A new message from Julia Coates. What a mess. Hello, everyone – Summary: In this installment, I will outline additional aspects of the boilerplate by-laws of the 22 At Large satellite organizations and explain why they were structured as they are and how they relate to good community organizing principles. Interested? Read on… In the last installment, I mentioned a previous Cherokee organization in Albuquerque and how it had become abusive of many of its members. As those of us who defected from that group were devising by-laws for a new group, we sought provisions for our governing document to implement a more positive organization. The old group had had only four officers and sometimes there would be more than one member of a household among them, which made for a pretty ingrown situation. We felt that seven was a good Cherokee number and that our council would be expanded. We also wrote into the by-laws that only one member of a household could be on the council at a time. We also said that the majority of the council’s members must be CN citizens. We knew of Cherokee organizations, particularly a previous group in Houston, that had been overwhelmed by non-citizens and over time, the citizens had withdrawn from it. While non-citizen participation was encouraged as part of the “firewall” concept, we wanted to insure that the group remained firmly under the direction of citizens of the Cherokee Nation. These provisions worked well for the Albuquerque group, as they started out relatively strong, essentially having already been organized for years. There have always been enough citizens to step into council positions as required, and they have had enough active members overall that there was never an issue of needing multiple people from the same family/household on the council. But other groups have had to fudge this last requirement a bit, especially in their early building years. None of the groups has ever violated the provision that the majority of officers must be CN citizens (as it is also required by the overarching non-profit that they are chaptered under). But sometimes it has been difficult to recruit seven people to fill the initial council positions, and out of necessity some of the groups have allowed members of the same household/family to serve on their council at the same time. In most instances this has not been a problem, but good organizational principle would say that ultimately, groups should try to enforce this tenet as they grow and become stronger in order that family voting blocs and conflicts of interest are avoided. One of the issues in the old Albuquerque organization had been that the man who was the self-styled “chief” always ostensibly stood for re-election, but in fact, no one ever ran against him, and there was an unspoken understanding that no one ever should, as he was the “chief” and that was that. Many of us did not agree with the situation where people were discouraged from taking leadership roles, and that the leadership should not be contested. In government and community organizing both, leadership dispersed across many and challenging the existing leadership are usually evidence of healthy systems. The other issue was that the “chief” often publicly represented himself as such in the media and in his political endorsements. As the title was hierarchical and the public representations were egoistic, we considered ways to minimize these aspects in our new by-laws. We rejected titles like “chief,” “president,” and “chairperson” as coming from the top-down, hierarchical model of western culture, rather than from an indigenous model. It is too easy for the people holding those offices and for others in the group to look to them as the “leader” of the organization, when we really wanted everyone to be on equal footing and to work equally hard. Instead, we titled the officers according to the job they did – council meeting facilitator, recordskeeper, membership coordinator, treasurer, community relations, and two general meeting coordinators – and described their duties. No one was any more the head of the organization than anyone else. Each had a job to do and that’s all. When people ran for the council, they didn’t run for a specific office, only to be on the council. To resist any tendencies of an individual to remain in one position too long, and thus begin to feel that they “owned” it, we required that the roles had to be re-assigned each year. With two-year, staggered terms, and limits after two terms, this insured that people would take turns doing several of the different jobs, and that the group would have a broad range of experience in its leadership. To address the problem of misrepresentation, the by-laws for the new group also disallowed any member to represent themselves as a member of the organization for commercial or personal gain, or for self-promotional purposes. Besides the “chief” of the old organization, there had been at least one other non-citizen member who had engaged in questionable New Age-y activities (this was New Mexico, after all!) and had used his affiliation with the group to do so. So using one’s affiliation with the group to market Indian-themed products or services, or even to provide cultural or other kinds of presentations, is prohibited. The by-laws do allow one to state their membership in the organization on a resume. It was a small thing, but the new by-laws also stated that donations/honoraria over $50 that were made by the group had to be approved by the entire membership. This resulted from the fact that the previous “chief” and his wife had long promoted their daughter as the group’s “princess” and had copper crowns made for her, just as the Miss Cherokee representative had, paid for out of the group’s treasury which was built through membership fees. There had never been any competition for the title (which was questionable anyway), and others in the group had been irritated that their children and grandchildren had not been considered, and everyone had bristled at the expense. We also implemented independent and unbiased election processes for officers, as the previous “chief” and his wife had usually chosen candidates and urged others in the group to vote for their choices, deliberately undermining the other people who also threw their names into the ring. These are among the most significant aspects of the by-laws of the 22 At Large satellite communities today. They were fashioned after numerous meetings of eight or ten people over several months and much concerted discussion about how to counter the potential for our new group to become as distorted as the previous one had been. The Cherokee SouthWest Township will celebrate its fifteenth year in existence later in 2014, and it is perhaps the largest of the groups. It meets monthly, with anywhere from 30-50 people present at each meeting. It has a good mix of citizens and non-citizens, and for many years has produced a 12-20 page monthly newsletter. The members of the group, with whom I worked in 1999 to fashion by-laws for a strong, compassionate, independent organization, tell me that in 15 years, they have made only one revision to the by-laws, lowering the percentage of ballots that must be returned in order to validate an election to 50% + 1. Although the 22 satellite groups have never been required to follow these by-laws, all have adopted some version of them, even though making some revisions to tailor them to their specific situation. Thus the 22 groups function with a fairly consistent set of governing principles across all, and in accordance with the best practices of community organizing. Julia
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 14:08:35 +0000
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