Please publish any thoughts on bylaws in the comments! I have several templates for the format--we need to just figure out how things will work.
Some info on terms--sorry to those of you who already know this stuff. Usually nonprofits have a Board of Directors, each member of which is called a Director. Then they also eventually hire an Executive Director who is NOT a member of the board and runs the nonprofit day to day as basically the head of staff. At that point, the Directors (on the Board) move more to setting policy and overseeing the org on a big picture basis, while the Executive Director oversees day to day kind of things like organizing volunteers, etc.
A few things we need to cover:
--Number of Board of Director Members
--Number of Board of Director Members who will be officers, and what offices (President, Treasurer, and Secretary are the minimum legal requirements, and these individuals do undertake a legal responsibility)
--How often the Board will meet, where, and when
--What responsibilities officers will have
--What percentage of the Board will have to vote affirmatively to authorize an action (we can specify different percentages for different actions, like a basic office supply purchase just needs the officers' approval, but a 2/3 vote of all Board members to purchase equipment, hire an Executive Director, etc.)
--How long Directors will serve on the Board
--Grounds for removal from the Board
We can just paste our decision into these templates, so please don't worry about the wording yet--let's just share with each other our ideas. If you really like someone else's idea, please feel free to post that and respond to one another too.
I guess I'm hoping this will be a discussion among all of us because this is such an important document. We all need to be able to live with it!
1 comment:
About the Board: what about having 7 board members, 4/7 minimum having to be Native?
The reason for making a certain number Native is what has happened at other centers nearby, where hucksters looking to legitimize themselves as Native so they could sell ceremonies to new agers managed to get on boards and take them over. Then the centers didn't serve Native people or respectful non-Natives, but just the new agers' personal interests.
One way we could define Native was partly suggested by a friend of mine: a person who is
a) an enrolled member of a federally or state recognized tribe, or of the Miami Nation of Indiana, or the Wea Tribe of Indiana; OR
b) a person who is within one or two generations of a person defined in (a).
This way people who cannot enroll themselves for various reasons such as blood quantum are not going to be excluded from being considered Native. Thoughts?
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