[Organizers] Re: administrative question

The Bay Area Country Dance Society is a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit which has a board and officers (each with a 1-year term and subject to reelection every year) that sponsors multiple ECD and contra series and dance weeks and weekends and performance teams (morris and "American Dance"). While some board members are organizers of other events, others are interested community members who don't run events. No board member - in their capacity as a board member - serves on an event committee. The board underwrites events and pays losses, sets pay policies, pays rent for the website, pays a bookkeeper to handle all the 1099s. The dance and camp committees run the dances and camps but have to get budgets approved, submit final reports, etc. The Board has to approve volunteers to be in charge of events, annually, and appoints series programmers who then make booking decisions (within the financial limits the board has set, or getting permission to go outside them). So the same person can be in charge of a camp every year but they have to get reapproved every time. Other than that, there are no term limits. On the Board, it's a complicated enough organization that it takes a new member about a year to get hold of all the stuff we do, learn enough about how events run to understand budgets, etc. (I've been the chair for a *long* time. I once tried to promote bylaws changes to at least keep the whole board from dissolving every year - really, all the officer terms and the board member terms expire every May, so if we don't hold an election we'd technically have nobody in those positions,k and the people who can vote in those elections are the current board, so there'd be nobody able to vote, which is dumb. Tried to set up three year terms with staggered starts so that no more than a third of the board wold turn over. The idea went nowhere. Even if someone committed to a three-year term they might still resign after one.) In practice, what we've been finding is that it's hard enough to get people willing to be Board members, attend most of the meetings, red email enough to be up on issues, that it seems self-defeating to demand that the people willing to keep doing it stop doing it. It's not ideal. We did have one person we would have liked to have on the Board who said she wouldn't do it unless we instituted term limits - but we couldn't see enough benefit and could see too much risk. -- Alan ________________________________________ From: Peggy Hesley via Organizers <organizers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2023 3:53 PM To: organizers(a)lists.sharedweight.net Subject: [Organizers] administrative question Hello! I’ve finally found the opportunity to join this group, and I’d like to ask a question. Do any of your contra boards have term limits, and or required rotation of officers? Thanks, Peg _______________________________________________ Organizers mailing list -- organizers(a)lists.sharedweight.net To unsubscribe send an email to organizers-leave(a)lists.sharedweight.net