Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Do you wish you had more volunteers in town? Do you have persistent vacancies on boards and committees? Or maybe you have a big issue that's going to be voted on at town meeting, but unsure people in the community are aware and educated about all the issues.
In this episode of the Rethink Local podcast, I talk with Nate Bernitz, who is a community and economic development field specialist at the University of New Hampshire Extension, and we dive into a bunch of practical takeaways to that you can use to help improve your local civic ecosystem through more engaged and effective committees and boards and volunteers.
This topic has come up a lot in meetings and workshops that I've had with town officials, and so Nate and I run through a bunch of best practices that we've seen work out there that you can take and implement directly in your community.
Nate and I recorded actually a pretty long conversation here and I decided to break that into two shorter episodes.
So this episode that you're listening to is more geared towards practical tips that you can take right to your town and implement. The second conversation, which I'll post shortly, is a little more conceptual and philosophical and really, really interesting around the importance of effective community engagement and trust building and things along those lines. Everything that we cover in this episode is available in a free PDF that you can download. There's a link in the show notes and you can find it at Rethink Local Us. If you found anything work really well in your community, please feel free to reach out to me so I can include it in future materials and you can contact me@alexrethinklocal US. So I appreciate you tuning into this and being interested in the subject. Enjoy.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Maybe Nate, do you want to kind of walk us through like a couple of the different types of boards and committees? I think there's, there's a couple different kind of classifications here that I've often seen people get mixed up with.
[00:01:55] Speaker C: So the, the first type of board I would highlight are statutory boards, which are boards that are required through state statute, a select board, a a planning board, etc, so it's, it's clear that you need them, it's clear how to create them, it's clear what they do.
You also have enabled boards and committees like an agricultural or housing or heritage, and the state lays out a process for creating them and what they can do, but you don't have to have them.
You can have advisory committees, for example, an economic development committee that would typically be appointed by a select board. They would give a charter for years. Why we're Creating you here's kind of like how you function. Please report to us in some manner, maybe a parks and rec committee or commission something arts and culture where. And I love these standing advisory committees, or at least in theory because they're created very intentionally. The community says, hey, we have this problem or this opportunity and we as a select board or a planning board, we, we don't really have the capacity and focus to be able to work on this ourselves. So we're going to find a group of citizens that care about this and we're, we're going to have them on a board, we're going to have liaisons and, and they're going to be very focused outcome, outcome based, maybe even better are ad ad hoc, task oriented groups.
These are maybe my favorite and I love ad hoc because what you're doing is saying, hey, we're not creating a committee that's just going to exist in perpetuity even when it kind of loses focus and direction. It's just going to continue to exist and be something that we need members of and have to have meetings and have minutes.
Ad hoc is even more task oriented and goal oriented where it says, hey, we are working on a master plan update, we are working on town center development, we're working on a particular special event and we want to bring a group together to work on and execute this thing. And then that group will dissipate because it no longer has a purpose anymore. That's very attractive to a lot of people that may not be interested in, you know, in one of the other boards, especially younger people, are really interested in volunteer opportunities that are time limited, that, you know, where it's clear what skill they're bringing, where it's clear what the purpose is. And ad hoc boards can really accomplish all those things and can be an awesome on ramp to potentially getting involved with something else that's, that's more permanent because you had this potentially great experience.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Let's, let's talk about that for a second here because so that is a great overview of some of the kind of different types of boards and committees here.
Let's talk about the kind of ad hoc one for a second because I don't know if this is your perspective, but mine is that I think these are underused in a lot of towns. You know, you get someone who's never been involved before and you get them on an ad hoc committee for one particular thing. What do you, Nate, what do you hope happens if that engagement practices in that town are set up? Well, what happens from that point going forward with that person?
[00:05:28] Speaker C: Well, I. Not necessarily any one thing.
I hope that they have a good experience. I hope that they provide value and that the ad hoc committee is able to carry out what it was appointed to carry out. So that's at the bare minimum.
I hope that the people that are involved in that really immerse themselves in the community and learn more about, you know, the, the bigger picture.
