Charity Admin, Community, Employment & Volunteers, Good Practice, Quaker A-Z, Quaker Business Method, Social Justice, Sustainability

Quaker A-Z: R is for Relationship & Responsible

Who is responsible for what?

All relationships contain questions about who is responsible for what, but they’re not always clearly answered.

Groups working closely together are now using Memorandums of Understanding to clarify roles and responsibilities. These documents also help define how the relationship is monitored and maintained.

But those are just for trustees?

When I ask new clients how they fit into a larger structure, I often include a simple question:

Do you have a Memorandum of Understanding or a similar document?

Take a Premises Clerk dealing with a leaking roof, for example.

Do you know:

What you’re authorised to do to fix it?
Who pays for it?
Whether someone will pay, but only if told in advance?

Another common issue is building or land restrictions.

Assuming there are none can be costly.

More than one client has started a project, only to find out later they needed permission from someone else to proceed.

That’s why a clear table of authority is so useful.

It should show who can make decisions, who can approve spending, and where to go for further guidance.

A simple table can be completed at any level and help everyone to gain clarity. It can be useful to have both Trustees & Treasurers complete such things to see if everyone agrees or thinks they are responsible for the same things.

There might be another similar table to cover what needs to have approval from Trustees. One of the fascinating things about getting to read the minutes for,or be part of, several different charity Trustee meetings is how each charity does things just slightly differently.

None of them are wrong – but clear communication of who is responsible for what, and how that responsibility is maintained in the relationship can make things much easier.

Out of all virtues simplicity is my most favorite virtue. So much so that I tend to believe that simplicity can solve most of the problems, personal as well as the world problems. If the life approach is simple one need not lie so frequently, nor quarrel nor steal, nor envy, anger, abuse, kill. Everyone will have enough and plenty so need not hoard, speculate, gamble, hate. When character is beautiful, you are beautiful. That is the beauty of simplicity.

Ela Bhatt Tweet

What does that have to do with relationships?

So often the non-heirarchcal Quaker structures confuses those who aren’t used to them. Then add in that we move role holders regularly and are trying to encourage new people into roles and you can end up with people who don’t have any understanding on where they are in the overall structure of their own charity/Area Meeting let alone the wider organisation.

During an exercise to encourage a brand new Local Meeting treasurer to draft a budget, I noticed they’d not included anything to be given to Area Meeting. When I queried this, they explained but surely Yearly Meeting gave money to Area Meeting who in turn gave it to the Local Meeting? They’d only seen the previous year’s budget which did have Area Meeting giving money to the Local Meeting and presumed this was standard practice!

Explaining where everyone can look for help and advice without the need to reinvent policies or contracts, who supplies money for what and therefore why a Local Meeting doesn’t need separate building insurance helps everyone feel they understand the set up and that they are in a relationship with other parts.

Hopefully avoiding the idea that Trustees (or Meeting for Sufferings, or any other group they’ve only heard about) is ‘them’ rather than ‘a different group of us’.

Volunteers & Employees: Special Relationships

While everyone involved in the charity has some form of relationship with everyone else, employees and volunteers have a more complex relationship.

Clear lines of communication can help, any volunteer or employee will not find it easy to have more than one line manager, or more than one person who thinks they have the right to rearrange priorities. Where you have someone relying on the relationship for their income, housing, or any other essential need, it is important to provide protections and clear lines of communication, responsibilities and to have clear documentation that outlines who is responsible for what, and where authority lies.

Where to start?

If you have a problem with a relationship, there are contracts, templates and advice on Quaker.org.uk

Our own website has free classes in our resource library, as well as advice and links on a page: Improving Relationships

Minute 20: What it means to be a Quaker today: Trust in Trusteeship We have continued our consideration of what it means to be a Quaker today by focusing on Quaker Trusteeship. We have been reminded that our spiritual journey is about living in the world and wrestling with the tensions between living out the testimonies and dealing with practical, financial and property matters. The real test of our faith is whether we can connect with the spirit in the mess of our daily lives. Having bodies of named trustees is therefore not about giving all the power to a small group but making sure that all the difficult work gets done. Nor should we be surprised if mistakes are made, as this is where we as individuals fail as well. Both trustees and meetings need to hold each other in the light and above all to keep the lines of communication live and vibrant. We all belong to the same worshipping community, we are all working together and it is the same spirit that leads us. Community is two way. Trustees need to empower other Friends to ask questions,perhaps by making minutes more readily available, and other Friends need to talk to trustees and ask for information. This openness will in turn support trustees in their work. God has placed trust in us. We need to honour that trust in moving forward together to build the Kingdom.

BYM 2013