Governance gets weighty
Newstead 2021 was well represented at a workshop in Castlemaine on August 4 to learn about the roles, responsibilities, liabilities and protections for board or committee members of not-for-profit organisations like ours.
Karly Smith, Geoff Park and myself attended.
The workshop, organised by Mt Alexander Shire’s Strengthening Volunteerism Project Officer Jacqueline Brodie-Hanns, was succinct, practical and alerted us to five key responsibilities.
Board or committee members, whether of incorporated associations or Section 86 committees, need to:
a) act honestly and fairly
b) use their powers to further the organisation’s purpose
c) avoid conflicts of interest
d) be diligent, careful and attentive and use their skills for the organisation’s good
e) act in the organisation’s best interests
Since Newstead 2021 is an incorporated association, these are our legal duties.
We learnt about risk management policies, grievance procedures and briefly, public liability, although the question of whether we as committee members need to take out professional indemnity on top of Newstead’s already expensive public liability insurance remains unanswered.
Such expenses bite into money for our projects.
The workshop which attracted people from as far as Hamilton and Ballarat, was led by Kate Fischer and Nathan McDonald, lawyers from PilchConnect, which offers legal assistance for community organisations. (Pilch stands for Public Interest Law Clearing House.) Check www.pilchconnect.org.au
Thanks to Kate, Nathan and the dynamic Jacqui B-H.
We’re happy to share what we learnt with other groups in Newstead.
Geoff Park
Genevieve Barlow
The workshop sounds like it was excellent. Am a bit surprised at the unresolved issues of public liability insurance and professional liability insurance, as my understanding in the 1980s when the incorporation of community associations was championed by our state government through legislation, was that the act of becoming an incorporated association and taking some public liability insurance would protect community organisations and the participating individuals from risk, provided that is we employ contractors for professional work who have their own professional indemnity insurance and that we are careful to avoid negligent behaviour, we are not required to fork out more of our project monies to insurance companies. (Maybe my bias is showing through here).
These are excellent guidelines and worth adopting within our community organisations:
a) act honestly and fairly
b) use their powers to further the organisation’s purpose
c) avoid conflicts of interest
d) be diligent, careful and attentive and use their skills for the organisation’s good
e) act in the organisation’s best interests
Am impressed with these key guidelines for acting responsibly within community organisations. They are clear concise, sensible and relatively straightforward and offer some food for thought. Although, how to act on these in particular instances, can be quite a challenge. For example, what is a fair process to allocate limited numbers of plots within a community garden, when we may have more takers than their are plots available? Do we want the process to be as arbitrary as pulling names out of a hat? Would we like to reward the effort of those who put in voluntary work towards setting up the garden? Would group plots be wiser for the larger plots with individual plots being smaller and allocated later? How do people who are wishing for plots and also making decisions about allocating these do so with fairness. We are fortunate that within a relatively small community potential conflicts of interest are quite obvious, but the community is not so large as to be able to bureaucratize itself to protect and detach itself from potential conflicts of interest. Nor would we necessarily wish to place community decisions in outside hands. Our way of working as a community seems to favour minimising bureaucracy and maintaining our communal cooperative spirits.
People may like to comment further here on on the Community garden blog http://newsteadgarden.wordpress.com/