	Center for Community Futures Phone: 510-339-3801 Fax: 510-339-3803 E-mail: jmasters@cencomfut.com	Mailing Address: Center for Community Futures P.O. Box 5309 Berkeley, CA 94705

Community Action Agency Board Members Toolkit in a Nutshell

CHAPTER SIX. BASIC CHOICES for Board Members

CAA Board members, individually and collectively, have many choices to make.

	a.	Some are personal choices. You should know where you stand and how other board members feel about issues.
	b.	Other choices are the types of roles you want your CAA to perform.
	c.	Others are types of strategies you want your CAA to use in the community.
	d.	Other choices are the types of problems you will work on or the opportunities you want to pursue.
	e.	Other choices are the characteristics of people you will seek to help.
	f.	Other choices are your relationship to the other human systems and constituencies, to other forces for change in America, and how you will relate to those forces. Will you support, oppose, try to modify, or piggyback on the other changes that are taking place?

Your answers to these sets of choices, individually and collectively, will help define the type of CAA that will exist in your community. Some of the more important are:

1.	Whether you as a Board Member want to be a participant in the ongoing struggle for social justice and economic opportunity. Another way of asking this is whether you want to work for change at the federal government level, or if you want it to happen at the state, county and community levels.
2.	Whether you want to leave the responsibility for change to other people, or if you accept personal responsibility.
3.	Whether you see your role as consoling those who do not now have enough of what America offers, i.e. as ameliorating the conditions of poverty, or as eliminating the causes of poverty.
4.	Whether you will focus on the long-term (3 to 5 years) or want quick results, i.e. less than one year.
5.	Whether you will focus on individuals who are already low-income at this time, or on the economic and social systems that might be improved to help large numbers of people over time. Will you focus on the people, the social systems, or both?
6.	Whether you see yourself as an agent of social change in your community, or as a monitor of the compliance of your agency with funding agency regulations.
7.	The degree to which you are willing to take risks. Some investments are successful, some are not. Some program approaches work, some don't. Some positions on issues are popular, others are not. To what extent will you risk being criticized?

This workbook is about “how to row.” About how to create improvements in a community using your own smarts, energy and resources. About how to persist, and grind it out.

“Rowing” may not be as dramatic as a Presidential Speech. An issue of concern to us today may never be as visible on the federal agenda as when LBJ was at the helm. But rowing will get you -- and others -- across the river, and that is where we want to go.

The way you work out these answers to these kinds of questions is through personal reflection, asking yourself what YOU are all about, and by discussing these kinds of issues with other board members.

End-of-Chapter Six Quiz

1. What are some of the ‘basic choices’ for board members?

2. How will you arrive at decisions around these basic choices?

Answer to Chapter Six Quiz

1) Some of the basic choices are:
    ·         what you want to work on themselves as individuals,
    ·         what types of problems you want their agency to work on,
    ·         which groups of people you want their agency to help, and
    ·         which types of strategies you think the agency should use.

2) Some of the answers to these questions come from self-reflection and discussion with other board members.

Toolkit Home Chapter 7

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