Board Duties and Responsibilities – Coalition of Refuge Friends and Advocates (2023)

Friends groups together with their FWS partners have the opportunity to apply for the FWS Friends Mentor Program twice a year.The fall application is now available. Applications will be accepted until October 31, 2022.

What is the mentor program? In many ways it's exactly what you want/need. Every mentoring relationship is different, but in short, friends and their refugee management decide what topics they need to learn more about or help with. This is part of the application. This can be, for example, the training of the board, the planning of a joint project or a new start after this long Covid winter to inspire your board and the FWS employees to work together again.

Once you submit the completed application, it will be reviewed by the FWS Friends Coordinator, Linda Schnee, and the Regional Friends Coordinators. If your application is selected, you will be assigned a team of experienced and trained mentors, typically an FWS staff member and a Friends Board/staff person, who will work with you to set an agenda and then come to your refuge to to carry out a 2-day training.

At the end of this training, your group will identify a set of 3 or 4 goals that you want to achieve over the next year. Mentors then come to you on a regular basis to offer you help, guidance, encouragement and lots of applause for the good work you are doing.

Sounds like something your group would benefit from? I've been on both sides of the mentorship, as a Friends mentor and as a board member of a group that is mentored, and I can tell you from personal experience that this program provides a few qualified "consultants" free of charge for a year. free for your group of friends and your hideaway. So what are you waiting for?Make this application work!

Continue readingFWS Friends Mentor Program Fall Application Process

By Mary Beth Volmer, Friends of Plum and Pilot Islands (WI).Reprinted from The Link, Summer 2021

In his bookGood to great, author Jim Collins asks you to imagine your organization - in our caseFriends of Plum and Pilot Islands(FOPPI) - as a bus. The size doesn't really matter. In this analogy, think of the Friends President as the bus driver whose seats are filled by the board members. He stresses the need to fill the seats with thatRightPeople, don't just fill them with anyone. Will these people be willing to help push you when the bus stops? Do they provide ideas and inspiration when the bus isn't running smoothly?

As President of FOPPI, I am extremely proud to be able to say thattodayMy bus is full of the right people, pushing the bus through quicksand if need be. That is today … tomorrow can be different; People get sick, they move, they lose their passion. The bus driver (ormich) needs to keep the bus moving - there's wildlife that needs to be protected, habitats that need to be restored, visitors that need to learn about our sanctuary.

Can I drive an empty bus? Yes, but that would not be fun. I need the companionship of others who share my same passion, who care as much about sanctuary as I do, and who want to see the light in a child's eyes as they mark their first butterfly, or the smile on a woman's face when they... joins her hammer with a nail in our Women in Preservation program. The challenge is finding them, engaging them, and keeping them. Our Board of Directors has a limited term and many of our members are renewing their mandate for an additional three years; but they get tired and that presents a challenge. If one of them leaves, I don't have the bandwidth to take over what they're doing. We were so busy with what needed to be done that we missed the need to build a reserve. We topped up the oil instead of changing it.

So we asked ourselves, besides being able to vote on important initiatives for our shelter, why would anyone want to join our board? Through the work we've done with theFriends partnership mentoring programWe figured out what we think we're doing right (bylaws, job descriptions, strong finances, etc.), brainstormed ideas, came up with even more questions, and set out to do things differently. Following the 5Ws strategy, here is an example of what we came up with:

• Weris a potential board member?
  • People who share our passion, those who volunteer with us on a regular basis, and those interested in serving on a nonprofit board.
• Wasdo we have to do to get a volunteer to become a board member?
  • Offer perks unavailable to volunteers, such as B. Behind-the-scenes access and guided tours.
  • Introduce them to our “Volunteer Leader” program – a role similar to that of a board member, with fewer voting rights. Volunteer leaders are mentored by board members and encouraged to achieve a spot on the board.
• WhenDo we shamelessly start recruiting?
  • Now.
• From whereCan we find these people?
  • The LinkedIn social media platform is partnered withVolunteerMatchto bring together people interested in serving on a nonprofit board. We have converted the Friends of Plum and Pilot Islands into a corporation and have asked our Board and Volunteer Leaders to connect with it.
• whyserve on our board of directors?
  • A rare opportunity to work with some of the most passionate people you will ever meet who share your interest in conservation and in our case heritage preservation.

