Last fall Al Mills left Capacity Canada’s Manulife Board Governance BootCamp full of new ideas.
And now nearly six months later, Mills, who became executive director of Extend-A-Family Waterloo Region less than a year ago and attended the BootCamp Nov. 16-18 (2017) with four other board members, remains even more energized.
“The first thing we did (after the BootCamp) was make a presentation to the board of our key learnings,” said Mills, who shared an update of his board’s progress at a BootCamp follow-up.
Held in early March of this year at the Holiday Inn Kitchener-Waterloo Conference Centre, the follow-up workshop gave representatives from 20 non-profit organizations the chance to report back to BootCamp facilitators about the changes they’ve made since the initial event.
“The first get-together is about the theory and questions, and learning about board governance,” said Capacity Canada’s Fred Galloway, who not only helped lead the November BootCamp but the follow-up workshop as well.
“The follow-up day is all about the applied training. The participants go back to their board and a pick a governance topic or two and work on it.”
Each organization then fills out a short report which is returned to Capacity Canada prior to the follow-up workshop.
Galloway also lead a similar workshop near the end of March in Fort McMurray, Alta., for representatives from 10 non-profit groups that took part in a BootCamp in that city in October of last year.
He said the applied side of board governance training is just as important as the theoretical information that’s provided to participants during the initial BootCamp.
“It (applied) puts them in a place where they’re moving something forward and they gain experience with that,” said Galloway. “And then they could move other things forward over time.”
These issues can include a variety of issues, he said, including board practices, in-camera meetings, and fundraising.
For Mills, the one thing his group had hoped to accomplish after attending the BootCamp was altering Extend-A-Family’s board committee structure.
“One example of that is to eliminate our executive committee,” he said, noting that no members of this committee attended the BootCamp.
“The potential was there for push back,” Mills said, adding the group of board members who did take the governance training at the BootCamp are all relatively new to the board.
However, he said the board has been very open to the idea after he and his fellow BootCamp ‘graduates’ provided a very good explanation and rationale for wanting to make that change and reassured them the duties of the executive committee would be captured somewhere.
“We’re actually presenting that idea at our next board meeting,” Mills said.
Besides such things as structure and fundraising, strategic planning is another issue that surfaces at most board governance BootCamps.
At the Fort McMurray follow-up session in March, Galloway spent an additional day focusing on this issue alone. The feedback for many of the participants was very positive.
“I’ve served on a board and have done a strategic plan before,” wrote one participant in a feedback survey. “I’ve just needed to push the understanding of why it’s needed.”
Galloway said there are always tough questions that boards should ask around every issue in effort to make the organization healthier.
“Board governance continues to be an ever-changing and increasing challenge,” he said.
To meet some of these challenges Extend-A-Family, which offers a variety of programs and support to families whose children have developmental disabilities, is now pursuing accreditation with Imagine Canada.
Mills said this was recommended to the board in effort to give the organization clarity and strengthen its credibility.
“A big part of this decision was to give us sort of a roadmap for things we want to improve in terms of our governance,” he said.
More Manulife Board Governance BootCamps are on tap for 2018, including an event next November that will also celebrate the program’s 10th anniversary.
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