The FAN board elections are coming up in June! And FAN is looking for volunteers to be on the FAN board.
If you are interested in running for the FAN board, please feel free to nominate yourself or others on this thread. This thread will be for nominations and more information about candidates running.
We’ll have our annual membership meeting / happy hour in June where candidates will be able to introduce themselves, members can make any floor nominations, and we can have our happy hour. We’ll have more information on the meeting / happy hour in a separate thread with planning information.
If you have any questions about being a board member, please feel free to reach out to any current board member directly or post your questions here on this thread. You don’t have to have any leadership experience or need any fancy qualifications to be on the board of FAN - just a desire to help improve our neighborhoods and the city overall. Please nominate yourself if it sounds like something that you might like to do or nominate someone else that you think might make a great board member!
Suggestion: Describe what the board members did last year (how many meetings in person, how many meetings online synchronously; how often things were hashed out in e-mail; etc).
There are monthly board meetings. It’s always great to get together in person and discuss what’s going on, but I think that most issues can be handled online through discussion over email or through discussion on these forums. The new board would really determine what mix they’d like to have, but I personally like it when everything is done online.
I’ve included an old list of some other possible responsibilities that we put together in 2016 on what board members might be responsible for, but each board member would really determine what they are best at, what they would like to do, and that’s probably the best way to determine what an individual board member would do. If someone wants to be the person in charge of the newsletter, or that they want to put together social events, or they want to do something else, then that’s what they should do!
Communicate to public officials the vision and adopted positions of FAN.
Add and update events on the FAN neighborhood event calendar.
Engage the membership in productive dialog and action.
Edit and publish the newsletter.
Coordinate social and other events.
Update and maintain the historical knowledge base of membership activity, votes, meeting minutes, and organizational processes.
Recruit new members.
Assist in the formation of new neighborhood associations.
Help existing neighborhood associations operate more inclusively.
Execute votes of the membership.
Manage and post to social media.
Introduce new and innovative tools and methods for growing and empowering the membership and ensuring the sustainability of the organization.
We basically have no newsletter at this point, so if someone wanted to be in charge of that and not be a board member, they can volunteer to do that any time. =) And really the same thing with anything else if someone wanted to contribute in any way.
I’d like to nominate Mary Sledd @marysledd. Mary is a founding member of the neighborhood association Friends of Zilker and has been leading the fight in Zilker for a long time. She also has experience serving on boards for other groups.
I’d also like to nominate Tina Grider-Cannon @tcannontx. Tina is currently the Vice President of Government Relations with the Austin Chamber of Commerce after recently serving as a Senior Policy Analyst for Austin City Council.
I think they’d both bring a lot of experience, leadership, and be great advocates for FAN as board members.
I nominate @alyshalynn for the FAN board. She is stepping out of the officer role of FAN president, but I hope she can continue to serve on the board in another capacity.
I’d also like the nominate Chris Wojtewicz @chris78701 for the board. He’s very active in advocating for the values that FAN stands for and I know that he’d work hard for FAN as a board member. He’d definitely make a great addition to the board and hope that he’d consider running!
And I second the nomination of @chris78701 – he’s done an excellent job overseeing and streamlining operations at AURA as secretary there, and he’s stepped down from that board for work reasons. He’d be a major asset to FAN’s leadership.
Since the nominations made explicit in this thread have so far have been for general board seats, I am going to formalize some nominations for specific officer roles, as indicated below, that members have suggested they take on.
View the candidate profile cards here! (Use the left and right arrow keys to sequence through the cards.)
Here are the nominees:
President: Felicity Maxwell Nathan Ryan (@nthnryn) Treasurer: Felicity Maxwell (@Felicity), Roger L. Cauvin (@rcauvin) Secretary: Chris “Kaz” Wojtewicz (@chris78701)
Thanks to Rodger for putting this together. Unfortunately, I’m unable to accept the nomination for FAN President at this time. The good news is that @josiahstevenson is willing to be nominated for President of FAN for the upcoming year.
I am happy to serve as an At-Large Board Member, and would be happy to be added to that position for the upcoming election.
Thanks!
Felicity
Also, as a sidenote – I don’t like the way we have this set up with officer elections coming at the same time as board elections. The way we have it creates this situation where the stakes are a lot higher for officer races, which in turn creates awkward dynamics around running.
Someone running for an officer position is effectively guaranteed a space on the board if they’re unopposed – or at much higher risk of not being on the board at all if someone runs against them. It’s…not clear to me why we would set it up this way, and I think we should change it as soon as possible.
I’m honored, @josiahstevenson, and would love to serve as board president if the organization thinks I’m the right fit. I think we can continue to do a lot of great work in and around the city and I’m excited about the opportunity to work with the board and our members to make some stuff happen.
Voting has begun! If you are FAN member, by now you should have received your secure ballot via email to vote in the FAN 2018 Board Election.
Voting is taking place online and began today. Search your inbox for the secure ballot from the address for Helios Voting Administrator system@heliosvoting.org.
The voting period ends August 5th at 8 PM CDT. Until that time, you are welcome to ask questions here that you might have about the election or the candidates.
If you have not received a ballot to vote from Helios, or if you have any questions about this process, you may also email info@atxfriends.org.
P.S. Please don’t hesitate to invite others to join (http://www.atxfriends.org/join) the cause of improving neighborhoods and neighborhood representation in Austin. Please help spread the word of this vote by posting about it to your local NextDoor.com group or other online neighborhood groups and encourage people to join so they can vote. Anyone can sign up to vote during the voting process until voting ends.
As with all past and current votes, information about the election is on the Votes page at http://www.atxfriends.org/votes. FAN strives to be transparent and open about its votes, and the website will show full numerical results of the vote soon after it completes.
The vote’s been set up so that you cannot abstain from any page; and as I’m not going to vote for any of the AURA crew, I’m forced to abstain from this election.