Maybe there's a, there's another opportunity for them to step into. Maybe, maybe they're inspired to, to run for something or, or asked to get appointed to a standing committee or an enabled board or a statutory board. It depends on people's circumstances.
We need to recognize that it's, it's not one size fits all.
And it's really great if you can get someone to step in to an ad hoc committee because they have a clear skill set, a clear purpose.
It's time limited. That's an amazing accomplishment. Someone that wasn't involved and now is involved. Even if they complete that and then step off and don't step into some other opportunity, they're primed to get involved again in the future. They're more likely to attend meetings, more likely to vote, more likely to volunteer in other capacities.
And sometimes it's just about having that. Right opportunity and you're kind of building your bench.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Right, right. Okay. And so, so the first piece here is sort of just understanding some of these different possible structures and that there is this opportunity to create these ad hoc committees that can be very specific on particular projects. I mean, one of the things that I think a lot of towns make the mistake about.
And you know, I learned this very early. Fortunately, you know, I got elected. I was very young when I got elected, and there was a lot of people that were like, oh, this is so exciting. You know, we want to get involved. You know, we're going to start coming to the town board meetings. And I was like, why?
They're horrible. They're five hours long, they're at night. It's a lot of process and procedure. If you want to contribute, you get three minutes. And it's not a back and forth, like what? Why would you want to come to that? And you know, what I found was that there was a lot of governing bodies that, you know, select boards and councils that, that use their meetings as the focal point of engagement. Oh, you have a question about this thing? Come to our meeting. My goal as the chief elected official in a town was to have nobody in the meetings because anybody who wanted to participate on A particular project or issue or topic was plugged in in some other area that was going to be more interactive, more interesting, less pressure, all that sort of stuff. And we had a huge number. I mean, we're talking, you know, 60, 70, 80 people on boards and committees in South Orange actively coming to meetings on boards and committees that were producing work products that were being used by the governing body with people that had long term sustained membership on those boards and committees. And I have never worked with a community of that size and seen that number of people engaged in that many different areas. But it was a very intentional effort to actually divert people away from the general governing body meetings and into environments that were more interactive and constructive. And so if there is some question that you have about an issue in town, why not delegate some of that discussion to an ad hoc committee to work on that and then report back to the select board rather than having people come to a select board meeting and have to fit into that public comment framework?
[00:09:19] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely, that's a great example. But put yourself in the shoes of someone who's not involved and they're trying to figure out how to get involved. How many communities have on their website some sort of short get started document on how they can plug into local government.
How many have diverse opportunities of, of different levels of engagement, different ways of participating.
It's, it's easy to point out that hey, maybe you're not going to have the best experience coming to this five hour marathon meeting of, that's focused on procedural, technical issues, but what are they supposed to do instead?
You're talking about a community that put a huge amount of ongoing effort into creating additional opportunities.
All these things are optional and have to be staffed and organized.
Boards have to be trained and recruited.
It's a lot of extra effort in communities that, you know, don't have a lot of staff that are just trying to fill, you know, the few boards and committees that they do have and, and just kind of meet minimum requirements.
We don't want to necessarily, you know, talk about creating a bunch of new things.
But so there's a balancing act between saying, hey, like what, what is feasible and reasonable for, for us to do and let's put ourselves in the shoes of someone in the public and you know, how clear is it what the opportunities for them to engage are? And are we, are we empowering them with information on what happens if they do come to one of these meetings?
So many people that I talk to feel like when they go to a meeting they, it was very different than they expected and they felt like they didn't really have a voice. And yeah, you know, maybe they did have their three minutes of public comment, but the, the public comment was on something really specific and you know, they wanted to talk about maybe something else and, and there wasn't any opportunity to do that. And it kind of didn't even seem like the people on the board were even listening when I talked. And then afterwards there was no follow up.
It seemed like whatever I said just kind of went into the ether and then maybe there was some developer applicant or something that had their lawyers with them and they knew exactly how to navigate the process and I didn't. And so what was the point?
[00:11:49] Speaker B: So, yeah, I, we have, we have
[00:11:51] Speaker C: to think from all angles here.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: It's a great point that, that by having a slightly unapproachable process, unintentionally you end up biasing the engagement towards people that are very experienced, which tends to be people who have very specific agendas.
