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The Alaska Association of School Board Officials (ALASBO) summer session, Homer, Alaska
July 28, 2012
On one of the sunniest days of 2012, I was with the ALASBO board, inside, in one of Alaska’s nicest places to be outside, Homer. This happened on a day – truth be said – that I would have rather been enjoying our brief summer with family and friends in the sun. That is one of the down sides of our job at Foraker.
I, along with many of our staff, meet with boards when they want to meet, often weekends. But all negatives have some positives like my experience today.
I met with an emerging nonprofit leadership group, a nonprofit we can use as a positive model. ALASBO supports people who work on the business side of Alaskan school districts. It’s been around a while but through the good work of their board, has built their capacity to serve their members and in turn, build their reputation as a player in the association world.
A few of the members of this board had attended other Foraker sessions but this was the first time as a group they had a more complete presentation on the principles we advocate.
So my smidgen of insight today is that while we know that many of our long-term Partners have become fluent in “Forakereze,” other organizations, with the right support from national affiliations or their own desire to learn, seem to be adopting many of the basics we promote.
ALASBO had never heard the Foraker sustainability model, but they practiced it. They had never been through our class on High Performing Boards, but they are one.
So kudos to ALASBO. They are a strong nonprofit association. They know who they are and where they are going, (FOCUS), they have a good board and recently added a great staff leader (part-time) do have the Right People, and they included the need for strategic Partnerships before they even had heard of Foraker. And as business managers they understood their need for Unrestricted Cash.
It’s good to see the relevance of our model regardless of how it was adopted.
Dennis