Twenty people from eight agencies graduated April 9 from Capacity Canada’s first Board Governance BootCamp outside of Ontario, and there was no mad rush for the door when the event wrapped up.
In the 30 minutes of coat-gathering and conversation that followed, participants laid down plans to keep the momentum going.
“I know about three things that will be happening in the next month, where different organizations will be getting together to do something,” said Bonnah Carey, chief social entrepreneur with FuseSocial in Fort McMurray, Alberta. “Networks are being made. Things are going to that next level.”
Capacity has been holding Board Governance BootCamps in Waterloo Region, Ont., since 2009, with Manulife as a sponsor. After a day-long workshop in November, participants — the board chairs and top executives of not-for-profits in the charitable sector — leave to apply the lessons they’ve learned to real issues in their respective organizations.
They reconvene in March to share how they handled their assignments and graduate.
Last year, Capacity Canada partnered with FuseSocial to host a November BootCamp in Fort McMurray. FuseSocial, like Capacity, brings organizations together to work collectively on community challenges.
The Fort McMurray BootCamp, and another coming up in May in St. John’s, Nfld.-Lab., form part of a National Capacity Building Strategy supported by the Suncor Energy Foundation in communities where Suncor Energy ranks as a major employer.
Different locations, same goals: strengthen decision-making in the charitable non-profit sector by making sure boards and administrations understand their separate but complementary responsibilities.
When they returned April 9, organizations in Fort McMurray reported that the BootCamp got them working on such issues as leadership succession planning, risk evaluation and oversight, and improving ties that connect an organization’s board, administration and volunteer pool.
The BootCamp in Fort McMurray reinforced a belief that Capacity has held for years, said Cathy Brothers, Capacity’s chief executive officer.
“When ordinary citizens go on to boards of charities as leaders, they have to be prepared for the job,” Brothers said. “It’s not just something you do intuitively. There is really specific knowledge and discipline that you have to have.
“When you put good people on boards, you don’t minimize what you expect of them. You up the expectations and you wind up with people performing at a way higher level with visioning and planning.”
Fred Galloway, a long-time member of Capacity’s BootCamp faculty, said he was struck by the enthusiasm for change Fort McMurray organizations brought into the room. They aren’t tied to doing things in safe, familiar ways.
“There is no old-growth forest here,” Galloway said. “It is young, energetic and uniquely different.”
Far from being flattened by the slump in the oil economy, Fort McMurray’s social-profit sector has used the situation to take stock. It’s a pause, Carey said, that has allowed organizations to look at what they do, and ask themselves whether they should be doing more or something different.
There was more talk about opportunity than loss as the BootCamp came to a close, said Lynn Randall, who leads the National Capacity Building Strategy for Capacity Canada.
“FuseSocial is raising the bar on board governance, and the community is up to the task,” she said.
