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Organizations are Not People!
- ljmarkson
- Mar 23, 2023
- 12 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
I’m sharing the following lengthy and raw personal journey post in the context of helping others who want to help repair our natural world reflect more carefully on where and how to spend their energy. I promise I tie this up with hopefully helpful advice at the end!
Almost two summers ago when we were all still living through the pandemic, Leslie Inman of the popular Pollinator Friendly Yards on Facebook invited me to join her at a start-up meeting for a new native plant society chapter for my area. I told her I’d go but wasn’t going to get involved at a leadership level like I’ve done throughout my adult life. I’ve been honored to serve on over a dozen boards, including two of the largest synagogues in the country and many small non-profits including an herb society. Years ago my husband and I also started a niche special needs school designed for kids who needed intense educational support and served in a volunteer capacity as founders, funders and leaders of the school. One of our responsibilities involved building a well-rounded board with strategic community members and leaders who worked to support our mission. I am fortunate enough now to enjoy existing in the slow lane where I can pick and choose how I want to spend my time. For my own self-care, I also have a mantra to keep my cortisol and stress levels low and not unnecessarily get involved in other people’s mishegoss (craziness!).
Yet, the more chapter formation meetings I went to the more involved I became, and I continued to help the organization get off the ground. I decided to join the inaugural working board. I thought my life experience as a seasoned life-long gardener who transitioned to native plants and has a spent my adult life pursuing entrepreneurial initiatives and donating my time to board work would be helpful. I’m not young and didn’t need to pad a resume in any way and I'm not selling anything - my only motive was to help advance the mission and help spread the word about the habitat value of native plants. One of my first tasks was to screen and interview the initial board member candidates. I convinced my husband to volunteer his time to help me do this since he has an HR consulting company.
Since then, I have charged forward and actively worked collaboratively with the leadership in making tough and sometimes hotly debated strategic decisions around building a strong, scalable organization for the future. I know from experience that unlike working for larger organizations, the pressure that you feel to make things happen in a start-up is pressing. Going from zero to one is the hardest part for any organization – from there it’s a much easier task to repeat and build on what others have done. I don’t regret the work I did because it wouldn’t have happened without someone with my particular quirks who volunteered 20-30 hours a week behind the scenes to move things along in countless and not so obvious ways - including the thousands of e-mails and phone calls needed to make things happen.
The board is a working board meaning the board members are expected to be active and engaged as both the board of directors and the staff to help implement the daily activities of the organization. Everyone is a volunteer. The most obvious way a working board member should be expected to participate in a small organization’s activities at a leadership level is by being a committee chair, so I raised my hand to be a chair on the Programming and Education committee which is one of the keystone operational committees. It has been the most cohesive and active committee for a few reasons - we had two chairs and I’m an optimistic, reasonable risk-taking worker bee, and tend to over-function when I get going. An active volunteer on my committee explained to me that she went to other committee meetings and the programming was the one where things seemed to get done. As Programming co-chair the events I was instrumental in working to help make happen by engaging and supporting my co-chair, planning committee members, and event volunteers included -
Helping to promote, secure the location, and find a speaker for the inaugural chapter meeting attended by 100 people.
Spearheading the wildly successful inaugural Native Plant Habitat Tour at six sites with over 300 attendees. I engaged and led an energetic group of committee members in organizing and coordinating all aspects of this event. My goal was to lay the foundation for this to become a yearly event to highlight seasonal habitat yards throughout Atlanta.
Supporting my co-chair who organized a speaker panel called Adding Native Plants to Your Intown Landscape
Initiating a partnership with the Southeast Pollinator Census to organize committee five leaders at five partner sites throughout Atlanta for family friendly Pollinator Picnics.
Initiating and leading an active committee for the inaugural Native Plant Share & Swap with well over a dozen volunteers, 85 participants, and over 600 plants. I championed this first large scale native plant swap in Atlanta from the beginning to make native plants more accessible to all. I stuck my neck out and made a strong case to do this instead of plant sale which I tends to bring in a more narrow demographic.
Organizing a popular speaker presentation called Your Yard IS Nature’s Best Hope, 10 Ways to Bring Nature Home with over 100 folks registered.
Organizing and presenting my own speaker presentation on Winter Sowing Native Plants with over 85 folks registered. Along with the presentation there was the first ever native seeds only swap in Atlanta. I believe strongly that sharing resources and information is fundamental to making the change to native plants from ornamentals.
Supporting my co-chair who organized a speaker presentation on How to Remove Invasives
Pursued ways for our chapter to partner with the historical Druid Hills Garden Tour to shine a light on native plants by attending their planning meetings and coordinating connections.
