BASIC Board Retreat

Fall 2023

BACKGROUND

BASIC, the (Re) Build America’s School Infrastructure Coalition, led by Founder Mary Filardo and Executive Director Ally Talcott, is a “non-partisan coalition of civic, public sector, labor, and industry associations who support federal funding to help under-served public school districts modernize and build K-12 public school facilities.” The organization’s executive Board, a group of 15 individuals who represent a cross sector of coalition members from across the country, was formed over the course of the last few years. Ally, along with a number of Board members, called for their first in-person retreat to clarify the coalition’s strategic direction.

THE CHALLENGE

BASIC was founded, and has done much of its critical work, in the years during and immediately following the Covid-19 pandemic. The coalition’s Board includes powerful leaders from across multiple sectors, but many of them weren’t sure how to best support the coalition’s efforts, Ally’s leadership, or the organization’s growth. They were unclear on the coalition’s vision and mission, and felt unsatisfied by the Board’s processes for decision making.

Through our initial interviews with a few members of the Board, and a survey to which most members responded, we determined that the collective was interested in engaging around a wide range of issues. Folks wanted to clarify vision and mission, they wanted to align on goals and a specific strategy, talk governance, think through membership growth, build a marketing and external communications plan, and consider how to build bi-partisan support. And did we mention that this group had never met in person? Many of them also expressed the desire to spend time explicitly developing their sense of community and team.

We knew that each of the conversations the Board was looking to have could be the focus of a full day retreat. We also knew that, before engaging in any of these strategic conversations, we had to slow this group down to build relationships. We felt a deep sense of responsibility to design a day that would leave Ally with the critical tools to move the work of both the Board, as a leadership structure, and the coalition, as an organizational unit, forward.

OUR APPROACH

Our purpose for the day was to bring together BASIC’s board members to begin a process to clarify the Board’s and the coalition’s mission, vision, and goals so that all members are aligned on where the coalition’s work is headed, and to begin to articulate what support and solutions are needed to achieve the goals of the coalition and build an effective Board structure. The outcomes, as we defined them, were as follows:

1. Create space for the members of BASIC’s Board to deepen their understanding of one another’s work and articulate their reason for service.

2. Create the building blocks for BASIC's mission, vision, and strategic goals.

3. Share the unique needs and capacities to support and serve the Board and coalition, and explore inherent tensions, brought forth by each Board member.

4. Explore what success looks like for BASIC as a coalition, and what success looks like for BASIC’s Board, in 6 months, 12 months, and in the next 5 years.

5. Define the strengths and challenges of the coalition’s and the Board’s current functioning, and begin to identify solutions to build a Board that guides an effective coalition.

We began our day together the way we begin with most groups - with an explanation of Emotional Intelligence and an exercise that begins to help participants practice self awareness, self management, and relationship management. From there, we set norms together for our day, and discovered that this group had never engaged in any norm development. We warmed up with deeper introductions that asked folks to identify both what they need from the coalition and what they bring to give to the coalition. We wrote letters from our future selves to clarify and share individual visions, and then began the work of clarifying the building blocks for BASIC’s vision and mission statements. We talked about what success would look like across a 10-year timeline, imagined all that we might do to torpedo that success, and started to ideate solutions.

We knew we planned an ambitious day, and we knew we didn’t want to wordsmith or finalize any critical statements in the room. We knew we risked frustrating participants by opening too many doors, and we knew we wanted to leave Ally as equipped as possible to move forward. In our close, we asked folks to go around the room and share both what they were hopeful about and what Ally could count on them to do.