The Board and the Staff

Hy Resnick

I've often wondered why staff in child care agencies had so few meaningful contacts with board members of their agency. As a service deliverer I obviously knew a great deal about our program – what it was really like and what our experience was in working 24-7 with our needy and sometimes acting out kids. I also knew the board needed to understand our program in order to communicate our distinctive approach to working with these kids in our community. And of course the more they knew the more effective they could be in playing their role as interpreters of our service to the community. But our top leadership sometimes/often kept me and my co-workers away from the board except at ceremonial events where little of substance could be exchanged or discussed.

There were probably good reasons for limiting contact between staff and board – chief among them being the lack of understanding on the part of staff of the nuances and politics of working with boards where the truth-trust model of work with troubled children is less used than the strategic-political model often present in work with boards. And the limited experience of staff who were skilled in work with the children in care, but typically had little training for (or for that matter, little interest in) work at that upper echelon strategic and management level.

But I believe that there should be more staff-board connection for the good of the agency and I thought I'd try to put together this column on the benefits of increasing staff board contact.

Benefits for the board

If one of the roles¹ of a board member is to interpret the agency services to the various constituencies in the community, they could benefit from more substantive contact with the staff whose 24-7 work with their young clients can best educate board members to what life is like for the youngsters in care. And, for that matter, educate board members to what life is like for the staff whose difficult and delicate job it is to help these young clients². These contacts could be of at least four types:

Board and staff working together on a subcommittee to prepare a report on a topic relevant to some issue on which the board is working.
Board and staff interacting together on some tangible project such as building a playground or upgrading a children's playroom in the agency.
Board and staff making a presentation to the city council or legislature seeking funds for an agency project where board members make the presentation and staff members provide statistical or research supports.
Board and staff go on an overnight together where board members serve as helpers to the staff-led program.

All four of these activities can help both of these groups get to know and trust each other – by both working together to help the agency. The relationships which can develop from such joint activities can have the effect of bringing more in alignment three significant populations of an agency, i.e. the board, the staff and management – an alignment which doesn't always happen in the child care world.

Notes

Agency executives and staff can think of many other creative ways for staff to interact more with board, and by so doing build a constructive partnership between these two role players in the agency.
Only staff members can provide the intimate and poignant interactions that they experience with these troubled and needy children and youth. The management team do try to convey these sensitive exchanges to the board but they themselves are often removed from the day-to-day interactions with the kids and consequently lose something of what it feels like to do the intensive work with troubled children.