I went the extra mile to make every event special because I believe an organizational generosity of spirit is contagious and helps connect people to a cause. At one of our events, an attendee told me she loved coming to our events because they were first rate, friendly, and not randomly thrown together like so many events of a similar nature seemed to be. My over-the-top touches included
Making over a hundred newspaper pots with native blue-eyed grass to give away at the Native Plant Habitat Tour!
Potting up and donating dozens of native plants as raffle items for events, and along with another friend, making and donating multiple winter sowing kits.
Potting up an embarrassing number of my own plants (~80!) to bring to ensure success for the largest native plant swap ever in Atlanta.
Throughout my time volunteering I never thought twice about buying and donating materials for events.
Advocating to have refreshments and/or receptions at our events if possible. This generosity of spirit helps people connect. I also have a professional cooking background and now that my family is grown, I love any excuse to share food. I made hand baked and decorated cookies with help from my daughter, the artist and baker. In addition to baking, I bought and donated refreshments for events and when hosting committee meetings.
I’ve also spent countless hours strategically elevating the mission of the organization in the community in a number of ways.
By coordinating content, photos and graphics with other chapter leaders to spread the word directly to members
By being instrumental in keeping an active organizational social media presence on Instagram and Facebook
By connecting and cross-posting with aligned organizations
By writing targeted blog posts on my own site to help cross-promote events I was organizing.
By taking photos and writing promotional content for events
By making sharable graphics and collages for events
By documenting our activities and writing follow-up blog posts about our events on my site – some were even published locally to reach an even wider community audience.
I’ve reached out generally and personally to encourage and engage an increasing number of member volunteers at all levels in implementing our activities including leadership roles, planning, and volunteering on the day of our activities. Engaging and thanking volunteers is essential since they are the heart of small mission driven non-profits. Since our inception, most of the new volunteers who are now helping our organization in more significant ways came from my committee which is how a functioning committee structure works. For example when a new person showed up at a committee meeting and had an interesting but vague neighborhood mentorship idea, I invited her to my home to meet and explore the idea with me. This kind of support is how an idea becomes a fully formed proposal that can be brought to a board meeting as a new initiative to pursue and implement. In this case inclusivity is still an issue since there's a possibility of creating neighborhood cliques that aren't interacting with each other or supporting the mission of the organization such as volunteering at events. I spent hours organizing a strategically designed Programming and Education planning meeting for 2023 that I hosted at my home to transform a list of ideas into volunteer engagement. Thanks to my co-chair and the room full of energized committee members who attended we are poised to double the number of programming activities and initiatives planned this year over last first year! We now have over a dozen volunteers who have stepped up to be leaders for these events - and a promise to support them each step of the way.
I've helped others facilitate partnerships with multiple aligned community members and organizations, including Leslie Inman of Pollinator Friendly Yards, Vickie Mann of Quiet Georgia, GSU Perimeter College, The Atlanta History Center, the Wylde Center, Woodlands Garden, BeeCatur, Southfork Conservancy, Friends of Zonolite Park, the Great Southeast Pollinator Census, the Druid Hills Civic Association, Emory University student groups, and multiple Friends of Park groups in Atlanta.
My involvement also contributed to most of the donations received that were not membership connected. The state organization gives 25% of the membership fee to the chapter a member affiliates with and most chapters raise the rest of their operating money by hosting plant sales. The board adopted my idea not to raise money by selling native plants so we can support a growing number of local native plant nurseries. This left organizational energy to strategically reach out to a wider community of people across demographics, make more connections with high quality programming, and ask for donations in connection with our activities. The strategy to be more inclusive seems to have worked and in addition to growing our membership, we organically received enough donations through the various events and community relationships I actively spearheaded to support our mission without directly fundraising.
It's uncomfortable for me to list out the immense work I’ve done. The only reason I'm doing this is not to pat myself on the back in any way but to give context to the situation at hand to counteract any misinformation out there - and why I unfortunately am regretfully resigning from my leadership position. The ongoing chaos and lack of experienced leadership at the board level is making it impossible for me to effectively continue to facilitate quality programming initiatives, reach out to the community as a representative of the organization, engage and motivate volunteers, empower strong leaders, and continue to cheerfully volunteer to nurture this organization in addition to the hundreds of other things I've done. This is a hard and painful decision because I believe so much in the mission and potential this organization continues to have. Sadly, despite being supportive and respectful of those I work with there is a weird and persistent lack of reciprocal respect, and congeniality coming my way at the board level including snarky and passive-aggressive comments and odd alleged accusations of unfamiliar grievances from unnamed people about me. I'm a direct person and don’t have enough time left on this earth to spend a minute playing games of this sort.
