Session materials from "Cooperative Governance: A Look at Policy Governance Principles Applied to Student Cooperative Housing," presented by Billy Thogersen and Ashleigh Lassiter at NASCO Institute 2015.
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Do you often feel like your board of directors spends excessive time on things that don't really matter? Do your board meetings tend to be painfully long, rambling, or unsatisfying? Perhaps the problem is that your organization lacks a functional theoretical strategy for governing itself - an all-too-common issue among volunteer boards. After all, with an infinite number of interesting things to discuss and decide, how indeed does a board ensure the most important topics get consideration? This 90-minute workshop will investigate the way a well-meaning, volunteer, non-expert group of board directors with limited time can organize their work using policy governance as a tool to enable the board to hold total accountability for the organization and engage in visionary leadership. The course begins with a 30-minute panel discussion/Q&A on governance problems, accountability structures, and visionary leadership, leading into a short presentation on the policy governance theory. Then , the conversation shifts to how ICC Austin implemented a new cooperative governance system using policy governance theory as a guide. For the final 30 minutes, the entire group will conduct a mock board meeting using policy governance principles to demonstrate how they might look in practice.
