Baby's First Board Meeting

Oh, dear. In true college student fashion, I've waited until the last minute to get things done. Well, written things anyway. I had previously written about the concern for hours which I carefully mapped out and completed.

So....my work with Lutheran Campus Ministry. Right.

This past Monday I was elected to the Northern Virginia Lutheran Campus Ministry board of directors. I went to the meeting where Ben Buss was presenting the annual report and there came a time when elections were taking place and someone mentioned having a student on the board and all heads turned toward me (presumably not just because I was a student but also because I had mentioned an interest in nonprofit involvement). I was gladly voted in and welcomed.

That meeting lasted three hours but was quite beneficial to my understanding of how things get done.......or don't get done. As a five-oh-one-cee-three they felt the need to be uber professional about things as far as structure and agenda. It sort of felt like one of my old honor society meetings but like, the way things would have been if we had actually stuck to the rules. Making motions for this and that, seconds and ayes, and an actual agenda list. Interestingly enough, two of the fellows there were young and ring-less. One of them was even employed. Even in the church-iest of church setting I find that's where my mind goes. In the interest of doing nonprofit work, maybe that's where it ought to be going.

So we went down this list of things and I found it kind of hard to believe that there was so much going on behind the scenes when this surface stuff was so informal and small. Ben Buss is not all business like so many other people I've met. He's super organized but, I don't know....he makes it seem like he's not...? We do little service projects and we take little trips and we do fun little things. Our weekly Wednesday night services which are actually shared with United College Ministries on Northern Virginia also seem pretty little. While there are occasionally new people that come once, there's a little core group of people. Little. On the surface, we are far smaller than we are behind the scenes. I'm perplexed by this.

Anyhow, I have a whole lot to learn about grant-writing, fund-raising, budgeting, and out-reach so this will be an excellent start. This is actually the sort of thing I've been looking to learn from so while the end of the semester is here I'm obviously going to do as much as I can for this organization in the future. I've already been to a meeting so I can man the LCM table over the summer for the freshman orientation dates. This is just the beginning for me and legit nonprofit work.