I hope these ideas give you food for thought. Think of the board's sustainability similar to the preventive maintenance you would perform on your bus. Don't wait for the oil lamp to light up!

2022 Board Recruitment and Structure Updates:

• FOPPI has not received any responses from our LinkedIn recruitment.
• FOPPI has filled two vacancies withFacebook-Jobs.
• They also realized that they didn't need as many seats on the bus. The reality is that people are busy and attending meetings can be challenging. So they created the Volunteer Leader roles. These people provide valuable input, engage in discussions, but do not vote.
• Board members with tax responsibilities to FOPPI members and donors include: Treasurer, Historic Preservation, Fundraising, Governance, Merchandising.

Continue ReadingGood to Great: Building a Effective and Sustainable Friends Board

Friends groups together with their FWS partners have the opportunity to apply for the FWS Friends Mentor Program twice a year.The spring announcement and application has just been published.Applications will be accepted until March 31, 2022.

What is the mentor program? In many ways it's exactly what you want/need. Every mentoring relationship is different, but in short, friends and their refugee management decide what topics they need to learn more about or help with. This is part of the application. This can be, for example, the training of the board, the planning of a joint project or a new start after this long Covid winter to inspire your board and the FWS employees to work together again.

Once you submit the completed application, it will be reviewed by the FWS Friends Coordinator, Linda Schnee, and the Regional Friends Coordinators. If your application is selected, you will be assigned a team of experienced and trained mentors, typically an FWS staff member and a Friends Board/staff person, who will work with you to set an agenda and then come to your refuge to to carry out a 2-day training.

At the end of this training, your group will identify a set of 3 or 4 goals that you want to achieve over the next year. Mentors then come to you on a regular basis to offer you help, guidance, encouragement and lots of applause for the good work you are doing.

Sounds like something your group would benefit from? I've been on both sides of the mentorship, as a Friends mentor and as a board member of a group that is mentored, and I can tell you from personal experience that this program provides a few qualified "consultants" free of charge for a year. free for your group of friends and your hideaway. So what are you waiting for?Get this application working!

Continue readingFWS Friends Mentor Program Spring Application Process

The FBI reported a 69% increase in cybercrime in 2020. And cybercriminals' focus has shifted to small and medium-sized businesses, including nonprofits, as they tend to have fewer resources to implement security safeguards and user education. Your small nonprofit can no longer hide behind a "we're too small" defense.

Cybersecurity is an important part of the duty of care you have as a nonprofit to protect your assets and your supporters' information. This webinar will update your current understanding of the cyber landscape and walk you through the essential steps to start securing your organization's digital and electronic assets.

Inventory and planning tools are included to help you create a plan and immediately improve your organization's defenses.

Speaker: Linda Kilgore, CORFA Board Member, NTEN Certified Nonprofit Technology Professional, Retired Senior IT Analyst for the State of Oregon

Recording and Supporting Materials

Read NextUpgrade Your Cybersecurity to Protect Your Mission

roles of respondents
We asked respondents to give us some information about their friend group and their role within the group. We realize that many of you play many different roles in your group, so we tried to get as much information from each as you wanted. Over a third of our respondents identified themselves as board members, although many chose other ways to be active with Friends.

board size
More than half of the respondents work in committees with 6 to 10 members, the rest in committees that are larger or smaller.

Membership Size
Almost a third of our respondents were from friend groups with over 200 members and over a quarter from groups with 101-200 members, but well over a third of our survey respondents are in groups with fewer than 100 members or have no membership for their group.

Age of Friends-Organisation
37 respondents came from groups that were more than 20 years old, while 10 came from groups that were less than 5 years old. We love this variety!

(Video) AMAC Advocacy Training

What else should we have asked about the people taking the survey and the friend group(s) they belong to? I wonder if we had respondents from any Fish Hatchery Friends groups. Were your survey respondents from community partners or groups that do not have a partnership agreement with a shelter? How about people in groups supporting programs like Friends of Duck Stamps or Friends of NCTC? There are so many ways you all support the refuge and fisheries system and we all know that no two groups of friends are the same. The more we learn about each other, the more support we can offer to ensure each group of friends is strong, resilient, and doing all they can to support our fragile environment.

Read moreWHO ANSWERED THE CORFA WEBINAR SURVEY?