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.