Governance, Ungovernance, and Other Possibilities
year ago, I was preparing for an AGM, reading through the CRA’s basic guidelines for charities searching for a way to make quorum. We had recently lost half of our board. When I read that a non-profit was only required to maintain a minimum of three directors I realized that we could do something radical that I had been mulling over for some time: turn Saskatoon’s AKA Artist-Run back into a collective without losing our charitable status and our funding. We realized that the outdated policies, the meeting structures based on Robert’s Rules of Order (the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure in the US), and other inherited ways of conducting governance were things we could overthrow. We needed only to meet a bare minimum of regulations, and could get rid of the rest. Staff and board members all became members of the collective, the latter given an annual honorarium and—at the suggestion of artist and former board member Ruth Cuthand—each BIPOC member would join with a mentor. We dispensed with the procedural vocabulary and processes of board meetings, and instead built group agreements to foster equitable conditions for all collective members to speak, to listen, to honour their own mental and physical needs, and to understand why they show up. The change