Let's segue a little bit into, you know, recruiting people, getting people into this whole ecosystem here, right Is it's not telling people to come to a three hour meeting where they get a three minute comment where nobody's necessarily going to respond to them and they have to do it on TV in front of a crowd. And it's not interactive and it really can't be interactive because then it's, you know, governing bodies are going to get into really tricky territory legally about meeting law issues. In both New Hampshire and Vermont, there's rules around giving people equitable access to public comment time. So you really can't engage in a back and forth with somebody without running afoul of those rules.
And so, so rather than thinking about the public comment period or the select board or council meetings as the starting point of engagement. What are some other things that we can do here? And along these lines, I'll start with one. Just, we were talking about, you know, how overwhelming it can be for someone to look at all this stuff and not know where to go. I was recently doing some work with a town in New England. They have 36 boards and committees.
So you are interested in getting involved. You're not sure exactly where do you go. You go to the website, there's 36 different boards and you've somehow got to navigate through all that and understand where you're best suited.
So one of the ideas that I want to throw out there, and let's run through a bunch of these, one of the ideas is not asking people to Volunteer for a specific board or committee, but. But rather creating some volunteer leadership qualities and posting and advertising those and asking people to get involved, whether they are nominating themselves or what I think is often more effective, having community members nominate each other.
And they do that, but not for a specific board. Just because this person is reasonable and thoughtful and cares about the community and has a little bit of free time. And then they then meet with a town stakeholder. That person interviews them and talks to them. Then that town stakeholder says, wow, it sounds like you have a really good skill set in reading. You know, you love reading documents that are long and technical. You'd be great on a development review board or zoning board of adjustment or like, oh, you've got this really big picture thinking and you like engaging with the community. We're going to put you on this border committee. And that basically means making it simpler. Right? There's all this interesting studies out there that's a whole rabbit hole about if you give people too many options, right, their choices end. They end up facing choice paralysis and they don't really know what decision to make and they end up making no decision. And so sometimes I think communities actually hurt themselves by putting too many options out there. People don't know what to do, they don't engage. So the idea is simplify that significantly into a couple categories or one category and get people to just get their name in the hat so you can reach out to them and talk to them more.
[00:15:01] Speaker C: Yeah, that. The sort of matchmaker idea seems like a good one. I would take a step back though, before we're talking about engagement, before we're talking about recruitment even. I think the first step that any, any community, any board or committee should take is thinking about how to make your work more visible and more relevant.
So in my community we have a newsletter that goes out bimonthly, I think, and I look at that every time and I'm like, why is there not a section from each board saying, here's what we're doing or just a little tidbit on some aspect. Why is the planning board not providing some sort of update on progress on the master plan? Why is the select board not sharing a win or something like that? So I can go dig around on the website for minutes and try and parse those and see if I can, you know, by looking at a bunch of them, develop some sort of like, understanding of themes and everything. Why am, why am I being made to do so much work for these boards and committees that just seem completely abstract? Okay. The planning board is doing planning. They're reviewing applications. Like, what. What are we doing here? So, you know, if you're, if you're thinking about trying to inspire people to want to get involved, whether it's them saying, I want to get involved with this board or asking, hey, you know, here's my skills. What, what do you think would be the best fit?
Make people actually interested in, in what these boards and committees are doing, make it seem relevant and then, you know, have, have that invitation to get involved and, and go out and engage people, but like, take that step back and do more education and outreach that isn't about recruitment first.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: And you talked a little bit about.
Go ahead.
[00:17:00] Speaker C: I'd say kind of in that same bucket is recognition of the volunteers that you do have.
How many communities really do that at your. If your community has an annual meeting, why isn't there a part of that meeting that that's about asking different board and committee members to stand up and getting a round of applause and, you know, having them, you know, featured on the website and in newsletters and, you know, make people proud of, of what they're doing and then make people in the public, you know, appreciative of the service that these people are giving. I mean, that really is, is in the same category as making your work visible and relevant in terms of, you know, really attracting people to you without you having to go and actually ask them.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: Right. And that recognition can come in, you know, having a section in your email newsletter, having social media accounts, if you do a town podcast. There's all different great ways to recognize not just employees of the town, but obviously the volunteers as well, and help them feel good about the work that they are doing.
