Govcom minutes 2015-05-18
Minutes of the Governance Committee, 18 May 2015
Present: Michael Maggs (Chair), Alastair McCapra
Board observers: Simon Knight (Vice Chair), Carol Campbell
In Attendance: D'Arcy Myers
Apologies: Greyham Dawes, Kate West
1. Minutes of the previous meeting: Agreed. All matters arising were on the agenda.
2. Update on CEO Appointment: Michael described how the recruitment process had been restarted with a new agency and the experience so far was positive with a good number of early applications received. A new recruitment pack had been prepared and the deadline for applications was the end of May.
3. AGM: The date has been set for 25 July 2015, at a venue in London. There was a discussion about the elections to the Board and the need to make clear what skills mix would be useful on the new Board. It was agreed that, in particular, skills and experience relating to GLAM, education and community/volunteer engagement would be particularly valuable. There was a discussion about the need for a new teller. Kate had said she knew someone able to act in this capacity and Michael agreed to follow up with her. There was a discussion about the resolutions the Board wished to put to the AGM. The committee agree that it was particularly important to be able to have non-trustees serving on our committees. It was agreed to recommend to the Board the six proposed resolutions set out in the agenda.
4.Trustees' Report: It was now urgent to have a draft trustees' report to accompany the audited accounts. D'Arcy reported that Stevie was working on this.
5. Relations with Volunteers. It was agreed that the forthcoming Volunteer Day needs to build on the last one and be more focused. We need to build in and publicise what our key performance indicators are going to be, how we will be renewing our programmes based on them and how we are intending to involve volunteers in delivering this.
The committee noted that as a result of the need to keep certain matters confidential during the period in which staff redundancies were under discussion, we had not kept up with our normal processes of publishing key documents such as board reports to the community. The committee agreed that Alastair should review documents from previous meetings and consider what should now be published. In addition, we needed to make a clear statement about what we had done and why, explaining the new structure and the role of volunteers as we foresaw it.
There was a discussion about the proposed new Cultural Advisory Panel, which will be a stand-alone entity comprising high-level individuals in the GLAM world invited to contribute their expertise to the charity's and the movement's long-term goals.
Finally, it was agreed that for the previous quarter we should give ourselves a transparency score of only 2/5, as a result of the constraints on publication of materials during the period of consultation on redundancies.
Next meeting: Thur 13 August at 2:30pm