Congregational Meeting

I conducted the Governance Task Force's first official presentation to members of the congregation this past Tuesday.  We were delighted to have about 20 people attending.  The basic presentation lasts about 20 minutes and then there is lots of time for questions and answers.  (In fact, GTF members will stay until the last question is answered.)  There are two meetings scheduled for tomorrow (Sunday, October 31), one after each service.  If you're at all interested in how things get done at UUCA, this is a great opportunity to get a good overview of the process.  As one of the attendees said, "On Tuesday night I attended the first presentation on Policy-based Governance at UUCA.  Even though I knew something about the new governance system before that night, I thought I learned a lot."  So, c'mon down!

Write the Ends (or Goals)

A vast amount of volunteer time was devoted to writing the Ends Statements that we are using this year to guide our work.  (These Ends Statements are in the first section of the Governance Document that you can link to from the Governance webpage.) However, as soon as we put them to use, we realized that they need some adjusting before we move ahead next year.  And how did we put them to use? 

The Executive produced a work plan (this is also linked on the Governance webpage as the “2010-2011 Executive Work Plan”) for the year that was based on the Ends Statements.  As soon as he attempted to do that, we all saw that some of the finer points in the Ends Statements (we haven’t yet figured out any sensible thing to call the bulleted points under the major Ends Statements in the Governance Document though we’re working on it) were redundant, misplaced or hard to enact.

Still, we were mightily impressed at how beautifully the basic system has worked so far.  We have Ends that we’re aiming for, and we have the entire staff along with the volunteer groups that they lead, heading for those Ends.  And every month, the Board gets an update from the Executive on the progress he and his staff are making on the Work Plan.  So far, so good.

Start with the Mission

Now you have a handy-dandy summary of how the Board is enacting policy-based governance in our congregation.  (You DID receive our very awesome brochure in the mail, right?)  You’ve also received an invitation to one of three opportunities to hear a brief presentation about governance:  Tuesday night, October 26 at 7 pm, or after either of the Sunday services on October 31.  Childcare will be provided for the presentations on Sunday.

Here’s a quote from Dan Hotchkiss (p 80 of Governance and Ministry):

There is no one right way to organize a congregation; each community of faith must choose a structure right for its own values and beliefs, and in harmony with the practice of its historic tradition and its larger family of congregations…..  Among those practices are board-centered and committee-centered modes of governance that emerged early in the 1900s.  In their place, congregations are experimenting with alternatives.  The most successful of these efforts focus strongly on the congregation’s mission—rather than on organizational life for its own sake.  They also have in common clarity about which buck stops where and how leaders will be held accountable.  Equipped with a clear structure, such congregations can identify their mission clearly, choose a strategy, get out from under their own feet, and move ahead.

So in designing our new governance system, we have started with the UUCA mission.  With much input from the congregation, we adopted this mission statement:  “We nurture individual search for meaning as we work in community for freedom, justice and love.”  And it is from this mission statement as well as strategic planning results from a year and a half ago, that our Ends, statements of who we want to be in the world, were created.

Back in the Beginning....

The best blogs have short entries.  (People actually read them when they’re short.  How about that?)  So, since we have a year together, we have time to wade slowly into the waters of policy-based governance.

Let’s begin at the beginning, as I shamelessly steal from the website of First Unitarian of Omaha, NE (there are over 60 UU congregations plus the UUA that are somewhere along the path of policy-based governance, from “just considering it” to “been doing it for several years”):

Our work is to examine the way that we go about making decisions in the church and also to consider the way that we organize ourselves to get those decisions implemented.  The goal is to determine if our current policies and structure still offer the best vehicles to achieve our vision or to learn if there are improvements that might be more suited to our current opportunities.

Last year, the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville did a ton of work to prepare us for trying out policy-based governance this year.  They believed that we could better live out our mission by re-organizing the work of the church.  They learned about the process of policy-based governance, they invited Dan Hotchkiss to conduct a workshop about it, and they produced a beginning document that we are using as our guide for this year of trying out policy-based governance.

Dan Hotchkiss is a Unitarian Universalist minister and a consultant for a highly respected church “think tank” and consulting group called The Alban Institute.  He has written a book, noted on the right side of this blog, that we are using as a basis for our trial year.  Prior to Dan’s book, John and Miriam Carver introduced a new way to organize boards of not-for-profit organizations to function effectively. They called their model Policy Governance® which they have trademarked.  Dan followed up on the Carver ideas and applied them to the very special form of not-for-profit organization that we are focused on here:  a congregation.  He and we call it policy-based governance to avoid trademark problems though I admit it is a mouthful.