Years ago, as part of my youth that was actually well spent, I was elected to the board of a non-profit student cooperative, and “education” was broadly part of our mission, with specifically “education in self-governance” as a goal we aimed for in all resident student members, to at least some degree.
Electing board members and then teaching them to be good board members was explicitly part of what was going on.
I. Good Theory Seems Rare
I wish I could transmit Holden’s text back in time to my younger self (or maybe this one from another comment) because it would have been useful to have almost any coherent theory back then when I was theory-less and “just trying to help” perhaps using the vague idea that “showing up is 90% of success”.
Something in the by-laws of that co-op, which I came to admire greatly, was the idea of multiple kinds of board seats selected in various ways.
We had an 8 seat board to govern a co-op that owned 4 houses, with the smallest house (which in retrospect maybe we should have sold and bought a bigger one) having 7 bedrooms. Two of the seats were appointed by institutions the co-op wanted to stay friendly with and the “grown-ups” that these institutions sent to our institution were fantastic members, and great role models. Two seats were filled by “at large” elections, and then 1 seat each was filled by each house, to ensure universal representation.
II. Some Wise, Some New?
From the perspective of very wise members who came in based on their skills, their power to provide rhetorical “ballast” on the board involves noticing obviously false-or-bad proposals or ideas, and then helping people see alternatives that are better or wiser or more based in theories not ruled out by plainly visible observable. They can shape the whole discourse in deep ways simply by letting it breathe and nudging rarely. One of the tricks here is to TEACH new young board members WHILE ALSO obeying the precept “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. This precept, however, is obviously not a universal <3
A key point here: high quality service in benevolent governance is not very personally remunerative to the server. Mostly what you do is apply common sense and elbow grease, and mostly what you’re short of is high quality people who are able and willing.
If you have elected representatives, who were willing to run, and able to win an election, it might be wise to cherish them, and teach them? But having such capacity is itself potentially tricky.
(I think there might be a thing that happens sometimes, at the level of civilization-scale oscillations, where the default of a failing governance system is that its death throws bring on conflict and drama, and then people who love conflict and drama get sucked in for the fun of the fight, and then fighting isn’t actually fun, and eventually you have a lot of people, who are engaged, and exhausted by the fighting, and enough of them switch to minimizing conflict while having a seeming-surplus of competent civilization-level “fight-prone governors”, and then you get a brief golden age until they (inter-generationally?) forget how to draw in new people and teach them how or why to govern well.)
III. Conflict Isn’t Fun In The Long Run
The whole red/yellow/green system Holden talked about, and having closed board meetings without the CEO present seems to aim directly at carving out semi-formal exceptions, where un-nice words that could create dramatic conflicts are solicited, but they are solicited in a way that will do the least damage, in case un-nice words are necessary, while avoiding costs… that seems really really useful for what are hopefully really really rare situations?
I think maybe Holden’s model presumes that a non-profit already has a giant war-chest/endowment, and that fund-raising, and body-raising, and anything-except-theory-of-mission-raising is already handled, and what’s necessary is simply to not irreversibly destroy or degrade mission-oriented capacities for a presumptively perpetual mission?
The student housing co-op I served was somewhat similar, and in that it owned houses, and had membership, and collected “rent”, and planned to acquire houses over and over into the deep future, without serious risk of bankruptcy (the question here was “how much financial pain now was worth how much growth in service for future students we would never know?”), until it had enough houses to serve every student in the city who wanted to live in a student housing co-op.
(In practice, at that time, we had a waiting list of students, and were far from the long term goal of serving the whole target demographic.)
The limiting re-agent for the co-op, then, was usually executive capacity, and my participation might have been a net positive, given the alternatives? But also my participation was already institutionally conceived of as: potentially flawed, potentially improvable, and part of what the institution did on purpose as part of its “educational” mission.
In the co-op, part of our recurring yearly patterns included trying to find at least two of the youngest board members, who were likely to stick around, and sending them (plus, if lucky, a third or fourth and fifth) to the NASCO annual conference.
Sometimes there’s a person who refuses to accept a nomination for election to the board, and you send them to the conference, and they come back willing to serve. NASCO was also helpful as a sort of long-running slow-moving abstract community in which one could find people who understood student housing co-ops and were interested in being the executive director of one.
IV. Economically “Marginal” Missions Serving Those In True LOCAL Need
I chatted with my dad a bit, and he was on the board of a town Rotary club during his well spent middle age, and consistent with that service he ended up on the board of the town senior center, that got money from the county to pay a director to run it. (This “being on multiple boards” thing is a pattern that recurs convergently in certain kinds of voluntarily governed civilizations.)
He had this to say in the end: “We loved our executive director. The town loved her. The tragedy was when she retired and sold her house in town and moved away.” In that case, the problem was, arguably… underfunding? (Maybe “inadequate succession planning”?) The seniors were being served, but in their age and poverty, they lacked the capacity to non-trivially govern themselves, or pay for their own governance services… maybe? It is often hard to trace causality cleanly in these matters.
Maybe “towns” are just no longer demographically viable in the current economic meta? For now, I’m happy that towns still exist, even though I don’t live in one anymore. I think they might be critical to the continuance of large functional voluntary governance at the highest levels. Maybe? It is repetitive to say, but maybe the repetition is correct: it is often hard to trace causality cleanly in these matters.