What are some other good kind of retention recruitment stuff that you've seen out there? What else helps?
[00:18:13] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I do think recruitment is downstream from retention.
So my, my focus and what I recommend is really focusing on retention not only to keep, not only to literally retain your members, but also by making the experience a really positive and impactful one. And it's naturally attractive to people that aren't involved but may consider getting involved.
There are some different ways to do that, to make that experience a really good one. Each board should have a clear scope and mission and people, individual members should have job descriptions. And it's really clear, okay, here is my purpose. Here's what I do. No confusion, no, no ambiguity.
And train them like, do meaningful onboarding and ongoing support and professional development opportunities.
Treat them like you like, treat them well.
Treat them like their role matters and that you're here to make them successful because their success is truly important.
There's, there's certainly other things you can do on the back end as well, like make it, you know, make it obvious, like the, it's the logistical things like document sharing and, and stuff like that. It's the meetings themselves.
Your, your board chair should have training and meeting facilitation.
It's really important that they're a good facilitator and that these meetings are efficient, that they're positive, that there is conflict resolution capacity. You know, when, when there are disagreements.
These, these meetings should not be something that people dread. They should be something, I mean, maybe look forward to, is a little bit dramatic, but, but not, not dread and, and say, hey, that, that was a good meeting. We, we got things done and I can actually distill what we got done and I was able to get home in a, in a reasonable amount of time.
I'm not like drained and exhausted from another brutal meeting.
That's really important.
Have rules of procedure and follow them and update them.
That's not just a piece of paper or document that exists on some drive and has never looked at. It's a guide to how you do these things. Something that you regularly look at. I mean, even actually call out at every meeting potentially, you know, at the beginning and say, and because you're not only, you know, reinforcing that for your members, but also for the public.
So all those things I think really come first before you think about community engagement and before you think about any kind of recruitment. When you do think about recruitment, I think it's about pathways.
So, you know, people should have a diverse array of ways to get involved. It's not just about, okay, there's this board, this board and this board, but also those ad hoc committees, sort of special meetings.
You know, when we get into the engagement realm, we have community forums, we have focus groups, maybe we facilitate storytelling, we have world cafes. You know, whatever you're doing, give people an opportunity to come and engage maybe just one time in a meaningful way and you know, get out there on the front lines.
Go, like I said in the beginning, you know, go to the soccer field, set up a table, you know, have a, you know, have post it notes and clear questions and you know, information for people that are interested in, you know, onboard them onto, you know, an email list. Use that opportunity where you're collecting a little bit of targeted feedback to, you know, to do a little bit of education.
All these things can work in tandem, but you've got to get your house in order first.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: Right. And so to some degree, what it sounds like what you're saying, I mean, I would say this is similar for recruiting employees that if you don't have that stuff organized. Right. You really shouldn't be bringing new people into the fold yet.
[00:22:40] Speaker C: Right? Yeah. If you're, if you're in a position where you say, we have a seven person board and we don't even have seven people to serve on that board, or we, we don't have enough people running, so your immediate instinct is, okay, we gotta go pedal to the metal and try and recruit people, beg people to join. And I mean, you do need to have a minimum number of members to be sure.
But are you stopping and asking why that's the case? Is it because no one in Your community of 3,000, 5,000, 7,000 people cares about this?
I don't think so. Right. Like, you know, ask those hard questions, reflect, collaborate between board and staff to, you know, to do some problem solving. Make sure you're devoting some of your meetings, you know, to these discussions instead of just business or you know, maybe alternating meetings saying, hey, this is a business meeting, the next meeting is a capacity building, you know, type meeting and really give space for that. Don't just kind of like keep plowing ahead because you don't want to have those hard discussions.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great point.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: And I think, I think you're right that that is exactly what a lot of boards and committees will do is if they're down members, they just go straight to getting new people and they're not really asking the questions about why they're not retaining people.
