Board, Staff

 German Women Sewing

The Board will be a working one, reflecting various skills needed for the project as well as representation from leading community institutions.  The Board will meet once a month, each reporting on his or her tasks.  All core staff members will also be board members.  They may be excused for three meetings a year due to health or travel reasons.  If they are not able to make more than nine meetings a year, then they should not commit to this project.

Although I would like to believe in consensus decision making, I have a hard time with how long that can take to happen.  I prefer to move forward, test things out, come back to the table if they don't and leave whatever works in place, constantly fine tuning and growing it.  This means that those involved in the day to day operations of The Sewing Project need to have the authority and autonomy to make decisions, hopefully within keeping of the Project's larger mission.  The Board members need to be flexible, visionary, and understand the challenges in carrying this project forward successfully.

With that in mind, the best boards that I have been on have had between 15-20 members, and the best, the one that worked with the Craft Cooperative that I managed, had a great mix of expertise.  The ideal board that I would like for the project would look something like this (no special order of importance):

1. Project Teacher
2. Project Teacher
3. Project Teacher
4. Project Teacher
5. Accountant
6. Banker
7. City organization 
8. Western Kentucky Community College
9. Business sponser
10. Business sponser
11. Business sponser
12. Community Organization
13. Community Organization
14. Community Organization
15. Church
16. Church
17. Women's Group
18. Women's Group
19. Computer Nerd
20. Marketing Specialist

At this time, there is myself as staff, Deb Lyons (a local artist who taught in The Chicago Public School system for over 20 years) as staff and Brother Gregory Waldrop (Fountain Avenue United Methodist Church) as the umbrella organization for The Sewing Project until it achieves Not-For-Profit status. 

I figured that having this blog show the concept would help give a better idea of The Sewing Project than my long speeches and pages and pages of words.

If you are local to Paducah and would like to serve as a Board Member, please send me an email with either a resume or a paragraph on what specific skills you would bring to The Sewing Project, describe why you want to do this, and I will get back to you.  

 Mary Cassatt, Young Mother Sewing

Please take a look at the other pages for more information on programming and on how you can become involved with The Sewing Project.

I am looking for feedback from people who are interested in this concept, so if you would like to share something, please leave a comment here.  I will respond back here so that others can benefit from the discussion.  Make sure to check the box to receive email notifications if you want to know how others respond.