Organizational leadership development, team-building and...
michaelhealy@columinate.coop
802-881-7306
Along with the template Financial Conditions policy, in the CBLD Library you can find an easy to use monitoring report template that reflects the trends approach outlined in this article. When it comes to numbers and data, context matters. This is particularly important when we are talking about financial data; the context in which we place particular numbers helps us make meaning of [...]
How will you make your next meeting the best meeting ever? Here is a useful tool for helping you run effective meetings and create common ground with groups. You’ll find tips for meeting process design, preparing for a meeting, creating meeting materials and the agenda, as well as insight into the stages of group development and meeting process. “In this [...]
Michael Healy Recorded at The Cooperative Cafe Michael Healy invites us to expand our thinking around participation in our co-ops, specifically how we look at measuring participation. According to Healy, there may be way more to examine if we can move beyond just counting voter turnouts and Annual Meeting attendance. Rather than looking at participation as something co-ops need to convince people to do, [...]
What would happen if everyone in a whole community understood their role in achieving a common purpose? It’s not hard to imagine that lots of really positive things could be accomplished, some of them beyond our wildest dreams. That’s why it is critical to the success of a cooperative that everyone has a role in determining the co-op’s future. One of the fundamental differences [...]
One of the key moments in a co-op’s business cycle comes at the end of a fiscal year when it becomes clear how much profit the co-op has generated that year. At that time, the co-op’s board needs to decide how much of that profit will be allocated as patronage dividends, how to divide that dividend between cash returned to members and savings held [...]
As well as being a consultant with CDS Consulting Co-op, Art Sherwood is the board president at Bloomingfoods Market & Deli in Bloomington, IN and is heading into his third and last term as president. As he thought about how to prepare others to take on the role, he believes that alignment is as important to leadership as it is to perpetuation. “My approach [...]
By Nina Johnson 160 May - June - 2012 You know the feeling: you walk into your first meeting, you don’t know anyone, you’re not sure what to say or do, and everyone but you seems to know what’s going on. That’s how it can feel for a newly elected board director who has had no orientation, and this feeling can last for months. [...]
By Michael Healy 159 March - April - 2012 Why does the work of measuring the co-op's accomplishments and telling the co-op's story matter? Cooperative enterprises build a better world. This tagline for the 2012 International Year of Cooperatives says so much with so few words. These few words can lead us to ask many compelling questions, among them: What does that better world [...]
How Do We Know If We Have the Bylaws We Need? To meet our needs, bylaws must allow for smooth functioning of the coop's internal governance processes while being consistent with both our owners' values and with the relevant laws. Bylaws are the means by which the owners delegate authority to the board. Under that authority, the board ensures that the co-op meets owners' [...]
Was your last Board election a thoughtful exercise in democracy in which members chose a well-qualified set of directors that add value to the Board and to the co-op? More than anyone else in the cooperative, the Board itself is responsible for ensuring that the answer to this question is “Yes!” Elections should be neither mundane nor contentious, but should honor and reinforce the [...]