And I think a lot of towns do that with employees as well. They have all this turnover and they're not really figuring out why they're having all this turnover. They keep hiring people and they keep having turnover.
And so a little bit of self reflection here goes a long way. And so we're going in a slightly different order in the conversation here because the next set of bullet points, understanding, and maybe depending on my editing skills, I can switch these two different orders around when I finally, when we put the podcast out and do the retention first. But we've got a kind of bullet point that is a little bit more about running effective meetings and having effective boards. So we're going to get to that in a minute. But let's assume that some of those pieces are met for the moment. Anything else on the recruitment side that you think would Be valuable as far as getting, getting new people interested? We haven't touched on yet,
[00:24:58] Speaker C: I don't think so. What about you? What comes to mind for you?
[00:25:02] Speaker B: I mean. So let's see. We've talked a little bit about, you know, understanding the different types of committees. I mean, I guess, you know, not only the different categories of them, but also the different topic areas, making sure they're matched to some of the community needs, how to use some of them so that people might be actually enjoying coming to the meetings, so that they're not just getting a three minute thing, but they're actually on a committee where they're producing work that is then going to be used, you know, that's good for recruiting the right kind of person. We've talked a little bit about the idea of having people nominate other people, which I mentioned sort of quickly, but I think is actually a really important point. I've seen very few towns approach it that way, but I have done a lot of recruitment with trying to get people running for office at different points in my work life. And having people nominate other people changes the demographics that you tend to get of people who get involved.
You know, one of the difficult gender biases that I think we see in a lot of governments is, I mean this is obviously these are oversimplified, but men tend to over nominate themselves for things and women tend to under nominate themselves for things. And from the data that I've seen in the work that I've done by people nominating other people, you equalize that bias a little bit.
And so you don't need someone to be like, I am the greatest person I should be on this board. You say, do you know somebody in the community who's really thoughtful and cares about the community and you know, et cetera, et cetera. And most people know somebody like that, that person gets nominated. And even if they decline being on a board or committee, they still might really appreciate being nominated. And this morphs into my next point which is treating this as a long term engagement organizing strategy, which means keeping people's contact information, collecting people's contact information.
So if you have a sign up sheet at your board or council meetings, there should be a, there should be a sign up sheet.
People aren't legally required to sign up. I don't believe if they don't want to. But I would make sure that you have an email address column there and that after any board meeting where you have signups that on that sheet, even if it's only three people who came to the meeting and signed up the next day. Email those three people. Somebody emails those three people with a forum email just says thanks for coming to the meeting.
You know, if you have any outstanding questions, let us know.
And I think building those things and building that database of people up over time, over the course of months and years, you'd be shocked at how many people you'll ultimately end up capturing into that.
[00:27:35] Speaker C: Alex, I know I'm the guest, but let me ask you another question. Sure.
Whose job is it to do that?
And kind of a.
Also on the meeting end of things, how do you balance in your experience boards that have too much group think and too much or too much conflict. How do you sort of look at getting that sweet spot?
[00:28:01] Speaker B: Well, I'll answer the first one first because it's way easier than the second one. So the first one. I think ultimately most small towns don't have a dedicated staff person doing communications related stuff. However, related things might fall on one or two or three different people. If there isn't a dedicated person doing communications and a communications person, I would call that person an engagement person. Right. They're not just putting information out, but they're also doing all this stuff. If you don't have that, I think there's basically three or four different positions that typically would get looped in here.
One is an executive assistant. If there's a town administrator or town manager. Often I've seen those people coordinate things related to governing body meetings. Often I've seen them coordinate volunteer applications in communities.
Not always, but sometimes.
Or coordinate people that sort of like generally reach out to the town but don't know where to go. That's one person that could potentially be responsible.
The next is somebody in the clerk's office or the clerk. It depends on the different towns and whether you have an elected or appointed or whether you have a clerk and a deputy clerk sometimes in those. In some communities I've seen clerks deal with volunteer and board appointments because they often are doing the swearing in ceremonies. They're keeping track of board, especially statutory board appointments and terms.
