Your prospective committee members probably know enough about Young Life to be interested and they have probably a foggy idea of what a nonprofit board is all about. But, what’s next? How do you onboard them in an efficient (we’re mostly volunteers here, right?), yet effective way.
Many times, we bring people onto our committees and they have no clue what our purpose is, what we’re working toward, and what their role is in the group. While we have good intentions to make our committees organized and moving together to support the Area, it can feel clumsy at best.
Our committee has been at a point where we need to grow our committee. We’d been laying the groundwork for a couple years after hiring a new Area Director in our area and in our committee. So, we thought we’d share a few elements of our current process to onboard new members to our committee.
Confirm committee structure. We worked with our NEW Area Director to ensure what structure and roles work for the staff, Area goals, and needs. We spent time to ensure we had buy-in on all key players on the direction we’re going.
Date our Committee: Get to know Us. Invite committee members to “date” our committee for six months. During this time, the goal is to get to know each other and see what roles the prospective member might best fit in.
This document is intended to share with prospective committee members. It includes the following sections:
Activities to do to get to know the Area in the first six months
Young Life’s Statement of Faith
Our Area’s Top Areas of Focus
Purpose of Young Life Committees
Our Staff - Overview
Our Current Committee Members - Overview
Our Committee’s Biggest Needs Currently and our Current Subcommittees
*We also created separate documents that lay out more specifics around some of the main subcommittees. Examples are RCE Crew, and Leader Care Crew.
Six Month Checkpoint: Prospective Committee Members will follow up and meet with Area Director and Committee Chair to discuss if they want to dive in as an official committee member and what core role on the committee might be right for them.
Committee Immersion: We set up this document to organize information about who we are as a committee. It includes the following sections:
Activities we expect committee members to participate in outside of our monthly committee meetings. These are ways to get to know Young Life, our leaders, local ministry, and more!
Committee Expectations
Committee Core Values
We want to provide committee members with some foundational information, yet not overwhelm them! We are still very much IN-PROCESS with these documents, procedures, and content here, but we hope it’s helped give ideas for your own framework or process. If you have any tips of what’s worked for your own committee onboard, please send them my way!
Written by: Valerie Morris (valerie.l.morris@gmail.com, Committee Chair, Douglas County, CO