Interestingly, I have roughly the opposite concern. I’m worried that the current structure of EVF results in too little accountability for individual projects under EV’s umbrella.
Formally, the board is accountable for the actions of an org it “runs”. But the great majority of actual decisions are made by the executive officers, especially the CEO/ED. In the case when the board is responsible for a dozen or more autonomous suborgs, their ultimate responsibility/accountability seems likely to be even more nominal than usual.
I expect that, in practice, EVF suborg leaders have significantly less oversight & accountability than they would if they all had separate boards. (I also have concerns about how this structure might reduce accountability to the community/public, but these are currently too ill-formed to express very clearly.)
In practice though, your concerns seem to point to the same conclusion, don’t they? That different sub-orgs should be separate from each other and have mostly-disjoint boards?
I’m not sure how much we should be relying on the legal institution of the nonprofit board here, since these are often pretty toothless. (Honestly, CEA’s board has shown more teeth than many ever do, though they were still very slow to act in this case IMO.)
But I’m also not sure what the alternative is.
(My comment on this other thread is also somewhat relevant here.)
If the organisations are effectively run individually, then they answer to their funders.
If they all get funding directed from the same group who just de facto fund whatever falls under the EV umbrella, then we’re back to the EV trustees having all the power.
If they get substantial funding from we, the movement, that seems healthier, but only if there’s some kind of meaningful competition. That only seems possible if they limit their scope to allow for meaningful comparisons between orgs—which I argued for here, though didn’t get much engagement :\
I’m not actually sure these are different concerns—it depends how the logistics work. If the rulership method of the EV trustees is ‘appoint someone, then direct funding to them’, then that’s still a lot of influence. If it’s ‘appoint someone, then let them find their own funding’, it’s quite a lot less so (though those waters could be muddied by funders being implicitly influenced to give funding to anyone under the EV umbrella).
It’s my loose impression that different EVF orgs do need to seek their own funding, at least for stuff that doesn’t fall under EV Ops’ purview (though the latter is not inconsiderable!). I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this laid out explicitly, though, and agree that would help.
though those waters could be muddied by funders being implicitly influenced to give funding to anyone under the EV umbrella
Interestingly, I have roughly the opposite concern. I’m worried that the current structure of EVF results in too little accountability for individual projects under EV’s umbrella.
Formally, the board is accountable for the actions of an org it “runs”. But the great majority of actual decisions are made by the executive officers, especially the CEO/ED. In the case when the board is responsible for a dozen or more autonomous suborgs, their ultimate responsibility/accountability seems likely to be even more nominal than usual.
I expect that, in practice, EVF suborg leaders have significantly less oversight & accountability than they would if they all had separate boards. (I also have concerns about how this structure might reduce accountability to the community/public, but these are currently too ill-formed to express very clearly.)
In practice though, your concerns seem to point to the same conclusion, don’t they? That different sub-orgs should be separate from each other and have mostly-disjoint boards?
Plausibly.
I’m not sure how much we should be relying on the legal institution of the nonprofit board here, since these are often pretty toothless. (Honestly, CEA’s board has shown more teeth than many ever do, though they were still very slow to act in this case IMO.)
But I’m also not sure what the alternative is.
(My comment on this other thread is also somewhat relevant here.)
If the organisations are effectively run individually, then they answer to their funders.
If they all get funding directed from the same group who just de facto fund whatever falls under the EV umbrella, then we’re back to the EV trustees having all the power.
If they get substantial funding from we, the movement, that seems healthier, but only if there’s some kind of meaningful competition. That only seems possible if they limit their scope to allow for meaningful comparisons between orgs—which I argued for here, though didn’t get much engagement :\
I’m not actually sure these are different concerns—it depends how the logistics work. If the rulership method of the EV trustees is ‘appoint someone, then direct funding to them’, then that’s still a lot of influence. If it’s ‘appoint someone, then let them find their own funding’, it’s quite a lot less so (though those waters could be muddied by funders being implicitly influenced to give funding to anyone under the EV umbrella).
It’s my loose impression that different EVF orgs do need to seek their own funding, at least for stuff that doesn’t fall under EV Ops’ purview (though the latter is not inconsiderable!). I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this laid out explicitly, though, and agree that would help.
Seems right to me, at least directionally.