CCoC Board Member Nomination Expectations and Responsibilities

The board should ensure that the organization operates in compliance with its governing and policy documents. Failure to do so will likely result in a disorderly operating environment and may create significant legal problems for the organization and its leaders. – Board Member Orientation: The Concise and Complete Guide to Nonprofit Board Service. 1

BOARD CANDIDATE BIOS HERE

The Membership of the CCoC will elect two new board members at the next annual meeting. The board is eager to identify candidates to commend to the congregation for consideration. If you are interested in running for a position on the board, talk to any current board member. If you’d like to nominate a candidate, confirm with them that they would accept a nomination, then notify a board member of your nomination.

Expectations and Responsibilities
The board has three primary responsibilities:

  1. Supporting the leadership and employees who run the organization
  2. Identifying and mitigating risk that exposes the organization to liability
  3. Providing input to the organization’s strategic plan

To these ends, the board is accountable and reports to the church membership.

A board member should be comfortable with asking hard questions, and the resulting tension, to ensure our decisions most most effectively support the organization based on the information available at the time of decision.

A board member should be comfortable fielding difficult questions from our membership and representing the board’s point of view, noting where a board member’s personal point of view may differ from the board’s itself. The goal is transparency, clarity, and accountability to the membership on the execution of financial and operational policies and tasks.

While the board provides input on strategy, accountability for strategy and ecclesiastical
matters lay with the leadership team.

Specific Expertise and Characteristics
An effective board member will have subject matter expertise in important aspects of
running an organization. The board would like to add a member who represents a depth of experience in HR.

The board also understands that the future of our church should be placed in the hands of the generation that will lead us. The board continues to welcome nominations for younger members who can bring professional management and leadership experience to the board.

And while the board itself is limited to six voting members per current bylaws, we’re committed to supporting as much diversity as the membership decides to nominate and elect, and would encourage the membership to do so. Perhaps a note about diversity: the board requires specific subject matter expertise in its operations, real estate, finance, policy, and management. The board will ask members with needed expertise to serve as advisors from time to time. While the diversity of the board itself is somewhat dependent on who is nominated, as well as election cycles, the advisors who can provide input on specific subject matter are not limited by these factors. The board will strive to include as advisors as many diverse perspectives as possible and manageable given the willingness of members to fulfill those roles.

Time Commitment
Full board meetings that include the voting members and the non-voting members are convened every other month, or six times per year. These meetings generally occur on Saturday mornings from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM. The non-voting members are the lead evangelist and any elders.

The working board currently meets every other Thursday evening for an hour on a video call to work through issues. Depending on progress and outstanding issues, the working board call schedule may change.

Onboarding
The board currently uses the book Board Member Orientation: The Concise and Complete Guide to Nonprofit Board Service to onboard new board members. This is a short 80 page book. Familiarity with this by any candidate would be a plus. Feel free to reach out to current board members as they may be willing to lend you their copy. The cost is $15 on Amazon.

1 Batts, Michael E.. Board Member Orientation: The Concise and Complete Guide to Nonprofit Board Service (pp. 44-46). CreateSpace. Kindle Edition.