Profile: Adele Stowe-Lindner of Community Directors

Adele Stowe-Lindner is the Executive Director of Community Directors. The BoardPro partner delivers practical governance training for board directors and staff in the community sector, including not-for-profit organisations, social enterprises, school councils, sports clubs, committees, and local councils. Community Directors trains 22,000 people a year and sees around 300,000 downloads of its free governance resources annually. 

Adele is speaking on leadership and AI at BoardPro's Governing with Impact in the New AI World Roadshow.

Before she led Community Directors, Adele spent 20 years in the not-for-profit sector working with people experiencing homelessness, with refugees, and supporting people facing serious illness. She also specialised in helping organisations grow from small to medium, and medium to large. With a master's degree in leadership, Adele sits on several boards, and now leads Community Directors, a social enterprise. Her career is built entirely in the for-purpose world, and it shapes everything she believes about governance.

Leadership first, and governance as its expression

Adele's field is leadership, and she came to governance through it, not the other way around.

“I'm really interested in governance as the expression of leadership — the part that carries those accountability and decision-making aspects.”

That framing matters, because it puts governance where she thinks it belongs: not as paperwork to be survived, but as one of the ways leadership actually shows up in an organisation. Her two decades in the sector give her a close view of what happens to a cause when the governance underneath it is weak, and what becomes possible when it is strong.

Community Directors and BoardPro's shared goals

The purpose of Community Directors is to take the governance load off not-for-profits so they can get on with their mission. “We have a whole lot of free resources, like a policy bank available for not-for-profits, so that we're doing the work, and so that not-for-profits can get on and do the impact they're designed to do,” explains Adele.

That same logic is what led Community Directors to BoardPro. When Community Directors looked for a partner, the sector's needs came first.

“We were looking around at board portal solutions that could acknowledge the particular needs of not-for-profits, who are most often looking for an entry-level price and an easy-to-use interface. BoardPro sees its responsibility to the community sector as central to what it does, so we're really proud to have built this partnership.”

The right board management software mitigates a risk the sector doesn't always name out loud, says Adele.

“The not-for-profit sector is holding on to the most private details of some of the most vulnerable people in Australia.”

Too often, she notes, board papers carrying that kind of information are simply emailed, left sitting in the inboxes of people who have long since left the board, readable by anyone who shouldn't have them. Board management software, or a board portal, keeps those papers secure, and access ends when a director's term does.

What AI can't fake, and why real character matters

At the roadshow, Adele is taking on the question every leader is now circling: as AI gets better at the work, what remains distinctly human?

“I'll be speaking about leadership and AI in a human-centred way. I'll be thinking together with the people attending: what can AI not do? What can it not fake? And how can we as leaders lead with character, to bring the best out of human leaders working alongside and employing AI?”

It is a timely question for boards specifically. BoardPro's own research across 485 boards in New Zealand, Australia, and beyond found most are already using AI weekly, while only a small fraction have agreed a position on how to govern it. As the tools grow capable of drafting the strategy, writing the board report, and even mirroring warmth, Adele says the ground shifts under leaders toward the things a machine can approximate but not authentically hold.

The value of human leadership in an AI world

What Adele brings to the roadshow is a reminder that governance and leadership are, in the end, in service of something. Community Directors exists so that not-for-profits can spend less time wrestling with governance and more time doing the work they were built to do.

In her world, that work is real-world impact in its most literal form, work that reaches some of the most vulnerable people in the country. Strong governance isn't the point; it's what makes the point possible. And when every board is being asked to fold AI into how it operates, it's just as essential to weigh what the technology can't do, and how people and AI can best work together.

Hear Adele at Governing with Impact in the New AI World

Adele Stowe-Lindner speaks on leadership and AI at BoardPro's Roadshow in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Melbourne — a practical day for directors on governing well in a fast-moving AI world.

The Roadshow runs across four Australian and three New Zealand cities over October and November. Save with early-bird tickets when you register before 30 September.

Choose your city and register here