What Does the Board Do, Anyway? (Part 1)

by Michele Meulendyk, Board President

As a Shareholder-owned entity, the Co-op is overseen by an elected Board of Directors. The Board represents their fellow 9,000+ Shareholders, and serves as a governance body tasked with keeping a bird’s-eye view on the overall health of our Co-op.

An essential part of this process, for us and many other Co-ops, is a system called Policy Governance. This system allows us to use a set of Policies to provide clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and expectations for both the Board and the General Manager (GM). 

The consistency provided by Policy Governance is an important aspect of our Board’s ability to govern. The makeup and experience level of our Board can change, frequently. People pop in and out, with some staying for nearly a decade, and others popping right back out in the middle of their first term. With so much coming and going, the “voice” and “vibe” of the Board can change notably from year to year. Additionally, Board members come from various personal and professional backgrounds, but rarely do they have experience in running a consumer co-op, or in managing a retail grocery store. And so, with Policy Governance, the Board delegates operational responsibilities to the GM, and routinely monitors performance data to ensure that the objectives outlined in our Policies are being met. This makes up the largest part of the Board’s work.

While the Board can be very fluid, a General Manager could stick around for a while. As the Board evolves, a GM steadily builds ongoing relationships with our staff, Shareholders and community members. They are steeped in the trends and challenges of operating a food co-op and, therefore, are best prepared to pivot and adapt, as needed. This day-to-day immersion in the details is why Boards delegate operational aspects to the GM and why it is the GM who can provide the kind of stability and consistency that allow both staff and Shareholders to feel good about their relationship with the Co-op.

While the GM works to build stability and consistency through operational practices, the Board looks toward the future, setting the broader, aspirational direction for the Co-op, via the Ends Policies, which state: 

Policy A.1 – ENDS

The Brattleboro Food Co-op, an organization modeled on cooperative values and principles, exists to serve its shareholders’ collective needs for:

1. An open, inclusive, and welcoming marketplace

2. Access to, and education about, goods and nutritious food that are ecologically sound

and responsibly sourced

3. An organization that contributes to a just and resilient local economy

4. An enterprise that engages in sustainable and regenerative environmental practices

Coming soon: Part 2: Holding ourselves accountable through Policy Monitoring