Um, so somebody should have a spreadsheet that's got all your boards and committees, all your positions listed out and when they were appointed and when those terms end. Often I've seen those, but not always live in the clerk's office.
The next person who might be responsible would be a town administrator or town manager.
And especially as far as designing some of the engagement programs.
And sometimes I think in some communities, I know, you know, I do town manager recruitments and Oftentimes, select boards want the town manager to be out in the community, doing office hours, doing coffees with people, stuff like that. So if that's part of the job description in that town, then that person should be doing it. And then the fourth person is an elected official.
And that certainly in a city form of government, you know, should be a mayor, most likely. But in a select board, I think it can be a select board chair. And that person isn't making decisions on behalf of the board, but they are bridging a communication and engagement gap between the town government and the community at large. And so I personally think that's one of the best uses of elected official time in a local government is not just doing random, haphazard engagement, but doing coordinated, planned engagement as elected officials, where you're. You know, one of the things that I view is basically door knocking and making phone calls.
It was advice I got when I was in elected office by a really wonderful, longtime New Jersey public servant who passed away recently. And just. But it just had a really good history of engaging people in his district where he was a state senator. This is Dick Cody, who also briefly served as governor of New Jersey. And his advice was just to call random people every weekend. And I did that, and I called people. And it was funny, especially in the beginning. People said, wait a second, why are you calling me? I thought the election already happened. I'm like, no, no, no, the election happened, and actually I won somehow. I'm just calling to see how things are going.
And people were very appreciative of that. And I was able to get outside of my bubble, right outside of the people who I already knew and who were already engaged, because I was literally picking random phone numbers out of a phone book, calling those people, logging them in a spreadsheet, following up with them, adding their email list to our town email newsletter. And we got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of email addresses from that. And that's part of the reason we were able to build out so many good engaged boards and committees, because I had a big database of people that I could go to. So those would be the four people that I would think would be most involved in this.
To your second question, how do you balance between groupthink and divisiveness? We could probably do an entire podcast about that.
But I would give maybe one or two quick thoughts.
One is, I think sometimes stakeholders appointing stakeholders have the fear about appointing what they would call a negative person to a border committee, someone who is showing up, giving them a hard time. You know, putting in public records requests, you know, questioning them on things, stuff like that. I think there's two categories of people that fall in that group. One is people who really don't have good intentions. They are, they have an interpersonal conflict with an elected official. They felt wronged in some way and they are not trying to solve an issue. They are trying to make a point. And the point is about them, not about the community.
I don't think that's the larger group. I think the larger group is people who feel aggrieved in some way and maybe they were by the town. A process that didn't go right, a decision that was made not transparently.
And those that, that group of people, they might be engaged negatively, but they could be brought in. I think that's probably 80% of the people that, let's say, you know, these are not the right terms, but quote unquote, engage negatively.
Most of those people I think could engage constructively. And I think sometimes what towns do is they're afraid to engage those people and they just ignore them. And then those people get really. Obviously someone who's frustrated. Ignoring them is the absolute worst thing you could do. That is only going to make them more mad and more frustrated and they have lots of time and they're going to just keep engaging down that pathway. Get that person on a border committee. Now, if you've got a seven person board, would I appoint all seven people from that group? Probably not, but I would definitely want to bring, you know, if you're doing a fire station, you know, you got to redo the fire station in your town and you've got one or two people who are really don't see the need for it, don't think that the town can afford it. Put one or two of those people on the committee. Make sure you bring that perspective into the fold.
And what I have often seen is that those people, even if they disagree, their tone and tenor changes. Because now they're working with neighbors and community members. They're seeing the inside. They're seeing that none of these decisions are really easy. They're seeing that nobody's trying to like get anything by. The town's just trying to do the best it can under very difficult circumstances and the empathy goes up even if the disagreement stays. And I, I think that's a pretty big win.
