This handout is useful for members of cooperative & non-profit boards of directors and includes: Co-op Board Member Job Description; Roles & Responsibilities; Legal Responsibilities of the Board of Directors; Proposal Writing; and Communication Basics.
A guide to why consensus is used among co-ops, and how it is effectively used and facilitated.
Having good meetings can make a huge impact on the satisfaction members have with their coop, and can also be a powerful way of encouraging deeper involvement from all of your membership. NASCO has worked with groups across the continent for over thirty years, and has also cultivated connections with the broader cooperative and non-profit sector, and has used these connections to build excellent training materials for groups looking to improve their meetings.
Four roles of a facilitator at group meetings.
You can use this tool creatively, adapting the intensity of the 4 basic principles to different situations, depending on the level of risk being taken in each setting. Some components of these tools may be inappropriate for some settings, and invaluable in others. The more personal risk involved, the more carefully you want to frame the space at the outset, because a secure anchor is the only thing that will enable a process to fly to the heights of its potential.
This document provides a guide to parliamentary procedure; what is it? how does it work? what are its advantages and disadvantages?
The following approach to facilitation and decision-making outlined in this document is a modified consensus process which came out of the June 2006 NASCO Board meeting after a good deal of discussion and experimentation with different meeting processes. The process outlined below is something of a hybrid, which attempts to combine some of the clarity and formality of Roberts Rules with the participatory and flexible nature of consensus processes.
Techniques for problem solving in meetings.
A decision-making process that many co-ops use is consensus. Consensus is a process of building united judgment whose purpose is not to avoid conflict but to bring out all opinions and perspectives. Each position has a responsibility to present facts and perceptions which are not being considered, to explain her or his position clearly and rationally, and to question the other positions so as to reach full understanding of their positions.
A document of board functions and board self-assesment
