Board Meeting Highlights – 18 June 2023
Dear Sangha:
Here are the highlights from the 18 June 2023 KCC Board Meeting.
Present: Board members: Jennifer Chang, John Rothermich (note-taker), Brad Upton, Peter Wood. Guests: Linda Besant, Lama Eric, Liza Baer, Linda Grove, Kate Rudiger
1. Approval of April 2023 Meeting Minutes.
2. Quick Bits.
- Financial Update and Future Board Finance “Deep Dives”: Income is below budget and expenses closely tracking budget. “Reserves” remain at approximately 2.5 months of operating expenses, down from 3.0 months in April. Concerns that revenue shortfalls will be exacerbated by programmatic changes (Khenpo Rinpoche’s cancelled visit and cancelled October Vipassana retreat).
- Sexual Misconduct Policy: Liza continues to look for potential sources of training or orientation for the persons that the policy identifies as the possible recipients of misconduct reports under the new policy.
- September Board Meeting: Jennifer and John R. will both be out of town on vacation for the scheduled September Board meeting, which will accordingly need to be rescheduled.
3. 17th Karmapa Discussion. There was a discussion regarding the Board’s and KCC’s
actions around the sexual abuse allegations against the 17th Karmapa. The Board agreed that neither the Board nor Lama Eric are in a position to moderate or comment on the community listserve emails in general, and that sangha members are likely to have differing views on whether such sharing is appropriate. The Board agreed that a great next step would be to have some teaching by Lama Eric or perhaps Sarah Harding or another guest teacher on how to practice with allegations of abuse by gurus.
4. Strategic Planning Update. The writing team (Chang, Baer, Lama Eric) is starting to draft the plan based on the Strategic Planning retreat outcomes. Also the team will present potential edits to KCC’s mission and vision statements.
There was additional discussion around the process for final approval of the mission, vision and strategic plan. The Board agreed that the Board, the Program Council, and the SG Coordinators should have a chance to comment, and others suggested that we might want to open it up to the entire sangha or at least a larger group for last comments before final approval. The Board agreed to revisit the approval process when we are closer to having drafts to review (likely in a month or two).
5. Board Recruitment. There was discussion of potential Board candidates, and a reiteration of the general consensus that we want at least seven Board members, with preferably at least several being non-straight cis-gendered white men.
6. Executive Director Report. Liza reported that things are going fairly well, but particular challenges include finding ways to delegate and track task completion by volunteers, tracking all of the many small ongoing tasks and projects, and working on longer-term KCC programming.
7. Volunteer Recognition. The Board, Liza and the SGCs generally agree that more
recognition for volunteers would be a good thing to do that might increase our volunteer numbers or at least encourage volunteers to stay on longer. Liza described the idea of a tiered system, where all volunteers get a thank you letter, volunteers that put more regular time into projects or weekly work get a bookstore gift certificate, and folks like SG Coordinators get a few free days of personal retreat at SCOL. The Board generally supported this plan.
8. Election of Secretary. With Marci’s departure from the Board, Brad Upton volunteered to serve as the official KCC Secretary and was elected by the Board.
KCC Board meetings are open to all sangha members and are usually held every third Sunday of the month at 1:3pm. You can join us for next month’s meeting either by Zoom through the KCC Calendar on the KCC website or in person at the Urban Center.
