Boards need to exist to felicitate the organization, not to be vehicles for a bullet point on someone's resume.
The legal fiction is so that coöperatives can run unmanaged by others, particularly the government, outside of providing a framework of rights and legitimate responsibilities. As such, boards should be both organically formed from within and by the organization, while seeking out to strengthen the organization in its structure and goals by adding any necessary elements.
Maintaining both a sense of empowerment and agency, for each individual within the organization as well as for the organization is a key factor. Being self-strong, while reaching out to increase strength within the community and of the community is integral.
The organization should be self-formed, with guidance by the board and the participating community, within a framework of rights and responsibilities, with structural mechanisms and principles, such as Roberts Rules of Order and coöperative principles.
~Robert Allan Rands Board member, SoPo Bikes (SoPo Bicycle Coöperative), Reynoldstown Atlanta, Georgia
On Thursday, June 2, 2022, 09:03:40 PM GMT+1, thethinktank-request@lists.bikecollectives.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Governance Transitions? (cyclista@inventati.org)
Message: 1 Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:39:17 +0000 From: cyclista@inventati.org To: thethinktank@lists.bikecollectives.org Subject: Re: [TheThinkTank] Governance Transitions? Message-ID: c181ccaf5487d5b8b13ef049265569d3@inventati.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
We had to consider this extensively; never got to exactly where you are but one important thing stood out in the consideration over time: nobody should be on a board unless they have strong standing in running the day-to-day of the shop, or, at the least, the board should have a required majority of members having that qualification.
Don't go down the path of a board with an agenda that doesn't fit with what the organization needs in order to thrive on a daily basis - and more broadly, accomplish its mission. It's one thing to have stakeholders on the board *in addition* to former staff or experts; it's completely another to seat people who simply want to have some measure of leverage or influence for their own reasons.
The purpose of a board, from the federal government's perspective, is so that the government may retain a reliable point of contact through any potiential changes or adversity. It's s huge deal to the feds to remove the requirement to pay taxes, and they don't want to grant that status without assurance that the entity will remain responsive and responsible from a federal standpoint. What this means is that there is no requirement for the board to do any particular thing other than exist and be prepared to liase with the feds should they require it. The board can be a board of directors, who exert vision and authority, or it can simply be a board of advisors, assisting those who already run the organization. Really it can be a board of [anything]. It just has to fulfill the few barebones duties demanded by nonprofit specifications.
So be careful how you choose them and appoint them. Do set out very carefully right away who gets to choose them; one of the worst configurations, because nepotism and incest, is the current board voting on the new board members. Any good idea might be protected in this way long-term (which is why a lot of organizations cling to this method), but it can also mean bad ideas have the ability infect a board for generations, even outliving the tenure of the members who originally set them in motion. Probably better to identify stakeholder groups (whom are served or targeted by the organization) and operational groups (staff, volunteers, other support personnel), and extend the right (or requirement) to vote to them.
As for accountability, elections play a part in that - not only the initial elections themselves, but the frequency of them. More frequent elections, for instance, might mean more opportunities to cut off bad work or behavior.
~cyclista Nicholas
On 2022-05-27 08:23, Thomas Butler wrote:
Austin's Yellow Bike Project is going through a governance transition. We used to be a fairly horizontally organized consensus-run collective of volunteers who did the day-to-day of what happens at the shop, and our size wasn't limited. We are becoming an exclusive board of probably 6-9 people. Some of us are still running shops, but about half are not.
We're currently trying to work out (among many other things) how board members are (s)elected and to whom the board is accountable. Or more concretely, how the board is held accountable. We don't have "members," so the questions of "who gets to vote" is among the ones we're trying to answer.
If you have thoughts or if your org went through something like this I'm interested to hear about it. In particular what best practices and pitfalls you encountered.
The board also has appetite for working through this with a professional. Some of us are less psyched about people who don't have experience with groups that have our consensus- / volunteer-run d.i.y. culture, horizontal organizing history, etc. Many of them have experience only with the more traditional non-profit board model and struggle to wrap their heads around how we used to operate and why. Suggestions are welcome.
Feel free to email me privately if you like at thomas.unavailable@gmail.com Or you can reply here.
Thanks Thomas Butler he | him | his Austin's Yellow Bike Project austinyellowbike.org
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End of Thethinktank Digest, Vol 188, Issue 1