Navigating challenges in establishing a new charity (Anonymous post 🤫)
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Seeking guidance for small charity's AGM (Anonymous post 🤫)
Ocean King Staff Community Executive at CharityConnect Posted 2 months ago
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This question is from a member of our community that wishes to remain anonymous:
Hi, I was hoping that the community could help us with a conundrum for our small registered charity with a membership of c1200 people.
Our board is maximum 11 people but currently, we have 10 people due to an unexpected death. Our articles of association say that at least 50%+1 member have to be members. Currently, we are 7 members and 3 non members. We have our AGM coming up and the 3 longest serving trustees always resign, and may choose to stand for re-election or step down. Of this year's 3, they are 2 members and 1 non-member. This would leave the current board before elections as 5 members and 2 non-members.
We have invited applications for trustees and have received 7 for the 4 vacancies arising from the death and the resignations. The applications consist of 3 members and 4 non-members. If all 4 non-members were elected, our board make-up would not be correct (as it would then be 5 members and 6 non-members) so we need to be sure that at least one member is elected. Our AGM is held online, with members sent a proxy vote to submit in the usual way if unable to attend.
How do we organise the voting? Is it best to ask members to vote in order of preference or just to vote for up to 4 people, ensure that at least one vote is for a member? The meeting is held in Zoom and I don't even know how to do that in there as I'm a Zoom user for meetings but not generally as the meeting host. As it's such a small community, I think members are more likely to vote for other members than outsiders but who knows?
Also, what do we do if votes are tied? Despite having over 1000 members, we are lucky to have more than 40 people voting in these elections if the last few years go by and although it wasn't a problem last year, it was very close - one candidate missed out by one vote.
We need to send out notice of the meeting this week or early next so we need to decide quickly how to do this;any advice would be appreciated as our solicitors have taken a week to tell us how much it would cost us and haven't indicated when they could respond!
Our board is maximum 11 people but currently, we have 10 people due to an unexpected death. Our articles of association say that at least 50%+1 member have to be members. Currently, we are 7 members and 3 non members. We have our AGM coming up and the 3 longest serving trustees always resign, and may choose to stand for re-election or step down. Of this year's 3, they are 2 members and 1 non-member. This would leave the current board before elections as 5 members and 2 non-members.
We have invited applications for trustees and have received 7 for the 4 vacancies arising from the death and the resignations. The applications consist of 3 members and 4 non-members. If all 4 non-members were elected, our board make-up would not be correct (as it would then be 5 members and 6 non-members) so we need to be sure that at least one member is elected. Our AGM is held online, with members sent a proxy vote to submit in the usual way if unable to attend.
How do we organise the voting? Is it best to ask members to vote in order of preference or just to vote for up to 4 people, ensure that at least one vote is for a member? The meeting is held in Zoom and I don't even know how to do that in there as I'm a Zoom user for meetings but not generally as the meeting host. As it's such a small community, I think members are more likely to vote for other members than outsiders but who knows?
Also, what do we do if votes are tied? Despite having over 1000 members, we are lucky to have more than 40 people voting in these elections if the last few years go by and although it wasn't a problem last year, it was very close - one candidate missed out by one vote.
We need to send out notice of the meeting this week or early next so we need to decide quickly how to do this;any advice would be appreciated as our solicitors have taken a week to tell us how much it would cost us and haven't indicated when they could respond!
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