What the heck does the SAA Board of Directors do? What are they up to? How do they run the SAA? Do they approve everything the SAA does? Who are these people, anyway? Well, let me try to answer some of these questions and tell you a little more about the SAA Board.
The Board currently has 10 members, including the CEO, Pam Brasch, who is a non-voting board member. The officers of the Board are James Maurer, Chair; Gilda Barston, Chair-Elect; and Joanne Melvin, Secretary. The other Board members are Fay Adams, Yuko Honda, Art Montzka, Mary Cay Neal, Ellen Shertzer, and Ed Sprunger. The Board meets 3 times a year usually for 1 and a 1/2 days.
Two members of the Board are elected each year by the membership for a 3-year term. The Board can also appoint someone if it feels it has a special need. Over the years, most of the board members have been Suzuki teachers. However, recently the Board has been able to broaden its perspective by including people who are not teachers, but have a great deal of leadership experience in other areas as well as a thorough knowledge of Suzuki education.
The SAA Board of Directors has been working on behalf of the membership ever since the organization was founded in 1972. Originally the SAA was small and the board was small. The board operated as a “working board”. The board actually managed all aspects of the association. The president, assisted by an executive committee, made all policy and management decisions. An administrator or executive secretary, with little or no staff help, carried out these directives. It was a bare bones operation.
This approach continued for many years. It is a common non-profit association board process. It worked well for the SAA for a long time. However, as the SAA grew, so did its activities, projects, responsibilities, programs, and services for the membership. Eventually, the association was able to add more staff to keep up with expansion. The SAA also made important changes to keep abreast of up-to-date, proven principles of management and governance in the non-profit sector. These changes moved the board from a “working board” to a “governance board”. There were too many things going on for the Board to stay on top of everything. So the SAA Board adopted “Policy Governance”, a board governance model developed by John Carver. This model has been used very successfully by numerous large and small non-profit, for-profit, and government boards throughout North America.
Under Policy Governance, the SAA Board has written broad but comprehensive policies, which clearly define its own commitment to governance:
“The purpose of the board, on behalf of “the ownership” is to see to it that the Suzuki Association of the Americas (1) achieves appropriate results for appropriate persons at an appropriate cost, and (2) avoids unacceptable actions and situations.
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The board will govern with an emphasis on (a) integrity and truthfulness in all methods and practices; (b) outward vision rather than an internal preoccupation, (c) encouragement of diversity in viewpoints, (d) strategic leadership more than administrative detail, (e) clear distinction of board and chief executive roles, (f) collective rather than individual decisions, (g) future rather than past or present, and (h) proactivity rather than reactivity.
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The job of the board is to represent “the ownership” in determining and demanding appropriate organizational performance.
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To accomplish its job products with a governance style consistent with board policies, the board will follow an annual agenda that (1) completes a re-exploration of Ends policies annually and (2) continually improves board performance through board education and enriched input and deliberation.
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The Chairperson assures the integrity of the board’s process and, secondarily, occasionally represents the board to outside parties.
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The board commits itself and its members to ethical, businesslike, and lawful conduct, including proper use of authority and appropriate decorum when acting as board members.
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The leadership success of the board is a direct result of the individual and collective participation of its members.
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Board committees, when used, will be assigned so as to reinforce the wholeness of the board’s job and so as never to interfere with delegation from board to CEO.
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A committee is a board committee only if its existence and charge come from the board, regardless of whether board members sit on the committee. The only board committees are those which are set forth in this policy. Unless otherwise stated, a committee ceases to exist as soon as its task is complete. The CEO will serve as a non-voting member of each committee.
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The Nominating Committee will properly screen and nominate, for board and membership consideration, the Board Chair, Chair-Elect, and the officers of the organization, as stipulated in the bylaws, and will nominate individuals to fill vacancies on the board.
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Because poor governance costs more than learning to govern well, the board will invest in its governance capacity.
The Board does make sure that all SAA activities help to further the Ends Policies, but it does not oversee individual programs of the association; the staff is concerned with that. The Board is concerned with leading the association into the twenty-first century. It keeps it sights set on the future. It wants the SAA to become a model for music education associations to emulate. It wants to make sure that all Suzuki education is of a very high quality. It wants to make sure that Suzuki education is not only available to a select few, but that it is available to all future generations of Americans.
