We got to five of six agenda items at our first Core Collaborators meeting on Feb 25th. The first item was arguably the most important and we took the most time with it, but did not come to a definite conclusion.
1) What does membership in the Council of Organizations mean and what do we do if a member organization does not agree with a decision or publication of the Council?
There were many ideas came up in this conversation, so it would be a good notion to use the “Start new Thread” button in our Core Collaborators subgroup instead of just replying to this long message. That way we can take up ideas one by one. Btw, InterMix allows you to rate messages for both interest and approval. We should use that feature to help us understand better where we stand.
What I heard was that we were leaning towards decision by consensus, though we have to realize this will slow things down and perhaps too much. We agreed we are a project of UNA-SF. We want to learn more about the national UNA-USA Council of Organizations, but we want to be independent of that national organization. The idea that we will have member organizations, affiliated organizations and affiliated individuals was well received. Only member organizations in this scenario have voting rights, but affiliated organizations and individuals do have speaking rights. As soon as we talk about voting, even consensus voting, the question of how formal our Council should be comes up. Presumably if we are going to be voting, we need bylaws! Is there an option to be totally informal? We did agree, I believe, that new members and affilates must be approved unanimously by the existing members and affiliates. We thought the Core Collaborators should be limited in size so in-person meetings can be useful. We agreed that at least member groups should allow us to put both their logo and their mission statement on our website. Presumably also affiliated groups. Perhaps member groups should be requested to put our logo and mission statement on their website as well.
What didn’t come up and needs to be discussed is leadership within the Core Collaborators. As it is now, Eliz and myself are taking the responsibility, but I would like to suggest that each Core Collaborators meeting should be organized and chaired by someone else. I would be willing to help as requested.
2) We already agree we support the noble goals of the UN - peace, human rights, MDGs and post-2015 sustainable development goals and so forth. We also agreed to adopt an ambitious mission to unite the Bay Area in support of those UN goals. Under this heading we need to come up with our mission statement.
3) We agreed to use the Collective Impact framework for organizing ourselves. Please read about collective impact and take the time to memorize the five points. All five points will need to be discussed. Point number two, shared measurement, especially.
4) We are agreed on making the UN 70th for Oct 24, 2015 our centerpiece activity.
5) For the March 13th meeting, Eliz has a couple ideas for speakers. Does anyone else have ideas? We will discuss membership and structure further in break out groups. I would like to also discuss UN 70th in breakout groups, so we stick to the “Vision, Structure and Action” meeting format, speaker for vision, then breakouts for structure and action.
-- Roger Eaton
415 933 0153
rogerweaton@gmail.com