[00:34:40] Speaker C: Yeah, that, that's all really smart. I, I think just on the group think side of things, like conflict doesn't only come from some flamethrower who, you know, who you invite into the process. Sometimes it comes just from someone or, you know, or a group of people that just have a different perspective.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:35:01] Speaker C: Think about a planning board where, you know, maybe the majority of the board is comprised of people that are, are very cautious of development and then someone runs. They're not a flamethrower, they're just more pro development and they, they want to, you know, see what they can do to, you know, to get more housing built in the community.
That's, that's not. I mean, that's just kind of like normal conflict of different perspectives. But.
[00:35:26] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:26] Speaker C: I see so much pressure sometimes for conformity. Like, let's just keep moving.
Like there's not really space, you know, to have this debate.
We're fine. We'll have some votes and there'll be four.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: One.
[00:35:40] Speaker C: But me, as someone that would consider getting involved in local government, I would want to be on a board where it's possible and even encouraged to hear those different perspectives and not drive everything to consensus and group thing.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:56] Speaker C: Of course I don't want conflict, but I think we focus so much on the dangers of conflict that we don't focus enough on the dangers of groupthink.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: I agree with you. I mean, this is such an important topic and you know, the only way to summarize before I would love to move into some retention efforts would be there's this quote that I'm going to not really get right. So I'm not going to try. But it's from Jerome Lanier, who I think is a brilliant thinker about a whole bunch of stuff kind of related to what we're talking about.
And he said something along the lines of, if you think you live in a democracy and nobody's disagreeing, think again.
And that disagreement, as long as it's constructive and it's for these broader goals, is not only is not only fine, it is actually a required part of the process and that if we don't have that, we are going to go down some very scary roads from a governance perspective.
And so that's a huge topic. And I think my personal feeling is that having a very good chair or vice chair who actually has either had experience facilitating, mediating, adjudicating things, you know, former teachers are good at this, principals, all people with backgrounds like that often are very good chairs because they can bring multiple perspectives in without getting things off the rails, but without making everybody think the same way. And I think one of the biggest problems actually in local government, the whole other topic, is chairs not knowing how to be chairs and that this is really their responsibility to run good meetings.
[00:37:28] Speaker C: I, I don't think that's a different topic though. This is a key aspect of recruitment and retention is having, well facilitated meetings. And you know, just to put a finer point on it, what happens when you have group think is someone looks at that and says, why should I spend two, three hours every two weeks just being a rubber stamp? What is the point? Right, so it is connected.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right, you're right, it is. And I think threading that needle is not easy, but it's really important and
[00:38:00] Speaker C: you can train people to become good meeting facilitators. Someone doesn't have to come in having, having all that experience.
And of course someone coming into a board or being a chair, they don't have to take training, they, they can just come in as they are. So you have to think as, you know, local municipal leadership on how you have that conversation with someone. And I think it's by just having a culture of professional development, not targeting anyone in particular and saying, hey, we create these opportunities. This is, this is simply what we do. And you know, we're gonna, we're gonna pay for you to do this. And it's, it's not because of you, it's because this is how we operate.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that and it's a great point. And not only offering the development, but making sure it's being offered broadly, not not targeting a particular person.
[00:38:50] Speaker A: So.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: Okay, so we've talked about a couple different things here.
Basically, I'm going to break this down into three categories to summarize for everybody. You know, we talked a little bit about the different types of boards and committees between your statutory boards, your enabled but optional boards, your standing advisory committees. And then one of the things that Nate and I both think are sort of underused is your ad hoc, task oriented, time limited, narrow focused committees that can really engage people on something specific and be a first point of engagement that might bring people in in the longer run. The second thing we talked about, although it may not have been in exactly this order, but Nate makes a great point that retention efforts really are important to do before recruitment efforts and that if you're having turnover or you're not having people stay on your boards, think about how you're managing as a board before you start getting new people in. And that could be things like having a really clear reporting structure in scope. I have seen a lot of communities start committees without a scope at all or with a very broad scope, make it goal oriented. Even if it's going to be a permanent committee or board, have bullet points about what this board and committee is supposed to be doing, what their reporting structure is going to be. Are they producing reports every month? Is it every quarter? Is it annually? Are they putting something in the town report? Make that clear upfront about what that board should be doing. And don't be concerned about asking people to do too much. I often hear people express worry, oh, these are volunteers. We don't want to ask them to do too much.
