In addition to traditional Boards of Directors, many harm reduction agencies have other bodies for democratic control of various aspects of an organization. These include both advisory boards and cooperative boards.

Advisory boards are usually one of two types – community or participant.

• Community Advisory Boards (CABs) may be made up of both participants and other close community members like the family members of participants or others the organization would like to involve in decision-making. “Community Advisory Board” is also a name sometimes used to describe an internal governance and advice board in fiscally sponsored projects. These boards often make recommendations to the BoD and may, in certain cases, directly control aspects of the organization.
• Participant Advisory Boards (PABs) are, as the name implies, advisory boards consisting of people who use agency services. Like CABs, PABs often have the capacity to make recommendations to the BoD and may, in certain cases, directly control aspects of the organization.
• Cooperative boards or committees are governing arms of cooperatively run organizations and may control every aspect of the organization with the (legally necessary) BoD merely rubber-stamping their decisions.

All of these types of boards benefit from the same board development recommendations described in the previous article.