Context 152 - November 2017

38 C O N T E X T 1 5 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7 Director’s cut Committed committees The IHBC’s volunteers are among the most important of our resources. Building on the goodwill of individuals means that capacity, strengths and interests will necessarily ebb and flow. However, in a sector well known for its pressures, the personal generosity of volunteering members has helped the IHBC flourish despite some of the most challenging times for our sector: economic collapse; local authority dismantling; policy deconstruction both inside and outside the sector; and, of course, political meddling. Our volunteers have helped us weather these pressures better than many. There are two main committee areas in which IHBC volunteers typically can get involved: our branch committees, which lead on issues and events with a geographical focus, on training and networking especially; and our national committees, which oversee operational areas of strategic relevance to the national institute, reporting to our board of trustees directly and regularly. Recently we have been looking at how best to support our branches, with research and survey work led by Carla Pianese, our branch and events support officer. As we are still working with trustees on how to plan our responses to identified needs there (I will report more fully at a later stage on that), I would like to focus here on the work of our national committees, not least as changes and developments since 2015 under our IHBC+ initiative – to build capacity through focusing on how best to adapt to volunteers’ needs – have led to some reshaping of these operations. Currently we have four national committees of volunteers active in our UK board operations, each with its own chair – typically an IHBC trustee reporting directly to the IHBC board. Each remit is captured in the corresponding committee title, with the usual listing reflecting an increasingly outward focus: membership and ethics (M&E); education training and standards (ETS); policy; and communications and outreach (C&O). Each national committee, supported by a national office staff lead, has subordinate remits that the committee either oversees or manages directly through volunteers. For example: • as well as assessment, the membership and ethics committee is responsible for oversight of disciplinary matters, given the close ties between discipline and ethics • the education training and standards committee links to training and accreditation networks such as COTAC (Council onTraining in Architectural Conservation) and the Conservation Course Directors Forum (CCDF) • the policy committee manages the whole consultation process, and includes within its domain specialist themed panels and critical practice networks • communications oversees publications, such as Context, which it monitors through reports from the editorial board. We also have a fifth committee, finance and resources, that does not operate as an independent entity at present as, under IHBC+, we host more regular board meetings, and so subsume the work of that committee into the main board meetings. Most committee chairs also volunteer as members of national (or branch) committees. For example, Andrew Shepherd, education secretary, is also a membership assessor; Roy Lewis was also until recently representative for his branch; and our national chair James Caird monitors any committee meetings he can attend. To keep demands on volunteers’ time within reasonable limits, we try to make sure that each committee chair has a reasonably well-defined role and duty. Both job descriptions and committee business plans specify and circumscribe the duties and roles of the chairs (although many of the business plans are under evolution, due to our experimental approaches tied to IHBC+).That said, being volunteers, discretion is required in interpreting and operating such guidance. Typically, duties of committee chairs range across reasonably familiar, if generic, management and planning areas.These include: • developing and delivering the annual business plan of the committee • reporting committee progress to the board • maintaining oversight of the committee budget and personnel • serving as the primary contact on relevant advisory and networking matters, [and] maintaining contact and communication across internal and external networks. Committee chairs also have agreed and relevant person specifications, from ‘Experience of strategic or national operations in relevant voluntary bodies/charities’ to (as trustees) ‘Knowledge and/or experience of trustee or similar roles and duties’. Recent initiatives give an idea of the kind of work being undertaken by, for example, the education committee: • annual schools, now with locations agreed to 2020, and detailing arrangements for Belfast in 2018 • apprenticeships, including addressing learning descriptors • accreditation, where we have been lobbying for more informed recognition of IHBC standards across mainstream systems • bursary programmes, including especially for the annual schools, and now also including free membership