Robert's Rules in Real Life

The Seattle Times describes today how a former program manager for  Senior Services has been charged with theft of $91,000.  

We thought blog readers might find our recent newsletter article on this topic of interest, as given below:

The weekend paper brings yet another sad story of theft from a nonprofit – sadder in this case because the thief was a deaf employee, working for the Vancouver Association of the Deaf. Fortunately the amount involved was small, only $6,527. It’s not like the national nonprofit organization I was a member of some years ago, whose energetic and simpatico treasurer was funding her condo in Hawaii and her fancy car from the accounts.

What is it about the nonprofit world that makes its board members so trusting? We are working to improve the human condition, I guess, and don’t like to look at those aspects that need correction rather than improvement. It’s also true that thinking about money is unpleasant, because there’s never enough. And it’s usually a challenge to make sense of the financial statements. If you’re not a trained accountant, you may want to throw up your hands and take the executive director’s word that all is in order.

But embezzlement is all around us. If you serve on a nonprofit board of directors, you have a duty to make sure that theft isn’t taking place under your nose. Make it your New Year’s resolution to get a firm handle on your nonprofit’s financial workings. All that’s necessary is to pay attention and ask questions. Here are some useful resources, all available without charge:

• Who’s responsible for the money?
• Nonprofit embezzlement: more common and more preventable than you think
• Five internal controls for the very small nonprofit

We salute Blue Avocado, which offers great information on this topic, and wish you a productive year that betters the lot of humankind while seeing all the affairs of your nonprofit organization in good order!

Ann G. Macfarlane
Professional Registered Parliamentarian

(c) Jurassic Parliament 2012. All rights reserved.

What do mayors, trapeze artists and board chairs have in common? An article in the Seattle Times about the aerial troupe Cabiri, rehearsing for their Halloween show, suggests the answer.

Personally I’ve never been tempted to try out a trapeze, but a feature about Cabiri caught my eye the other day. This is a troupe of dancers, athletes and gymnasts who bring myths from around the world to life. They practice in the Georgetown area of Seattle, and rehearsals are videotaped. Not only are the sessions videotaped, all the members of the troupe review the tapes and offer tips on what works, and what needs more practice.

Like these folks, mayors and board chairs are, in one sense, performers. They engage in activities in front of others which require the use of the whole person, and in which mistakes are inevitable. Unfortunately in the world of meetings, we don’t have the friendly custom of reviewing tapes of performances and offering “constructive criticism.” I suppose it’s because meetings are so ubiquitous that they seem easy. But they’re not.

Anybody who gets elected mayor of a city or chair of a board is going to make mistakes while running the meetings, unless she has had a most unusual background of training and experience. So why not ease up on ourselves, and accept that mistakes are inevitable? Getting feedback from councilmembers, board directors and meeting attendees might be a good way to improve fast.

It is certainly true for me that I’ve learned the most about good meeting process when I messed up. People who are willing to set aside what T.S. Eliot called “the endless struggle to think well of ourselves” and analyze their mistakes can make marked improvement. Hmmm, maybe that trapeze isn’t so alarming after all…

Ann G. Macfarlane, PRP

© Jurassic Parliament 2011. All rights reserved.

If you are not already a David Brooks fan, run, don’t walk, to read today’s New York Times column entitled “The New Humanism.” Brooks lays out with clarity and grace the way our culture fails to value— or even recognize—the totality of a human being in many of our social structures and ways of interacting.

At meetings above all else, we are not disembodied heads around a table, but full persons. If the atmosphere and structure of a meeting fail to recognize the importance of the non-conscious, the emotional, and the unspoken aspects of the people attending, that meeting will accomplish far less than it could or should.

Jurassic Parliament has been talking about this side of leadership and meeting management for ten years. It gives me hope to see a nationally recognized figure writing and speaking about this dimension of our humanity.

Ann G. Macfarlane, PRP

© Jurassic Parliament 2011. All rights reserved.