When we formed a board we literally raised our hands to choose what roles we wanted. I specifically decided not to be the chair because I wanted to dig in and be instrumental in helping create educational events and programs for the organizations since this is something I have successfully done with multiple other organizations. As a board member I was available, responsive, always on time, never missed a meeting, was often the first to jump in and offer to help, and was instrumental in keeping board processes and the mission of the organization at the forefront. This was particularly difficult with a green young leader which resulted in confusion, tension, and power jostling around undefined and overlapping roles, responsibilities, and basic lack of knowledge or consistency about how the board and committee process works. Board meetings were not cohesive, efficient, or productive, and devolved into negative micromanaging and discussions about trivial matters. The focus increasingly seemed to be on building a multi-layered bureaucracy which is unnecessary in such a small organization. Agendas were distributed last minute and few items on long and official lists were addressed or resolved. Often, scheduled board meetings were cancelled. Committee reporting became a minefield of negativity. There was a demotivating and ongoing misunderstanding about the role of board members as committee members and what decisions are defined as “board decisions” - which were randomly invoked to shut down progress. Because my committee is central to the activities of the organization, hours of valuable board meeting time was spent directed at questioning me in my role as programming co-chair about my motives and judgment around minor decisions. I mean really small, as in moving the date of an event or the semantics of a word! In my decades of volunteering for board work, I've never experienced this kind of dysfunctional dynamic. The frustration from the negativity and bullying had me wiping away tears after more than one board meeting. I hate conflict and found myself in conflict every time I opened my mouth!
The drift towards pessimism and lack of a clear, mission driven positive direction made the pace of board level decisions eyelash pulling. I’m not kidding.
When another board member quit, our already small, barely functioning board didn't add a new member for almost a half year because of internal conflict around straw man options...while we left someone dangling who we had unofficially asked to be on the board!
A logo contest was held a year ago and through a comical ongoing turn of events there's still no logo in sight. No logo, no merch to advertise our organization or raise more money. My daughter has a graphic design business and explained that for her clients she could turn around a logo within days and even format it on items to sell.
The most frustrating part of this directionless and random approach is lack of organizational development. After more than a year important committees including advocacy, restoration, and communication either haven't been formed or don't have co-chairs, and most imortantly new board members will not be tasked with having a co-chair role on committees. It's hard to see a focus on the mission.
Somewhere along the way the leadership of this organization seems to have forgotten this is a 100% volunteer start-up working board and the energy needs to be focused on implementing our own initiatives and supporting each other to grow the organization, There is no staff to oversee. Board members are the volunteer staff responsible for implementing our own decisions. I should have followed the lead of some smart and talented GNPS volunteers who wisely stayed away from being in the thick of this mess. Most boards I've been on, particularly small ones with no staff, are more casual, friendly, optimistic, and supportive. This one is uncomfortably wooden, tense, pessimistic, and transactional.
My husband, who has been doing management consulting and building businesses for over 30-years told me a lesson he tells successful executives he coaches who are questioning their role in a changing company. His advice is that unless it’s your own business to remember no matter how much you believe in the mission to never love a company you work for because it will never love you back in the same way and you’ll always eventually be disappointed in the end. It may happen sooner, it may happen later, but it will happen because you’re dealing with an organization, not a person. The best approach is to keep perspective. The organization is not your friend or family and the people in it, even if you are friendly with them, have their own motives and agendas that invariably don’t align with yours.
If I replace the word company with organization and work with volunteer this is how I feel. I love the mission of promoting native plants - they are no longer a niche, gardening club hobby but play a key role in helping repair our fragile natural world. I confused my passion for the mission with the opportunity to help spread the word about native plants by spending my time and energy helping build out an organization. I didn't consider whether the organization had the same ability, willingness and urgency I do around that mission...or even focus on the mission.
I’m still in love with the idea of spreading the word about the habitat value of native plants in the context of welcoming nature and creating a healthier ecologically-focused landscape where we live. I was happily doing this before I ever went to that planning meeting in summer of 2021. I’ve been doing this in a small and deeply gratifying way every day through writing and by caring for my small, rewilded yard.
I also need to remind myself that when I meet fellow nature focused people, there is a lightness. We are immediately what my family refers to as my “nature friends” who fall easily into talking about nature and native plants. Oddly, on reflection I realize we rarely talked about native plants or nature as a board. I need to take my husband’s expert advice and continue to seek out and connect to nature friends who bring joy, and be more careful about confusing organizations with people .
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