Re: [Organizers] Non-clique members in sensitive board positions.

My local organization has a board that elects its officers and successors, so the struggle always is to keep from getting too completely cliquish and inbred. We did just recently change Treasurers, so it's possible, and we bring up several new board members each year (but I have been Chair for a very long time and we should probably do something about that). Treasurer is the hardest position to fill, since you need someone who understands the job, can do the job, will keep doing the job even when their real job or the rest of their life gets difficult/busy. It really needs to be done professionally (at least in an organization like ours which runs 17 dances a month, three week-long camps, and several weekends and special events). We have *never* had two qualified candidates for Treasurer at the same time, and we have more often (thought not at all recently) had people who weren't able to keep up with the position. Having two candidates is luxury. It sounds like you have a general election for officers, perhaps annually? Is your incumbent Treasurer (a) doing a good job and (b) willing/planning to run again? Is the problem that you're afraid of having a contested election? Anyway, based on what little information is here, I can't recommend a bylaws change that makes it harder to fill the Treasurer spot with a qualified candidate. I can't even understand it. Would the bylaws change say "you can't be Treasurer unless you've been on the Board for five years?" How would that even work? If I were a member of the organization and I heard that they bylaws had been changed to keep out a qualified candidate it would make me wonder if the board were conspiring to keep an impartial eye from looking at the books. As to points 2 and 3: You do need to mentor new people into leadership. You can also accept qualified new-to-you people into leadership positions. If you do neither, your organization will be leaderless as current leadership moves away, develops other interests, or dies. If your bylaws specify that these positions are filled by general election among the members then you need to just vote at the general election and accept the results. Points 2 and 3 are both true. As far as I can tell, point 1 is batsh*t crazy. What do we do to avoid situations like this? We don't even think this is a situation to avoid. If somebody's interested in being on the board we let them run for the board (and probably get elected); if they don't work out they probably don't run again but probably don't get reelected if they do run again. If they want to do more work we give them more work to do. Why is this a problem? -- Alan On 4/26/2016 2:08 PM, Joe Kwiatkowski via Organizers wrote: