I have been involved in various breeds of committee over the years (and PSW committee for 5+ years in various capacities) and OK, they are not the most glamorous or fun things to be involved with. However, if you are running a permaculture group of some description a good committee can improve the effectiveness and ease of operation of your group remarkably. Following is how we run our committee and some insight on what we have found to work (and on occasion, not work!).
The Committee Members
The committee members are elected at the Annual General Meeting. There are 4 positions on the executive committee (President, Vice President, Treasurer and Secretary) but the leaders of our various teams (garden team, education team, living skills team etc) also attend each meeting where they can. We also encourage members of the various teams to attend if they want and in fact rank and file members of the group can attend if they want to.
Meetings
Meetings are run on the third Wednesday of the month, usually starting at 7:00pm and finishing at 9:00pm nominally. If you are just starting up it may take more than 2 hrs to get through everything you want to talk about but eventually efficiencies will improve and the 2 hours will be fine. The meeting is held at a member’s house and while it is rotated around the committee members to a certain extent, one of the committee members has a room and table big enough to seat the entire committee (which may number 12 and up). So it quite often winds up being at their place.
It is important to be punctual starting the meeting so time is not lost at the start which then has to be made up at the end, when people are tired. Most of us get there just before 7:00pm so we can say hello to other members and get ourselves seated. We all bring snacks with us some of which goes on the table for during the meeting, and water/tea/coffee is also available. We usually stay after the meeting is finished to chat and have some more food and hot or cold drinks.
Agenda
The agenda is a fairly simple one,
• Make sure everyone has read the previous minutes and that they are an accurate representation of the meeting – approved and seconded
• Review of any carry over action items from the previous minutes if they have been completed or not (if not they remain on the minutes)
• Correspondence both in and out, usually electronically these days but also any snail mail sent or received, usually by the secretary and president.
• Reports from the management committee – The President’s, and where applicable vice president’s and the treasurer’s reports are tabled. The president’s report is verbal and the treasurer lets us know how the finances are doing verbally then provides a written or electronic copy to the Secretary for inclusion in the minutes.
• Reports from other Committee members - these include reports from the membership secretary, librarian, IT support person and seed bank coordinator(s). Most reports are verbal with any statistics noted (eg membership secretary giving current numbers of members, attendees at last meeting etc) by the secretary and included on the minutes.
• Last of the reports are the team reports, where the team leaders of the various activities carried out in the last month bring us up to date on what is happening. These include reports from the living skills, education and garden (blitz) teams, usually by the team leader. These are verbal as well.
• New agenda items are up for discussion next, there may be lots or hardly any, they are the things which have cropped up between meetings which need to be discussed. They should be submitted a week before the meeting. Any remaining items such as last minute issues can be discussed as general business.
A sample agenda/minutes dcoument is available for download here.
Minutes
The secretary attends the meeting with a laptop and records all the points at the time of the discussion. It needs someone who is a good typist but saves a lot of time later trying to type up from notes or from memory. Minutes are emailed out to all committee members as early as can be managed before the next meeting.
Chairperson
We rotate the chairperson position each meeting, usually the person who is slowest stepping back gets the job (OK maybe it is not that bad!). If the committee is longstanding and everyone knows each other, this approach works but if it is a new committee, it takes someone with a strong will, tempered with tact, to keep the meeting from being taken off track by one or more committee members. It even happens to us sometimes. So it is worthwhile taking the time to appoint the right person as the chairperson, if they have had experience in a similar position, so much the better.
Convivial Social Interchange
Most of our meetings end by our 9:00pm shut off time, but a good proportion of attendees don’t leave until after 10:00pm. This is because it does become a great social opportunity for a coffee, biscuit and a chat. We usually get kicked out a bit after 10:00pm so the hosts can sleep.
