned from across the network, and offer frameworks, never to hand down directives. There are a few distinctives every board commits to, consensus among them, but those are known from the very start of the relationship and talked through openly several times a year. If I’m doing my job well, nothing arrives as a top-down surprise. When you honor each Affiliate’s history and local leadership, governance guidance becomes a way for a community to draw on the strength of the whole system while its leadership stays firmly its own.
When a group reaches consensus with your help, what changes for them afterward?
The real outcome of my help isn’t about an item on the agenda; I don’t get involved in local decisions. What I care about, and try to help with, is the trust and the capability that builds when we increase our consensus knowledge throughout every year. When a board is confident in the “how” and willing to move through the process together, they can handle the challenging times without fracturing.
People new to consensus are often relieved to learn there’s training and support for it. Boards in transition, revising bylaws or navigating a leadership change, will ask for a facilitated conversation or a retreat. And because boards are always changing, new members arriving, long-timers moving on, there’s always a reason for a refresher. What lasts is up to them, but the hope is stronger trust, better listening, and a framework they can use on the next challenge. The goal is each person having the confidence that comes from preparedness. Every Affiliate board should be ready to face their challenges together and prevail. When it gets hard (as it will sometimes), I’m here to provide support or guidance in the ways they request.
What do you most want boards and leaders to take from all this?
That governance isn’t an administrative formality. It’s one of the truest expressions of what their organization values. When it’s grounded in trust, being authentically shaped by others, and a commitment to everyone the work touches, including older adults now and in the future, staff, and partners, governance becomes a source of organizational strength and renewal.
Mostly, I hope people come to experience governance as a practice that, done well, honors the voices in the room (and not in the room) and can be effective, fiscally responsible, and genuinely humane all at once.