Management Committee

Tonight we have our monthly Management Committee meeting. For those who don't know every charity has a Management Committee or Board (the names are different depending on your legal structure, but they are basically the same thing). It is their role to manage the charity as a whole. So they agree annual budgets, monitor spend against income, make decisions about large financial expenditure and decide on policies and strategies. They are elected at an annual meeting - the AGM, and your rules set out who is allowed to stand for election - usually people who use your services or have some type of involvement or interest in your charity and its work.

Sounds great. The reality is that unsurprisingly most people are not interested in coming to a monthly meeting to agree overall issues. If they are interested in your charity they normally want to be involved as volunteers in projects where they feel they can make a real difference. So in reality it is hard to get people to agree to be on your Management Committee and even harder to then get them to turn up regularly.

This means in common with lots of small charities that we have a range of people of differing 'abilities' on our committee. Basically if you turn up at the AGM and say you want to stand for the Committee, unless you are very objectionable, you will be voted on - as there normally won't be anyone standing against you. We have 9 committee members. Some are very good like our Chairperson who is intelligent, has a good understanding of what we are doing and who you can trust to make intelligent reasoned decisions.

However you also have people like David. David uses a lot of our services. He is in his early forties and in the jargon has very poor social skills. This means he does things like leers very obviously at any young women who happen to be around, will happily chat away with you while eating thus displaying a mouthful of food, and struggles to understand what is actually being discussed at committee meetings. When he first said he wanted to be on the committee we tried desperately to dissuade him, but to no avail. So he turned up stood for election unopposed and ended up supposedly deciding how our charity is run. In reality of course he doesn't really have much say, but it is embarassing when outside people attend our meetings and realise he is on our committee.

At least we don't have anyone like Diane who was on my committee at the last charity I worked for. The Diane's of the world are unfortunately attracted to the committees of small local charities. Diane is a bully who doesn't work, is a single mother, has one son out of control and has no real power in her own life. So she loves getting involved in committees where she can try and boss the staff about and insist that she knows what real life is all about unlike other people on the committee. Diane was one of the main reasons I left my last charity job. It's just not worth the hassle. She was also almost impossible to get rid of as she attracted to the committee her band of quiet loyal cohorts who would agree with everything she said - at least in public. To understand this group just think of the bully at school surrounded by her 'friends' who do her bidding and agree with everything she says.