Years ago, as part of my youth that was actually well spent, I was elected to the board of a non-profit student cooperative, and “education” was broadly part of our mission, with specifically “education in self-governance” as a goal we aimed for in all resident student members, to at least some degree.
Electing board members and then teaching them to be good board members was explicitly part of what was going on.
I. Good Theory Seems Rare
I wish I could transmit Holden’s text back in time to my younger self (or maybe this one from another comment) because it would have been useful to have almost any coherent theory back then when I was theory-less and “just trying to help” perhaps using the vague idea that “showing up is 90% of success”.
Something in the by-laws of that co-op, which I came to admire greatly, was the idea of multiple kinds of board seats selected in various ways.
We had an 8 seat board to govern a co-op that owned 4 houses, with the smallest house (which in retrospect maybe we should have sold and bought a bigger one) having 7 bedrooms. Two of the seats were appointed by institutions the co-op wanted to stay friendly with and the “grown-ups” that these institutions sent to our institution were fantastic members, and great role models. Two seats were filled by “at large” elections, and then 1 seat each was filled by each house, to ensure universal representation.
II. Some Wise, Some New?
From the perspective of very wise members who came in based on their skills, their power to provide rhetorical “ballast” on the board involves noticing obviously false-or-bad proposals or ideas, and then helping people see alternatives that are better or wiser or more based in theories not ruled out by plainly visible observable. They can shape the whole discourse in deep ways simply by letting it breathe and nudging rarely. One of the tricks here is to TEACH new young board members WHILE ALSO obeying the precept “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. This precept, however, is obviously not a universal <3
A key point here: high quality service in benevolent governance is not very personally remunerative to the server. Mostly what you do is apply common sense and elbow grease, and mostly what you’re short of is high quality people who are able and willing.
If you have elected representatives, who were willing to run, and able to win an election, it might be wise to cherish them, and teach them? But having such capacity is itself potentially tricky.
(I think there might be a thing that happens sometimes, at the level of civilization-scale oscillations, where the default of a failing governance system is that its death throws bring on conflict and drama, and then people who love conflict and drama get sucked in for the fun of the fight, and then fighting isn’t actually fun, and eventually you have a lot of people, who are engaged, and exhausted by the fighting, and enough of them switch to minimizing conflict while having a seeming-surplus of competent civilization-level “fight-prone governors”, and then you get a brief golden age until they (inter-generationally?) forget how to draw in new people and teach them how or why to govern well.)
III. Conflict Isn’t Fun In The Long Run
The whole red/yellow/green system Holden talked about, and having closed board meetings without the CEO present seems to aim directly at carving out semi-formal exceptions, where un-nice words that could create dramatic conflicts are solicited, but they are solicited in a way that will do the least damage, in case un-nice words are necessary, while avoiding costs… that seems really really useful for what are hopefully really really rare situations?
I think maybe Holden’s model presumes that a non-profit already has a giant war-chest/endowment, and that fund-raising, and body-raising, and anything-except-theory-of-mission-raising is already handled, and what’s necessary is simply to not irreversibly destroy or degrade mission-oriented capacities for a presumptively perpetual mission?
The student housing co-op I served was somewhat similar, and in that it owned houses, and had membership, and collected “rent”, and planned to acquire houses over and over into the deep future, without serious risk of bankruptcy (the question here was “how much financial pain now was worth how much growth in service for future students we would never know?”), until it had enough houses to serve every student in the city who wanted to live in a student housing co-op.
(In practice, at that time, we had a waiting list of students, and were far from the long term goal of serving the whole target demographic.)
The limiting re-agent for the co-op, then, was usually executive capacity, and my participation might have been a net positive, given the alternatives? But also my participation was already institutionally conceived of as: potentially flawed, potentially improvable, and part of what the institution did on purpose as part of its “educational” mission.
In the co-op, part of our recurring yearly patterns included trying to find at least two of the youngest board members, who were likely to stick around, and sending them (plus, if lucky, a third or fourth and fifth) to the NASCO annual conference.
Sometimes there’s a person who refuses to accept a nomination for election to the board, and you send them to the conference, and they come back willing to serve. NASCO was also helpful as a sort of long-running slow-moving abstract community in which one could find people who understood student housing co-ops and were interested in being the executive director of one.
IV. Economically “Marginal” Missions Serving Those In True LOCAL Need
I chatted with my dad a bit, and he was on the board of a town Rotary club during his well spent middle age, and consistent with that service he ended up on the board of the town senior center, that got money from the county to pay a director to run it. (This “being on multiple boards” thing is a pattern that recurs convergently in certain kinds of voluntarily governed civilizations.)
He had this to say in the end: “We loved our executive director. The town loved her. The tragedy was when she retired and sold her house in town and moved away.” In that case, the problem was, arguably… underfunding? (Maybe “inadequate succession planning”?) The seniors were being served, but in their age and poverty, they lacked the capacity to non-trivially govern themselves, or pay for their own governance services… maybe? It is often hard to trace causality cleanly in these matters.
Maybe “towns” are just no longer demographically viable in the current economic meta? For now, I’m happy that towns still exist, even though I don’t live in one anymore. I think they might be critical to the continuance of large functional voluntary governance at the highest levels. Maybe? It is repetitive to say, but maybe the repetition is correct: it is often hard to trace causality cleanly in these matters.