Is democracy all it's cracked up to be?

...or being democratic and still getting things done

Last week we had our Annual General Meeting. This year we wanted to open it up to people who were going to have a real view about the way we did things so we invited participants from our Gig Buddies project, members of our Storm and Thunder Team (our advisory group of people with learning disabilities), carers, volunteers and of course trustees.
We also invited commissioners from our local authorities along but it turns out that 10am on a Sunday morning isn't the best time to hold an AGM if you want a broad diversity of people along.
Next year though it'll be a Saturday afternoon with a gig afterwards, a much better idea we reckon.

Of course we're obliged to do certain legal things at our AGM like elect trustees, nominate people for positions and pass the accounts but none of these things should take too much time unless there's some significant issues, or you're running a much larger charity. So the first 20 minutes was spent sorting through these things and then I presented our annual report in a pictorial format. 

The idea was then to hold an Open Space Forum as an accessible way to capture everyone's ideas for how we should be developing our work around the question 'How can we have the most impact in the year ahead?'

This was all great, and I was very excited by the idea but also had a big concern - what if none of the ideas fitted with what I thought we should be doing? And how could we make sure everyone felt listened to even if we simply couldn't take their idea forward.

Being open and democratic is all very well and good (and something I wholeheartedly believe in) but I also wanted to know that we were in a place to try and make stuff happen. So it was great to chat with a trustee about this issue and be reassured there's nothing wrong with benign dictatorships. I feel a little uncomfortable writing this as I'm sure there's loads of things wrong even with benign dictatorships so I'll need to make sure I'm open to being challenged and share what we're working on, but I know it's important in a tiny organisation like ours that we drive forward and try to make things happen. It's the only way we grow our work and our influence.

So to aid this process of working out what ideas we'd take forward I've come up with our 'Ideas Test' - hope you find it useful

• How much does it cost? – will we need to do some fundraising to make it happen?

• Is it practical? – is it going to be easy for us to make it happen?

• Is it fun? – a lot of what we do is about making a real difference and raising awareness about serious issues in a fun way. Do our ideas fit with this?

• Does it have impact? – We want to make sure that our work reaches as many people as possible and makes a real difference. For example – we could spend a lot of time planning a club night attended by 50 people, while it could be great it may have been better for us to spend our time and resources elsewhere.

• Is it sustainable? How can the idea grow and continue?

• Are we the right people to do it? – some ideas may be great and a totally worthwhile thing to do but we may not be the best skilled people at doing it.

• Do people with learning disabilities want it? Are we involving people with learning disabilities and checking that we really need to be doing something?

• Does it fit our purpose as a charity? We have to make sure that whatever we do fits with our legal responsibility as a charity – which is essentially promoting active social lives for people with learning disabilities.

I'll be posting up updates from which ideas we'll be taking forward and for all the amazing ideas that came up check out our write-up here