Committees & Slack

In this edition Black Box Backdrop, I have a few things to cover:

1. A bylaw amendment
2. Strategic goals identified by the board
3. How you can get more involved

Bylaw Amendment

Section 11 of our bylaws outlines the roles on the Board of Directors. In particular, it specifies which officer roles need to be appointed and need to be filled by board members – for example, the Building Manager could be any member of the theatre but President or Finance need to be a board member. Specifically, the roles that needed to be appointed and needed to be board members, according to the bylaws, were: President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, Executive Producer, Artistic Director, Membership Director, Communications Director, Rentals Manager, and Box Office Manager.

This is a lot, and there’s no particular governance reason why these all need to be on the board, or why all these roles need to be appointed every year. In alignment with my principle this year of “projects even over roles” (you can read more about it in my last blog post), we amended this bylaw to reduce these roles to: President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, and Rentals. (Please reach out to secretary@kwlt.org if you would like to see the specific text change within the bylaws.) This does not preclude us from appointing these other roles, but releases us from the obligation to do so. This allows us to cover these responsibilities with committees instead, which brings us to…

Strategic Goals

As a board, we ran a strategic brainstorming session so we could establish some shared goals for the year. We landed on four key areas of focus:

• Partnerships with other local businesses: This is an area that we’ve been neglecting for a while, but has a lot of potential opportunities for us.
• Volunteer burnout: Unsurprisingly, this came up as a focus. I probably don’t have to explain why…
• Strengthening our membership and volunteer base: One thing we identified as a strength we wanted to lean into more was our volunteer base – we’d like to find ways to make volunteering more accessible, fulfilling, and enjoyable.
• Improving our documentation: We identified our documentation as an area we’d like to improve, in the hopes that it will help share knowledge and reduce siloing of skills.

In order to make progress in these areas, and in alignment with our principle of “teamwork over efficiency,” we’ve formed committees to cover these, as well as the day-to-day business of the theatre. Which brings us to…

How you can get more involved

Alright, so we have 9 committees and we would love to have you join some. We’re leveraging a new tool, Slack, for collaboration and discussion. If you’re unfamiliar with Slack, it is an app/site similar to discussion forums that is used by many companies for collaboration. You can learn more on Slack’s website here: https://slack.com/why/slack-vs-email

I’d invite anyone interested in joining a committee or keeping tabs on what’s going on to join us on the Slack, by clicking this link: https://join.slack.com/t/kwlt/shared_invite/zt-1el4dgdhz-NuLuZKxPnhiPReGCjzYspw (if this link has expired, please email me at president@kwlt.org!)

Here are the committees! All of them are open for KWLT members to join:

• Partnership Committee: this committee will strategize and explore partnerships with local businesses
• Documentation Committee: this committee will help develop and organize our documentation
• Volunteer Development & Support Committee: this committee will brainstorm and develop ways to support our volunteer base
• Artistic Steering Committee: this committee, first established last year, will create a vision for our artistic season (this year and moving forward), and will solicit and select submissions for the season
• Communications Committee: this committee runs our social media, puts together our newsletter, etc.
• Show Support Committee: this committee fills roles like Executive Producer, Artistic Director, and generally serves to ensure our productions and events are successful
• Building Committee: this committee takes care of our building (right now, for example, we are coordinating a fix of our foundation)
• General Manager Committee: this committee is exploring the question as directed by the membership at the AGM: should we hire a general manager for the theatre?
• Social Committee: this committee is for organizing social events for the community

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me at president@kwlt.org (or on Slack!)