Board/Director Training

Group Decision Making Handbook

Table of Contents

Communication
1 What do you do when a dispute arises?
2 Communication Styles
Meeting Roles
3 Positive Group Roles
4 Negative Group Roles
5 Effective Meetings: Designated Meeting Roles
7 Influence in Groups
Meeting Process
8 Sample Agenda
9 Meeting Evaluation Sheet
Facilitation
10 The Four Roles of a Facilitator
11 Facilitation Tools

Board Training

This handout is useful for members of cooperative & non-profit boards of directors and includes: Co-op Board Member Job Description; Roles & Responsibilities; Legal Responsibilities of the Board of Directors; Proposal Writing; and Communication Basics.

Meetings That Rock!

Having good meetings can make a huge impact on the satisfaction members have with their coop, and can also be a powerful way of encouraging deeper involvement from all of your membership. NASCO has worked with groups across the continent for over thirty years, and has also cultivated connections with the broader cooperative and non-profit sector, and has used these connections to build excellent training materials for groups looking to improve their meetings.

Humor and Facilitation

This handout was contributed by Laird Shaub for a workshop titled "But Seriously Folks...A Close Look at the Two-edged Sword of Humor in Meetings; How to Encourage the Good Kind, and Put a Lid on the Bad" at NASCO's 2008 Cooperative Education and Training Institute.

Safe Space: A Tool for Allowing Deep and Consensed Dialogue

You can use this tool creatively, adapting the intensity of the 4 basic principles to different situations, depending on the level of risk being taken in each setting. Some components of these tools may be inappropriate for some settings, and invaluable in others. The more personal risk involved, the more carefully you want to frame the space at the outset, because a secure anchor is the only thing that will enable a process to fly to the heights of its potential.

NASCO Board Meeting Process

The following approach to facilitation and decision-making outlined in this document is a modified consensus process which came out of the June 2006 NASCO Board meeting after a good deal of discussion and experimentation with different meeting processes. The process outlined below is something of a hybrid, which attempts to combine some of the clarity and formality of Roberts Rules with the participatory and flexible nature of consensus processes.