Staff Vision
At present, non-professional staff in the form of Consuls are obliged to perform all work that must or should be done at Headquarters, and entirely too much that doesn't depend on that location.
There are two approaches to long-term staffing:
The first is to hire an Executive Director with substantial skills (especially at fundraising and membership development), who would take over much of the responsibilities now assigned to the Board. While a common approach for larger organizations, this would not be affordable for our Society until and unless we increase our membership by several orders of magnitude.
The second is to hire an Office Manager who would focus on the clerical and mechanical aspects of the work, leaving the Board and volunteers to carry the bulk of the work. This too is beyond our present ability to fund, but is something we might achieve with only a doubling of the membership.
In both cases, the Board will need to oversee the work of the HQ staff, and a senior volunteer will need to oversee the work of other volunteers, both on- and off-site, possibly in concert with a Volunteer Coordinator. Finding a candidate who can do so constructively will be essential, and close monitoring during their first years will be needed to ensure we have chosen well.
Proposal: The Society should document all of the tasks and procedures employed to the degree that a reasonably competent person might be able to follow such procedures to good effect, notwithstanding that some tasks may require specialized knowledge or skills.
The above is the primary aim of this wiki, but few are participating, resulting in slow progress.
Proposal: The Society should transfer all responsibilities presently held by Consuls that do not benefit from being performed at Headquarters to other volunteers.
Consuls are concerned that their cloistered existence may blind them to the wants and needs of the membership. Given that the Directors have largely chosen not to participate in discussions of Society issues outside of Board meetings, and that Consuls have no proper voice there, an alternative means of staying in touch with the membership would be valuable.
To this end, Consuls propose the creation of a Consular Advisory Group to whom will be put various practical and philosophical questions, the answers to which may illuminate members' thinking and guide recommendations for the Society.
Given the Board's low level of participation in such discussions, Consuls may elect to refer to this group the questions that the Board chooses not to address. This is a degeneration of the organizational structure, but is likely unavoidable without a more committed group of Directors.