I think my experience certainly that we ask, by putting too little structure on it, you end up kind of getting the wrong people in.
And what you really want to do is have the structure, goals and expectations clear and that that will help people be effective and retain them. On these boards, having job descriptions for individual positions is really helpful. And holding people accountable to meeting attendance is really valuable. If somebody's been appointed to a board and they miss four meetings in a row, from my perspective, that person, if you haven't had, if you've had a conversation and they're still not engaging, get them off that board and get somebody in who really wants to contribute effectively.
If you can provide those people access to town emails and calendars and resources and staff support. Like Nate's mentioned a couple times, having volunteers is not free. But giving people access to municipal resources not only helps protect them legally and helps protect the town legally because they're going to be doing stuff more in compliance with state law, but it makes them feel like a part of the organization.
If you've got a chair, offer them professional development about chairing and facilitating effective meetings. Make sure that people are conforming to ethics rules and rules of procedures, and help give resources to those boards and committees about how to engage the public more broadly so that that ad hoc committee working on that new fire station has some tools and has some guidance about how they can go out and bring more people in and that they basically have the capacity to do that
[00:41:44] Speaker C: on their own just to jump in for a second.
Sometimes with engagement, we forget to talk about why.
The why is not to get more people involved.
That's. That's a means. The right. The why is really to one, have more buy in, but two, even taking a step back is have like not just buy in, but people actually involved in creating these, you know, creating these ideas and these solutions, being bought in because they were a part of it, not just because you politely asked them what they think.
And, you know, ultimately, not only will you have broader capacity and trust and civic health as a result of proactive engagement. Those are wise as well.
But you'll be more successful in actually getting things done.
So just don't lose sight of why you're doing engagement and just and get so caught up in the minutia of like are we getting more people involved? We want to get 150 responses to our survey or we want to get at least 60 people to this meeting. The, the numbers are not important and there's no number you're trying to get to.
So forget that and just be laser focused on why you're doing it.
[00:43:02] Speaker B: I think that's a great point. And if anybody wants to go down the y rabbit hole, Simon Sinek has some great talks online about the importance of all of that.
And so those are some really good retention efforts. And then once you feel like you have an especially a clear point of having an ad hoc committee is part of speaking to that why that Nate was just talking about which is the purpose of all of us gathering here. And then from a recruitment perspective, collecting people's contact information, helping, you know, creating a nomination program where community members nominate each other rather than themselves, considering having people submit volunteer applications and nominations that are broad based. Then town stakeholders interview those people and then help place them on boards and committees so they aren't overwhelmed with all the different choices of where they could get involved. Those are all things that can really make a big difference from a recruitment perspective, as is the recognition and spotlighting all the great volunteers and explaining the work they do that really hits both the retention and recruitment pieces.
So what I'll try and do in the notes to the podcast is distill some of these down into some numbered lists. But Nate, really appreciate all the work that you do personally and all the work that happens at the Carsey School at unh because a lot of what we've talked about here, I've seen you all post about that you're doing this in New Hampshire and some really great lessons and insights for people. So where can they go if they want to learn a little bit more about that work?
[00:44:31] Speaker C: Yeah, so what I'll do, Alex, is I'll share a few resources from us. I'd also just invite if you're in New Hampshire, please reach out. Alex, you can also share my contact information and if I can't help you, I'll get you pointed in the right direction. Similarly, there are resources in every state and I encourage you to one, not try and do everything on your own and reinvent the wheel.
But also and Alex I know that you actually facilitate this, tap into other people doing the same work as you.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: That sounds great Nate, and appreciate you sharing that and joining on this and I will include all those resources for folks afterwards. So thanks again.
[00:45:15] Speaker C: Thank you Alex. This was fun.
[00:45:19] Speaker A: Hey everyone, Alex here. Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Rethink Local podcast. And don't forget that you can head to RethinkLocal US boards and download a free four page PDF with 10 best practices that we talked about in this episode and some tips where you can take them directly to your town and start building up your volunteers and boards and committees.
