[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Greetings from your Board of Trustees, who are digging into the work of the new board year with virtual meetings and real-life excitement about the board goals we have agreed upon for this year.
This year’s board of trustees consists of newly-elected board members Andrea Delorey and Doug Powell and five continuing members of the board — Sara Steen (who went above and beyond by agreeing to add a fourth year to her board service to help us maintain continuity in the face of all the change that 2020 has brought), Glenn Pearson and Brendan Mahoney, who are beginning their third and final years of board service, Debbie Gentry, who is starting her second year, and me, Sue Sullivan, on my third year of board service and the first of two years of Board Presidency.
At our annual board retreat in August (conducted mostly on Zoom), we settled on the following five goals for the year:
- Strengthening our financial and fiduciary literacy: making our financial oversight a whole-board affair rather than the sole domain of the finance committee, and further refining our financial policies and our monitoring practices.
- Beginning the work of becoming an anti-racism board: educating ourselves and making explicit our collective commitment to anti-oppression work, to seeing with a multicultural lens, and to recognizing and changing racism as we find it in our personal interactions and our institutional policies and practices.
- Making previously identified necessary policy book revisions and creating a system for updating both the policy book itself and the monitoring schedule we created to ensure compliance with our policies.
- Completing our Restoring Wholeness narrative and archival materials: our commitment to the congregation to be compassionately transparent about Foothills’ history of misconduct so that we speak our truth clearly, establish and support healthy boundaries through policy and monitoring, and communicate our commitment to maintaining a safe congregation for all who seek beloved community in Foothills.
- Beginning the process of rewriting our church bylaws and getting the congregation’s input and feedback on them prior to a future congregational vote. To be effective guidance for the board, the Ministry, and the congregation as a whole, bylaws should represent policy governance as we currently inhabit it and the best governance practices as identified by the UUA and other large policy governance churches in our denomination.
The board also set our schedule for the year and will meet on Zoom every third Thursday of the month from 6-8:30 pm.
We are excited to dig into this work, to communicate it out to you regularly, and to further the work of previous boards who recognized the benefits and utility of policy governance in living out our mission more efficiently, joyfully, purposefully, and creatively!
In faith and courageous love,
Sue Sullivan
Board President[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]